“There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder, and kill.”
—The Diary of a Young Girl,
by Anne Frank, May 3, 1944
“If all men are good at heart, there never really was an Auschwitz; nor is there any possibility that it may recur.”
—“The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank,”
by Bruno Bettelheim, in Anne Frank: Reflections on
Her Life and Legacy, edited by Hyman A. Enzer
and Sandra Solotaroff-Enzer
I HAD KNOWN THERE WOULD be a movie. How could there not be? The play won a Pulitzer Prize. All over America, every night, road-company Ottos stumbled into stage set annexes to discover their daughters’ diaries, and Annes and Peters fell in love, and a dozen different versions of my father, tall, short, fat, thin, stole bread out of my mouth. All over the world. In Amsterdam, the Queen attended a performance and was moved, and commoners emerged from the theater uplifted. They were not Nazis. They had tried to save their Jews. Never mind that they had had fewer to begin with and had given up more of them proportionately than any other country. In Germany, theatergoers expressed their shock and dismay. If only they had known what was going on, they would have spoken out. One woman was so deeply affected by Anne’s plight she insisted that particular little Jewess, at least, should have been permitted to live. Others identified with the hardships they saw on the stage. They too had suffered under their Führer. But a play can reach only so many people. A movie is a phenomenon of a different dimension. Hollywood would be morally remiss if it did not put Anne’s diary on film.
No matter where I turned, I found stories about the movie. The actor Joseph Schildkraut would repeat his role as Otto. The Nazi actress would play Mrs. Frank again. So much for the outrage of my wife and thousands of other right-thinking people. But there would be a new Anne. A new Peter too, but that was of less importance. The star search for the new Anne was the big news. Read all about it. What fortunate young miss would win the sweepstakes? Who would be lucky enough to be Anne Frank?
The same comedy team who had turned Pfeffer into a bumbling clown and my father into a thief—I am sorry to keep bringing that up, but I still do not understand how they got away with it—would write the screenplay, but the director, a man called George Stevens, was known for more serious films. He had been with the American troops when they liberated Dachau, so he knew his stuff, the papers said. He also had a reputation for realism. In matters of verisimilitude, money was no object for George Stevens and the gentlemen at 20th Century Fox. When bombs fell on the secret annex in the movie, I read, Mr. Stevens would not hit the camera to make it tremble, as most directors would do. Instead he had a special set built on wooden pillars and springs. At the appropriate moment, workmen shook the contraption and frightened the living daylights out of the actors. I was interested in the details of the construction. After all, I am a builder. But I was not persuaded it would have the same effect as the RAF. Mr. Stevens also insisted that Miss Shelley Winters, the actress playing Mrs. van Daan, gain forty pounds. I did not remember my mother’s being overweight, but perhaps that was because by the end we were all starving. But Miss Winters, the papers reported, was a good sport and a true professional. She was eating her way into my mother’s character, like a tapeworm.
When Madeleine told me she would go to the movie with her sister, I knew she had not forgotten my outburst the evening she had come home from the play. Wives took the train to New York and went to theater matinees without their husbands. They did not go to the local movie houses without us. If one of them did, she better have a good reason.
“I know you don’t want to see it.” She kept her eyes down as she spoke, not because she was avoiding my gaze, but because she was concentrating on the cake she was baking. She called it baking, though it required no cooking other than melting some chocolate. It was a concoction made by pouring the chocolate over ladyfingers, which she bought in the supermarket, then sticking the whole thing in the refrigerator for a few hours. It was tasty enough, but it was not what I would call a real cake, though perhaps I have been spoiled by years of too little nourishment and too much imagination. I remembered when food was the stuff of storytelling, the substance of myth. My mother’s babka, we whispered to one another, my grandmother’s strudel, my wife’s goulash, and our mouths watered and eyes teared, though we were dehydrated as well as starving, and who knew where the secretions came from.
“What makes you say I don’t want to see it?”
“Your reaction to the play.”
“I had no reaction to the play. I didn’t even see the play.”
She did not answer immediately. She was having difficulty getting the ladyfingers to stand up around the side of the metal spring pan.
“To tell you the truth,” she said, as she wedged the last ladyfinger in—it is a phrase I dislike; why should she begin a sentence by swearing honesty?—“I’m not even sure I want to see it. But I will.”
“Why would you go to a movie you don’t want to see?”
She took the saucepan of melted chocolate from the burner and began spooning it over the ladyfingers. “It’s a moral obligation.”
“A moral obligation?”
She looked up from the pseudo-cake. “People like me, people who have had it easy, have no right to close their eyes.”
I should have kept my mouth shut. That was a trait on which I prided myself. If I had to say something, I should have told her not to be silly. Going to a movie had no moral implications. But the conviction that burned in her eyes when she talked about not closing them was infuriating. I don’t know why. I had married her for her blindness.
“In the DP camp, I was assigned to work in the hospital for a while.”
She stood, the saucepan suspended in midair, her eyes focused not on some distant moral imperative, but on me. I never talked about my past. She did not want to miss a word.
“There was a man, half his face had been blown away. I think he had stepped on a mine.”
I saw her flinch. I really should have stopped.
“At least that was the story. Who knew what was what under the bandages? His head was swathed in them. All that was left were two holes for his eyes. His eyes were okay. Except for the lids. He had no eyelids.”
A spot of chocolate spattered to the counter. She put down the saucepan. I warned myself to stop.
“Without eyelids,” I went on, “he could not close his eyes. Obviously.”
She was still staring at me. She had no idea what I was getting at. How could she?
“You know what happens if you can’t close your eyes?”
“You can’t sleep?”
“No, you can sleep with your eyes open. Many people do.” I had lived in enough unholy barracks to know that. “If you don’t have eyelids, you cannot stop crying. If you can’t close your eyes, you cry all the time.”
This time I did not apologize. I was too angry. She had made me break my vow of silence. To a man like me, the only honor left, the only decency possible, is to protect others from the horror.
MADELEINE DID not talk about the movie when she got home, though I knew she was thinking about it. For the next few days, she moved through the upholstered and buffed rooms of the house with an air of tender distraction. It was more than sorrow for the poor bastards she had seen impersonated on the screen. It was longing. She wanted to know what it was like to suffer, for a while.
MY WIFE had watched the movie in the big theater in the new shopping center a few minutes from Indian Hills. I had to drive half an hour to see it.
The green spring afternoon was shot with sunlight. It was not a day to be sitting in a dark movie house. I told Madeleine I had to go to the office, then stop by the site. I even drove to the office. I pulled into the parking lot, then pulled out again and kept going down the highway. According to the schedule in the paper, I had just enough time.
The theater was filled with children and old people. I was the only grown man in his prime willing to while away the afternoon so fecklessly. I took a seat on the aisle. I did not want to bother people when I left. I had no intention of staying till the end. I was merely curious to see a few minutes of it.
I had to sit through three or four coming attractions before the movie started. My foot tapped the soft-drink-slicked floor. I was not nervous. I merely wanted to get on with it.
The name of the studio took shape on the screen. The air swelled with what sounded like several hundred strings. Cloud-white letters shimmering against an open sky. The Diary of Anne Frank. She would have liked that. The camera panned from the sky to the Westerkerk to the canal. My head spun for a moment, but that was only vertigo induced by the shot. A truck full of refugees, some of them still in striped uniforms, rolled down the street. Joseph Schildkraut lumbered down from it. I had to hand it to the actor. Not only did he look like Otto—the resemblance was uncanny—he even moved like him. A lesser actor would have hunched himself into a question mark of misery, but Schildkraut had obviously studied Otto. He moved like a man whose spirit was broken but whose bearing, thanks to the German army, was still straight.
One after another, the characters appeared on the screen. I had to smile. The milkily lovely actress—a former model, I had read—bore no relation to anyone I had known, but then perhaps moviegoers do not want to pay good money to see a girl with uneven teeth and a shadow of soft down on her upper lip. There was a boy called Peter. He was clean-cut and athletic, but with what is called a sensitive side. I felt a flash of envy, though I could not say whether it was for the golden boy on the screen or the storybook character he was playing. Shelley Winters lifted her skirt, and cavorted around the set, and shook her bleached blond curls. I wished they had not made her a bleached blonde. Her husband snarled and grumbled from under a bristly black mustache. Dussel, the dentist, joined the group, and the story took a comic twist. The writers had created an amusing idiot. I could not help laughing. The whole audience was chuckling at Dussel’s foolishness and Anne’s eye-rolling, sweet-smiling triumphs over him, and I was laughing harder than anyone, so hard that the thick-necked woman in the seat in front of me turned around to give me a dirty look. I apologized, but a minute later I was laughing again. I could not help myself. She turned around again and said if I could not restrain myself, I ought to leave and let others enjoy the show. I managed to calm down then. I had no desire to call attention to myself. Besides, the bombing scene had started, and I did not want to miss that. I was curious to see if Mr. Stevens’s set worked. I am sorry to say that he did not get his money’s worth. I could tell that even without knowing the cost of labor and supplies. The scene was a child’s idea of a bombing, or an American civilian’s.
The boy called Peter stopped snapping at Anne, and Anne stopped playing practical jokes on him, and they began to give each other ardent looks. Anne climbed the stairs to his room, and the parents worried and argued about it, but it was a clean-cut American movie with clean-cut American kids, even if they were supposed to be German Jews hiding in Amsterdam, and, unlike the parents, everyone in the audience knew there was nothing to worry about, at least when it came to sex. When they finally kissed, the girl beside me sighed achingly.
I glanced at my watch. The movie was longer than I had anticipated. When I looked back up at the screen, it was dark except for a single flickering flame. There was shouting and scuffling. Thief! Thief! Mrs. Frank screams. Bread out of the mouths of children, she wails. I have heard your own son moaning in his sleep from hunger, she howls. Otto steps forward and speaks.
“We don’t need the Nazis to destroy us. We’re destroying ourselves.”
“For God’s sake,” I muttered.
The woman in front of me turned again.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, but Otto should have known better. Anybody who had been through what Otto had should have known better than to speak a line like that. Then I remembered, Otto was not saying the line, the actor was. Otto had never spoken the line, because we had never had the fight, because my father had never stolen the bread.
It was almost over now. I knew that from the siren, though there had been no siren when the Green Police came. But I understood why the director inserted the effect. The shriek of the siren sawed across my nerves, though I had not heard it in years. The girl next to me, who had probably never heard it, began to sob. When the police shattered the glass of the front door, something else they had not done, the thick-necked woman in front of me moaned. The darkness vibrated with the sounds of whimpers and groans and honking noses.
The camera panned back to the sky. Clouds swirled overhead. Gulls shrieked and swooped. The movie was over, but it was not quite the end. There were Westerbork and Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen to come. There were even scenes of that, but they had ended up on the cutting room floor. I had read somewhere that the director had shot a final scene in a make-believe Auschwitz, but the audiences in the sneak previews had scrawled outrage on their opinion cards. The Anne they knew and loved had not died in a concentration camp. At least, they did not want to see her die in a concentration camp.
The thin singsong voice of the milky-skinned actress floated out over the discarded candy wrappers and crushed popcorn boxes and people already shuffling up the aisle toward the light.
In spite of everything, I still believe people are good at heart.
A sigh shuddered through the theater. That was what the audience wanted. The triumph of the human spirit, as my wife called it. The reassurance that in spite of everything, of people going to their deaths by the millions merely for the accident of their birth, of other people willing and eager to pry gold fillings from their mouths before they shoveled them into ovens, of ghoulish experiments on unanesthetized individuals in the interest of medical science, of an entire people’s bloodthirsty complicity to cleanse the world of another entire people, in spite of all that, human beings are good at heart.
Nonetheless, I was glad I had seen the movie, despite the inane last line. I had finally got it out of my system.