Anne Frank (11 page)

Our trust in Anne as a narrator will prove increasingly important as she describes daily life in a deceptively gentle circle of hell that, without her as our Virgil, we could hardly imagine. In the early diary entries, intimations of dread and peril (conveyed by the catalog of quotidian things that Jews are forbidden) alternate with equally quotidian activities—Ping-Pong games, flirtations, classroom dramas—that Anne is still able to enjoy. Our image of her as an “incurable chatterbox” whom her exasperated teacher assigns to write a composition called “‘Quack, quack, quack,’ says Mrs. Natterbeak” will inform our sense of her character and increase our sympathy for her neighbors in the attic, who must bear up under the strain (which Anne would be the last to notice) of her irrepressible conversation. Often, in these first diary entries, the descriptions of simple pleasures and of the punitive, shaming Nazi regulations appear within a single paragraph, such as this chilling variation on the theme of a parent worried by a child’s lateness:

“Harry visited us yesterday to meet my parents. I had bought ice cream cake, sweets, tea, and fancy biscuits, quite a spread, but neither Harry nor I felt like sitting stiffly side by side indefinitely, so we went for a walk, and it was already ten past eight when he brought me home. Daddy was very cross, and thought it was very wrong of me because it is dangerous for Jews to be out after eight o’clock, and I had to promise to be in by ten to eight in future.”

On occasion the contradictions of trying to live normally under abnormal circumstances are compressed into a sentence: “We ping-pongers are very partial to ice cream, especially in summer, when one gets warm at the game, so we usually finish up with a visit to the nearest ice-cream shop, Delphi or Oasis, where Jews are allowed.”

A
NOTHER
factor that contributes to the diary’s power to move us and to make us remember so much of what Anne tells Kitty is Anne’s eye for detail, for the gesture or line of dialogue that forms and refines her portraits of her family and neighbors so they become three-dimensional characters in a work of art.

In “The Development of Anne Frank,” John Berryman offers an example of Anne’s dispassionate observation, a passage in which she refers to her father by his nickname, Pim: “She was vivacious but intensely serious, devoted but playful…imaginative yet practical, passionate but ironic and cold-eyed. Most of the qualities that I am naming need no illustration for a reader of the
Diary;
perhaps ‘cold-eyed’ may have an exemplar: ‘Pim, who was sitting on a chair in a beam of sunlight that shone through a window, kept being pushed from one side to the other. In addition, I think his rheumatism was bothering him, because he sat rather hunched up with a miserable look on his face…He looked exactly like some shriveled up old man from an old people’s home.” So much for an image of the man—her adored father—whom she loves best in the world. She was self-absorbed but un-self-pitying, charitable but sarcastic, industrious but dreamy, brave but sensitive.”

Anne’s diary abounds in illuminating details—of setting, of action and repose, of food and clothing, of mood, of conversation and response. In case we have trouble visualizing the architecture of her hiding place, Anne maps it out for us and helps us understand where each room—each public space that will also serve as private quarters for working and sleeping—is located in relation to the others.

In an entry dated August 4, 1943, Anne begins an hour-by-hour account of what, after a little more than a year, has come to constitute an ordinary day in an existence that is “so different from ordinary times and ordinary people’s lives.” Every aspect of
the daily routine in the annex is made use of for what it reveals about the quirks and personalities of the people forced to follow the intricate steps of the harrowingly restrictive choreography.

Anne starts her timetable at nine in the evening, when the cacophony of preparations for the night reaches a crescendo in the thunderous sounds of Mrs. Van Pels’s bed being moved to the window, “in order to give Her Majesty in the pink bed jacket fresh air to tickle her dainty nostrils!”

Washing up in the bathroom, Anne notices a tiny flea floating in the water. When gunfire erupts in the darkness outside, she wakes, “so busy dreaming that I’m thinking about French irregular verbs” until she realizes what she is hearing and creeps, for comfort, to her father’s bed.

At lunchtime, when the warehouse workers leave and the annex residents can briefly relax, Mrs. Van Pels pulls out the vacuum cleaner and tends her “beautiful, and only, carpet,” while Otto retreats to a corner to escape into the novels of his beloved Dickens. Finally, the workday ends, the helpers come upstairs, a radio broadcast silences even the loquacious Mrs. Van Pels. After a nap, it’s time to gather for dinner, a scene that Anne documents at length.

Two weeks later, in a “Continuation of the ‘Secret Annex’ daily timetable,” Anne returns to the subject of her father’s love for Dickens, and this time, uses this detail to convey something seemingly trivial—but in fact revealing—about her parents’ marriage.

Otto keeps trying to interest his wife in what he has been reading, but she insists that she doesn’t have time. As if there were anything
but
time in the secret annex! When he makes another attempt, she suddenly remembers something she needs to tell one of her daughters—and a potentially companionable moment between a husband and wife has ended in a standoff.

Anne’s revealing focus on the minutiae of daily life reminds the reader of how cautious the attic residents had to be about trivial things, and of how the need for such vigilance must have sharpened Anne’s eye. “Although it is fairly warm, we have to light our fires every other day in order to burn vegetable peelings and refuse. We can’t put anything in the garbage pails, because we must always think of the warehouse boy. How easily one could be betrayed by being a little careless!”

Days earler, Anne had trained her attentive gaze on the decline in the standard of living—their “manners,” she calls them—in the annex. The oilcloth they have been using continually on the communal table has grown dirty. The Van Pelses have been sleeping all winter on the same flannelette sheet. Otto’s trousers are frayed, and his tie is worn. Edith’s corset has split and can no longer be repaired, and Margot is wearing a brassiere two sizes too small.

The following January, Anne entrusts Kitty with this inspired and withering complaint about how tired she has grown of the grown-ups’ conversation—a seemingly lighthearted account that captures the stultifying tedium of social life in a place whose residents can no longer find anything new to say: “If the conversation at mealtimes isn’t over politics or a delicious meal, then Mummy or Mrs. v.P. trot out one of the old stories of their youth, which we’ve heard so many times before, or Pf. twaddles on about his wife’s extensive wardrobe, beautiful race horses, leaking rowboats, boys who can swim at the age of 4, muscular pains and nervous patients. What it all boils down to is this, that if one of the eight of us opens his mouth, the other seven can finish the story for him! We all know the point of every joke from the start, and the storyteller is alone in laughing at his witticisms. The various milkmen, grocers and butchers of the two ex-housewives have already grown beards in our eyes, so often have they been praised to the skies or pulled to
pieces; it is impossible for anything in the conversation here to be fresh or new.”

Anne defines the people around her by noting their different solutions to a problem, or their diverse answers to a single question. Early in the diary, the arrangements for bathing—an activity that every attic resident approaches differently—provide a series of clues to their personalities, and to the extent to which they have adjusted to their new lives. Peter, Anne tells us, chooses to bathe in the kitchen even though it has a glass door and he is so modest that, before each bath, he goes around to each of the annex residents and warns them not to walk past the kitchen for half an hour. Mr. Van Pels cherishes his privacy enough to carry hot water all the way upstairs. Uncertain about how best to carry out this delicate and newly demanding activity, Mrs. Van Pels has avoided bathing at all until she figures out the most convenient and comfortable place. Otto washes up in his private office, Edith behind a fire guard in the kitchen, while Margot and Anne retreat to the front office. Peter has suggested that Anne use the large bathroom in the office, where she can turn on the light, lock the door, and be alone. “I tried my beautiful bathroom on Sunday for the first time and although it sounds mad, I think it is the best place of all.”

At dinner, during her “daily timetable” of life in the attic, Anne goes around the table, differentiating her characters by telling us what and how each person eats. Mr. Van Pels generously helps himself first, meanwhile offering his “irrevocable” opinion on every subject. His wife picks over the food, taking the tiniest potatoes, the daintiest morsels, smiling coquettishly and assuming everyone is interested in what she has to say. Their son eats a great deal and hardly speaks. Margot is also silent, though she “eats like a little mouse.” Mummy: “good appetite, very talkative.” Otto makes sure that everyone is served before he is, and that the children have the choicest portions.
Pfeffer (“helps himself, never looks up, eats and doesn’t talk”) provokes, from Anne, a diatribe that progresses from the “enormous helpings” he takes to his habit of hogging the bathroom when others need to use it.

A year into their stay in the annex, the residents play a game. If they were free, what would they do first? Like any author who has learned that an effective way to create a character is to indicate that person’s hopes and fears, Anne reports each person’s fantasies of liberation. Margot and Mr. Van Pels dream of a hot bath, at least a half hour long. Mrs. Frank longs for real coffee. Mrs. Van Pels wants ice-cream cakes. Peter longs to go to town and to the movies. Anne wants a home, the ability to move around freely, and to have some help with her work, by which she means school; this last is a somewhat odd and perhaps even thoughtless wish, since we know that Otto has been supervising the girls’ lessons and, in theory, giving them all the help they need

When Otto’s turn comes, he says he would choose to visit Mr. Vossen, Anne’s pseudonym for Bep’s father, Mr. Voskuijl. A month before, the residents had learned that Johannes Voskuijl, who had built the bookcase that camouflaged the entrance to the annex, had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and was not expected to recover. He must have been very much on everyone’s mind. We also know that on the afternoon Margot received her call-up notice, Otto was visiting the Jewish hospital for the indigent elderly. Comforting the poor and old was something Otto did; it was among the reasons he was so admired. But when, in the game, he makes that choice, the reader can imagine how, at moments, it might have been a trial for his wife and daughters to live with this pillar of moral perfection. Couldn’t he have picked the hot bath and
then
the hospital visit?

The final survey of this sort occurs in March 1944, when Anne polls her neighbors for their responses to their depress
ingly deficient diet. By now, we know her characters so well that we can almost predict their replies. Mrs. Van Pels complains bitterly about the difficulty of cooking with limited ingredients, and about the ingratitude she receives in return for all her hard work. Her husband claims he can stand the bad food as long as he has enough cigarettes. Edith replies that food is not so important to her, but she would love a slice of rye bread, and, incidentally, she thinks that Mrs. Van Pels should put a stop to her husband’s smoking. Otto says that he not only needs nothing, but that part of his ration should be saved for Elli. And Pfeffer’s maddening bluster trails off in ellipses….

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F
we try to understand why we come to know these people so well, one explanation can be found in the patient accretion of actions and gestures with which Anne informs our vision of them. You can track each character through the book, watching their portraits emerge like photos coming up in a tray of developing fluid. It often seems as if Anne is conscious of who she has been including or ignoring, of who has temporarily captured or lost her attention. Almost as soon as we become aware that one of the attic residents has fallen silent, or has briefly gone unnoticed, that character is brought in, center stage, to reassert the oppressive reality of his or her constant presence.

Unsurprisingly, given Anne’s age, her parents are the object of almost as much intense scrutiny as she devotes to exploring the mystery of her essential self. She consistently uses one parent to define the other: Daddy is kind and patient, Mummy short-tempered and sarcastic; Daddy is transparent and sensitive, Mummy opaque and obtuse.

A diary kept by Edith Frank or Auguste van Pels might have painted a slightly different picture of Otto Frank, but Anne’s perspective is the only one we have. In her view, Otto-Pim”—is invariably dignified and fair, defending his daughters
when they are being maligned, yet perfectly impartial when he must mediate a dispute. He is the educator, the peacemaker, the leader to whom the others bring their dissatisfactions, fears, and complaints. In a passage that Otto cut, we see him unclogging the communal toilet. When there is a burglary, Otto and Peter are the ones who go downstairs to investigate. “We must behave like soldiers,” he tells the frightened Mrs. Van Pels.

Urging Anne to be nicer to her mother, Otto appears to take no satisfaction in being the more popular—indeed, the adored—parent. Anne worships her father, and in our own more jaded and suspicious era, her diary serves as a useful reminder of how an adolescent daughter can feel passionately about her father without their relationship bordering on the incestuous or improper. This too may be one reason the diary has remained popular among young readers—its honesty about emotions that teenagers have learned to keep private.

Before Anne’s romance with Peter takes its course and she tires of him, there is a dramatic incident that begins when her father asks her not to spend evenings alone with Peter in his room. Otto, we may feel, is right to worry. His daughter is a precocious adolescent, Peter is several years older. A pregnancy would be disastrous. Enraged by what she interprets as her father’s lack of faith in her, Anne decides what she wants to tell him. She writes a note saying that she has reached a stage at which she can live entirely on her own. Her father can no longer talk her out of going upstairs. Either he forbids her to be alone with Peter, or else he trusts her completely—and leaves her in peace. Then she slips the letter into Otto’s pocket.