VIKING LOGUE
SEPTEMBER 24, 2010
Annelies1 Marie “Anne” Frank, poet, Holocaust survivor, and occasional Writers’ Week visitor, died two weeks ago. She was 81.
This is a high school newspaper, so we’re not really in the habit of printing obituaries, but as faculty co-advisor, I felt an exception must be made, There have already been obits about Frank, and there will no doubt be more biographies and biopics, but they will be impersonal, speculative, and packed with standard historical details, with no evidence of the strange, mysterious magic that emanated from her, a magic I can’t prove but know to be just as real as the newspaper-friendly facts of her long life.
Anne Frank was one of the first visiting writers to Fremd High School’s very first Writers’ Week when I was a junior here.2 A tiny woman in sturdy heels, she looked so frail up there onstage in the auditorium, as though held together by the structure of her blouse and skirt. Her voice was strong and deep and full of humor. She miraculously, perhaps magically survived Auschwitz and was sent to the Polish labor camp Liebau, where she managed to survive until liberation. Anne had narrowly escaped being sent to Bergen-Belsen instead, where she surely would have perished. Her debilitating scabies had miraculously healed mere days before her scheduled transfer, likely saving her life.
Reunited with her father, Otto, after the war, she was elated to discover several versions of her wartime diary had survived. Otto presented her with the red-and-white-checkered book, as well as the stack of blue pages she had been editing when the family was captured. Anne set to work, feverishly editing, certain the diary was a worthy project that would be published.3 She dedicated the diary to her mother, Edith, who died in Auschwitz and sister, Margot, who perished at Liebau.
Not a single publisher was interested in publishing Anne’s diary. They had just lived through the war; they did not want to relive it through the eyes of a suffering Jewish girl. By the early ’60s, when the world was finally ready to listen, Anne was done with the diary. “The girl who wrote those entries is dead,” she said onstage at Writers’ Week. “I had to let her rest. The world was not a safe place for her.”
She sought solace in poetry. Her poems omitted any mention of the atrocities she experienced, but you could smell it in the curve of her vowels, in the moist4 crevices between letters, in the cool, dry white desert at the end of a stanza.
Then, in 1956, she would gain some attention (and, in some, let us say more repressed countries, infamy and censorship) for her Dutch-language novel, its scandalous title5 softened in English to One Woman’s Water. In the novel, Frank explored her own healing from trauma through her many sexual escapades adventures, even hinting obliquely at the true parentage of her own daughter, Margot, rumored to be fathered by a Catholic priest. This chapter was narrated, humorously, from the point of view of a priest’s ejaculate, and according to novelist Ari Epstein, was the main inspiration for his blockbuster 1959 novel Water Water.
When one of my fellow students, to much giggling, asked why an old lady would write about sex, she took the question just as seriously and lightheartedly6 as she took anything. “Desire,” she said, “is the only emotion that can’t be tricked. Be careful! It is so easy to spend your whole life like money, and lie. Desire is fun and funny, but you are a fool if you mock it.”
The auditorium hushed as the joking boys tried to understand if they had been insulted, and the goths and drama kids smiled.7
Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, to Edith and Otto Frank, but spent most of her childhood in Amsterdam, Netherlands. We know her family hid from 1942 to 1944 in the building where her father’s business was located. We suspect they were betrayed. Their hiding place was discovered, and they were ultimately sent to Auschwitz on one of the very last transports. We know Anne and Otto were the only family members to survive. Anne was carried out of the Liebau labor camp to freedom, tenderly, by men who were used to carrying guns.8 As an adult, she emigrated to Chicago.
After the initial failed attempts to publish her diary, Anne grew reticent about sharing details of her traumas. In a 1977 interview in the Israeli newspaper Haartez, she was asked about her responsibility to share her experiences so they might never recur. “We each are given this tiny, glorious sliver of time between oblivions to live,” Anne said. “Am I not permitted to live my life in my sliver? Am I not permitted to attempt it?”
I think what was bubbling beneath Anne’s words were: “Can the absence of words tell a story? Like a pattern in lace, the holes as important as the threads?”9 Perhaps to understand her, we must get quiet and listen to what is not said.
After her reading at Writers’ Week, she held court in the library, allowing a long, snaking line of dreamy poets, drama kids, misfits, and dorks to ask her for autographs and stare awkwardly. My feet deposited me in the line, even as my heart pounded and vision tunneled. I was desperate to escape.10 What could I possibly say to this incredible poet and novelist whose words made me feel funny inside, the kind of funny that upset local mothers so much they were calling the principal nonstop. In Anne, I had a real Jewish role model, a real artist to look up to. I was otherwise adrift among friends who treated me just a little differently, or told me I was going to hell. Or both.11
Did I say any of this to her? No, I did not. She grabbed my sweaty hands in her soft, dry ones, and I blurted out, “I’m glad you made it.” Hot tears rolled down my face and snot immediately clogged my nose. She handed me an embroidered handkerchief and told me to keep it. She said something softly about a secret that I didn’t quite catch and was too embarrassed to ask her to repeat. She rummaged through her carpetbag-sized purse and pulled out an ancient red-and-white-checkered book, fuzzy-cornered and curled over itself, sealed with a tiny, rusted padlock and written in a smudged, barely legible pencil in a language I couldn’t read anyway. “Take it,” she whispered. Then she winked.
Why did she give me her wartime diary? Why me?12
Sometime between then and now, I lost the notebook. I was furious at myself for years, believing she had given it to me so I would publish it for her, at long last. But now I believe she gave it to me so I would lose it.13 The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Unlike every other art.
I don’t think14 Anne Frank wasn’t trying to outrun a wretched past, I think she was trying to create a future she could live in. The compost of her trauma bloomed with brilliant poppies, like battlefields do. She believed that all human connection—a handshake, a glance, an orgasm,15 a poem, a movie theater filled with laughing strangers—this was the life force—the libido16—that made her believe in the possibility of a better, kinder, more just world.
1 Sheila, we need to talk. -Principal Riordan
2 She wasn’t our first choice, though, not by a long shot. Worth clarifying?
3 Too many words devoted to a book that was never published. Cut.
4 Let’s not get carried away, walking a fine line here.
5 Don’t even THINK about giving the exact translation.
6 Which? Contradicting yourself.
7 Let’s not encourage these kinds of rifts.
8 Confusing. “She was rescued by American soldiers at the Liebau labor camp.”
9 If you want to write a poem, write a poem. If you want to write an obituary, Sheila, write a gd obituary.
10 Unnecessary contradiction.
11 No.
12 Please don’t embellish for the sake of “a good story.” She did not give you her diary. This is not fiction, it’s a newspaper. We’ve talked about this before.
13 You could reflect here on wishful thinking and how it clouds good judgment. Otherwise delete all of this.
14 Strong words only.
15 Sheila, you can’t seriously believe we’ll publish “orgasm” in the school paper.
16 Ditto “libido.”