Anne Frank (27 page)

Unlike the play, the film can step outside the annex, to the pretty streets of Amsterdam and zoom up to its placid sky, where the movie begins and ends to the swells and dips of Arnold Newman’s lush score. Yet Stevens was determined to convey the claustrophobia of life in hiding. This posed a challenge because the studio insisted that the production utilize its new CinemaScope technology, which had been developed in the hope that the wide screen would lure audiences back from the tiny windows of their brand-new TVs.

Stevens’s solution was to have the set (the interiors were filmed on a sound stage) built vertically so that the camera could pan upward from the office to the garret, catching the annex residents as they wait, frozen with fear, at the top of the steps, or stand amid attic beams, as if they are in a tree house. Heavy supports were constructed and moved as necessary to narrowly frame the shots and counteract the wide CinemaScopic panorama.

In close-up, every pore and imperfection becomes gigantic, and the differences among the actors—who appear to have traveled from different countries to act in different movies—are likewise magnified. Puzzling variations in manners, accent, and affect divide the German-born, aristocratic Franks and the Van Daans, who sound as if they have arrived in Amsterdam via the Bronx. Richard Beymer, who had mostly done TV roles and would go on to star as Tony in the film of
West Side Story,
plays Peter van Daan as a rebellious American teen walled up in a Dutch attic.

Millie Perkins appears to have been directed to play Audrey Hepburn playing Anne Frank. Coy and frisky, she pouts, makes faces, and gives little indication of Anne’s intelligence and heart. In her memoir, Shelley Winters writes (mistakenly) that Anne
knew nothing about the Holocaust. Had she missed the diary entry in which Anne wrote, “If it’s that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed. Perhaps that’s the quickest way to die.”

In the documentary about the making of the film, Millie Perkins admits, “I didn’t understand the area of the Gestapo and the Nazis.” Though she speaks in the Anglo-actressy diction that was Audrey Hepburn’s default accent, her voice has an American twang, a cultivated nasality, and at moments she stretches her vowels like the other, more patrician Hepburn, Katharine.

Millie Perkins’s struggle underlines the obvious problems of casting an actress to play a character who ages between thirteen and fifteen—a time span during which a girl may feel, and behave, as if she is becoming another person. For all Stevens’s talk about the miracle that could be worked by dressing up a little girl and letting the audience glimpse the youngster through the party dress, the result was quite different. An eighteen-year-old dressed up in a child’s frock looks like an eighteen-year-old dressed up in a child’s frock. It’s disorienting and vaguely upsetting to see Anne clinging to her father or sitting with her arms wrapped around his neck and her head on his shoulder; the problem is that she looks like an adult. To accept this Anne as thirteen requires a nearly impossible suspension of disbelief. It’s easy to understand how an audience might be surprised to learn that they had been watching a true story.

What was Stevens thinking? He was making a serious movie, coming as close as Hollywood would let him come to European
auteur
dom. Shot in black and white and dimly lit, the diary film was
art.
Besides, the American people needed to
know what Jews had suffered during the war. What
people
had suffered.

The documentary
Echoes from the Past
emphasizes the diary’s
universality,
the need to make Anne’s story “accessible to people all over the world.” Stevens “didn’t want the audience to think it happened only to Jewish people.” According to the documentary, “Stevens’s strategy of making the film accessible worldwide paid off” in the form of eight Oscar nominations. Neither a commercial hit nor an unmixed critical success, it won in two categories: Best Cinematography and Best Supporting Actress.

Later, to fulfill a vow she made Otto Frank during his visit to the set, Shelley Winters proudly donated her Oscar to the Anne Frank House Museum, where it is currently displayed in a small case outside the cafeteria. Winters was even prouder of persuading Stevens to restore a section of dialogue that was almost omitted. In the play, Peter wants to burn his Star of David, and Anne suggests that the yellow star is a badge of pride. Realizing that this exchange was missing from the film, Winters interrupted the shoot, angering Stevens, who was eventually mollified into a rewrite.

“I watched him reshoot this scene in which Dick starts to burn his Jewish star, and Anne Frank whispers to him, ‘Don’t do that. After all, it’s David’s star—the shape of the shield of his victorious army.’ This little moment in the film is extraordinary—the two terrified Jewish children, who are hiding from the Nazis, remembering their heritage of the powerful King David. I will always be proud that I had the courage to stop the filming and see that that moment was restored to the film.”

As in the play, Anne’s question about why Jews have been singled out to suffer has been changed so that she asks why
people
have had to suffer, first one race, then another. Perhaps
because Millie Perkins is so unsure, it’s a clumsy moment that nearly brings the film to a stop. You feel as if the actress can’t get beyond some problem with this line, and after a beat of hesitation, she sounds as if she’s faking it, or lying.

The ending of the movie is also problematic. Anne leans against Peter as they gaze out the attic window. “Some day when we get outside again…,” Anne says as the police sirens get louder. Cut to worried adults downstairs, also hearing the sirens, cut back to the lovers staring up at the sky, cut to a truck rumbling down the street. The syrupy music surges under the screech of brakes. The lovers meet in a passionate embrace—“Here is the thrill of her first kiss!”—intensified by the fact that the Gestapo has arrived. The front doorbell rings, Mr. Van Daan faints, there’s the sound of crashing, of shouting in German, more crashing, someone’s breaking down the door. And the music gets louder. The secret annex residents form a tableau of nobility—eight brave, resigned statues awaiting the inevitable. Peter comes up behind Anne and rests one hand on her shoulder.

“For the past two years,” declares Otto Frank, “we have lived in fear. Now we can live in hope.” Hope for what, exactly? Already the scene has shifted to a close-up of the diary, and we hear Anne reading, in voice-over, a passage that does not appear in the diary, an entry she would never have written, even if it had been possible for her to write anything at that dreadful moment.

“And so it seems our stay here is over. They’ve given us just a moment to get our things. We can each take a bag, whatever will hold our clothing, nothing else. So, dear diary, that means I must leave you behind. Good-bye for a while…Please, please, anyone, if you should find this diary, please keep it safe for me, because someday I hope…”

And so it seems our stay here is over. Our stay here?

Returned from the war, Otto Frank enters the attic with the two helpers, who explain why they were absent on the day the annex residents were taken away. In reality, as we know, they were in the office, and Kleiman and Kugler were arrested along with the Jews; presumably, their presence at that critical moment was edited out to simplify the scene and heighten its dramatic impact. Otto tells his Dutch friends about the camps, about his journey home, about looking for his family among so many others searching for loved ones.

“But Anne…I still hoped. Yesterday I was in Rotterdam, I met a woman there, she’d been in Belsen with Anne. I know now….” The music swells again, the camera zooms up for a wide shot of clouds and swooping seagulls, and we hear Anne repeating that, in spite of everything, she still believes that people are good at heart.

She sounds like an American girl. And why not? It’s an American movie. We’re the cavalry that rides over the hill. In this case the cavalry did its best, but its best wasn’t good enough to save Anne. D-day is a major event, and the film utilizes Stevens’s footage of the invasion. When his actors failed to respond with sufficient excitement to the news of the American landing on the Normandy beaches, George Stevens played them “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

You can watch Stevens’s D-day footage on YouTube. The distorted color of the degraded film stock gives it an otherworldly beauty. There’s a particularly lovely shot of battleships, silhouetted against the horizon, floating beneath a sky dotted with surveillance balloons. A link takes you to a clip identified only as “Auschwitz Liberation. Rare Russian footage.” It’s narrated in German and seems to have been made for German TV. A small band of Russian soldiers are running across the fields, falling and stumbling in the deep white snow drifts. Next we see the newly freed prisoners, one by one, men with faces of
great strangeness and striking individuality. Then come images of mass graves, corpses in the snow, prisoners of all ages, including children.

The harrowing film reminds you of what was forgotten in the haste to make Anne’s diary a lucrative, popular, and morally improving commodity. The camps, the prisoners, and the innocent dead tell the truth beneath the wheeling and dealing of the Broadway and Hollywood productions, beneath the drafts, the rewrites, the lawsuits and disappointments, beneath the simultaneously innocent and cynical American story that ended with a fashion model explaining that despite everything, she still believes that people are good at heart.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1998, HELEN CHENOWETH, THEN
the controversial right-wing-Republican congressional representative from Idaho, a strong opponent of gun control and of environmental protections, was obliged to dissociate herself from a political consultant named Robert Boatman, who had produced several video ads for Chenoweth’s campaign.

Three years before, the Anne Frank Foundation had sent its traveling exhibition to Boise. Inspired by the program, local residents had launched a drive to fund the construction of a human-rights educational park. Named in honor of Anne Frank, the park would be located on the bank of the Boise River. The planners announced that they had already raised almost $400,000.

This announcement triggered something in Mr. Boatman, who wrote a letter to the editors of the
Idaho Statesman
that began, “When a 50-year-old snapshot of a sickly teenager from halfway around the world appears on the front page of the
States
man,
you know someone’s political agenda is stirring. The perpetuation of the Anne Frank myth by gullible and guilt-ridden crybabies is a slander of truth and a slap in the face of history.” The letter went on to claim that Otto Frank had “discovered” and “typed up” the book and subsequently made millions and in the process become “the darling of leftist terrorist groups like the Jewish Defense League and the Wiesenthal Center.”

After Representative Chenoweth fired Mr. Boatman, he faded into a shadowy niche of the far-right-wing free-speech pantheon. He is the author of several books on high-speed revolvers, including one on how to “customize” your Glock—a euphemism for turning a handgun into an automatic weapon.

Helen Chenoweth remained in office until 2001.

I
N THE
1960s and ’70s, a movement formed, and spread with alarming rapidity, dedicated to championing and publicizing its members’ conviction that the Holocaust had never occurred, that the Nazis had never built or used gas chambers and crematoria, and that the number of Jewish World War II dead had been wildly exaggerated. The Nazis themselves had prepared the groundwork for these specious claims, destroying the evidence of the methods used at the extermination camps and employing euphemisms such as “resettlement” and “relocation” for deportation and mass murder.

Aided by neo-Nazis, gathered under the banner of organizations that have included the Institute for Historical Review and the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, these so-called Holocaust revisionists have challenged the so-called exterminationist theorists by placing ads in newspapers and establishing Web sites. Despite the fact that Holocaust denial is illegal in many countries, it has proliferated, drawing some of its most active supporters from the former Soviet Union. It has also gained currency in the Muslim world, where its most
visible proponent is Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has stated that the Holocaust is a Zionist myth, and who, in 2006, assembled, in Tehran, an International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust.

If the Holocaust is a fabrication, then it stands to reason—according to the mad logic of “historical revisionism”—that Anne Frank’s diary must be a fraud. The first to say so in print was Harald Nielsen, a Danish critic, who, in 1957, published an essay in a Swedish newspaper claiming that the diary was partly the work of an American writer named Meyer Levin. Nielsen’s charges were echoed, the next year, by a Norwegian journalist who went further and claimed that the diary was a fake. Surely the most regrettable and unforeseeable consequence of the conflict over the dramatization of Anne’s book was that Holocaust deniers would use Levin’s lawsuit against Otto Frank as “proof” that the two men had conspired and collaborated to forge a young girl’s diary. Why
else
would two Jews sue each other in a New York court for breach of contract and plagiarism?

In 1958, Lothar Stielau, a high school English teacher in Germany and a former Hitler Youth leader, wrote an essay claiming that Anne’s journal was sentimental and pornographic, and equated it with the counterfeit diary of Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun. During an official investigation, Stielau took the semantic defense, admitting that instead of the German word for
fake
he should probably have used the word for
seriously altered.
He was defended by a right-wing German political leader, Heinrich Buddeberg, who repeated the accusation that Meyer Levin had been involved in the forgery. Stielau was fired from his job, and both Stielau and Buddeberg were sued by Otto Frank for libel and defamation.

Given that Otto Frank had begun to see himself as Anne’s emissary of forgiveness, given that he had declined to prosecute the Nazi officer who arrested his family, or to expose the man
who had betrayed their hiding place, his decision to take legal action meant that Stielau and his supporters must have angered and alarmed him. He intuited that Stielau’s charges would be repeated and taken up by others, as indeed they were. Unfortunately, the trial failed to serve as a deterrent.

The prosecution argued that the diary needed to be authenticated, since so many vengeful factions were at that point trying to make the Germans look bad. The lawyers mentioned an article in
Der Spiegel
asserting that Anne’s work had been heavily edited by Albert Cauvern, one of the friends to whom Otto had first shown the manuscript. Miep and Jan Gies and Bep Voskuijl were brought into court to swear that Anne actually did keep a diary, the same one they had given Otto. Forensic handwriting experts convinced the judge that the diary was authentic.

Still, the case dragged on for three years. Stielau again clarified the point he’d tried to make: he meant the play, not the diary.
The play
was the fraud. In 1961, the lawyers settled. The defendants admitted that the diary was authentic; they apologized and stated that they hadn’t meant to offend Otto Frank or the memory of his daughter. Nearly all of Stielau’s fine was paid by the German state.

But the verdict in Otto’s favor would only have convinced those who already agreed with it. From then on, the books and tracts challenging the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary proliferated like an evil chain letter, each building on the others’ demented fantasies as if they were proven truths. Their writers spent pages discussing the “fact” that the forgers were so stupid they wrote Anne’s diary in ballpoint pen—ink that was not in use before 1944. They were uninterested in hearing that only six pages, in the entire diary, are
numbered
in ballpoint ink, apparently in Otto Frank’s hand. The rest had been written with a fountain pen, and all of it was written by Anne Frank.

In 1967, the
American Mercury
ran an essay by Teressa Hendry, reviving the charges that Meyer Levin wrote the diary, and using, again as proof, the court decision, later reversed, ordering Otto to pay $50,000 in damages to his “race-kin” (in Hendry’s phrase) Meyer Levin. The
Mercury
had been founded in the 1920s by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, and several changes of management later had become the paper of record for the racist intelligentsia.

The most chilling aspect of Hendry’s essay is its reasonable, quasi-academic tone. Beginning with a nod to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
it cites the question that Abraham Lincoln is said to have asked Harriet Beecher Stowe: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war?” Hendry riffs briefly on the power of propaganda and on the cleverness with which Communists have used the nonexistent threat of Hitler and Nazism to divert the world’s attention from the “live threat” of Stalin and Khrushchev. Then Hendry goes into the details of the Levin-Frank suit, and asks why this case has never been “officially reported.” After noting that both Levin and Frank are Jewish, so they cannot be accused of anti-Semitism, no matter what vile lies they tell about Jews, Hendry ends with a plea for truth. “If Mr. Frank used the work of Meyer Levin to present to the world what we have been led to believe is the literary work of his daughter, wholly or in part, then the truth should be exposed…To label fiction as fact is never justified nor should it be condoned.”

The claim that the diary is a forgery has since been echoed by prominent Holocaust deniers, among them Richard Harwood, author of
Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last,
and David Irving, who also cited the Levin court case as evidence of Otto Frank’s complicity in perpetrating the fraud of his daughter’s work. When Otto Frank protested, Irving’s publishers removed the accusation from his book,
Hitler and His
Generals,
and Irving was ordered to pay damages to the Anne Frank Foundation.

Still more pamphlets were published by a German named Heinz Roth, denouncing the diary as a swindle. The leaflets he distributed at a 1976 Hamburg performance of
The Diary of Anne Frank
aroused the interest of a German prosecutor, who issued an injunction prohibiting Roth from handing out his broadsides. In Roth’s defense, his lawyers cited a book that would become a sacred text to those who challenged the diary’s authenticity,
The Diary of Anne Frank—Is It Authentic?
by Robert Faurisson, an early champion of the idea that the lying fairy tale of gas chambers and crematoriums had been perpetrated by the Allies and Jews to defame the heroic Nazi party.

Subsequent cases against later pamphleteers were dismissed on technicalities or on the grounds of free speech, a fundamental principle that inspired Noam Chomsky to write the introduction to one of Faurisson’s books. Only one journalist, Edgar Geiss, arrested for distributing pamphlets in the courtroom where a colleague’s case was being tried, received a criminal sentence. He was given a year in prison for defamation, a judgment he later appealed.

D
ITLIEB
Felderer’s 1979
Anne Frank’s Diary, A Hoax
is still among the most repellent attacks on the diary. It is at once tedious and terrifying to attempt to follow the lunatic convictions that keep Felderer (an Austrian Jew who became a Jehovah’s Witness, emigrated to Sweden, and was won over to the “revisionist” cause while investigating the Nazi persecution of his fellow Witnesses) raving for page after page, spinning a seamless web of pure, poisonous hate.

Only the like-minded, or those with strong stomachs, could read more than a few lines of his rant, all in the name of history,
truth, science, common sense, and inside information. Today, an Internet search of his name directs one to a site headlined “To inform man is not a business but an obligation” and “limited censorship is the root of all terrorism.” According to the text, “Ditlieb Felderer’s Flyers have come out in the millions in spite of corrupt Politicians Fahrenheit 451ing them over and over. To see the various court records surrounding his censorship trials, Biblical sex photos and discussion, blog, studies of medieval history, controversies, dissent…” There is a link to a site that lists Anne Frank and Auschwitz as well as “holocaust-sex” and “pornocaust.”

One learns from Felderer’s book that the wearing of the six-pointed star was the Jews’ own idea, a “fact” proved by a slogan, allegedly coined by a Zionist weekly, exhorting fellow Jews to wear the badge proudly. Apparently, the star was something like a professional or guild badge, or like the lapel pin worn by the French Legion of Honor. We read about Otto’s Frankfurt family, “wallowing in wealth,” Jews characteristically not satisfied with owning a little piece of Germany and wanting to possess the whole country. Felderer goes into detail to establish the fact that the windows of the secret annex could not have been covered with paper, as the diary claims, that the adult males could not have been heavy smokers without alerting the warehouse staff, that the annex residents ate like kings, though (paradoxically) they could not have cooked without their presence being detected.

The very idea of the helpers spending the night in the annex strikes Felderer as so reckless that the diary entries describing these overnights are in themselves enough to prove that the book is a lie. No sensible Dutch person would save a journal full of anti-German insults in a desk drawer where any German could discover it. And why would Anne have kept her diary in
her father’s briefcase, where her father could have found it and have read her filthy little secrets—a question that, among other things, betrays a failure to understand the respect for privacy, even the children’s, that kept the annex residents civilized and sane.

The worst parts are the dirty bits. Felderer calls the diary, “the first pedophile pornographic work to come out after World War II and sold on the open market. In fact, the descriptions by a teenage girl over her sex affairs may likely be the first child porno ever to come out.” He suggests that the “sex portions” may be made up, invented by adult men in order to sell a book that otherwise might have wound up among Otto Frank’s private papers. As upsetting as it is to imagine Otto Frank using his daughter “in such a filthy manner,” Felderer points out, evil parents regularly prostitute their children, “so why could literary prostitution not be possible?”

“Apparently the ‘sexy’ portions were too much even for some Jews to stomach, and one of the first, if not the only group, to voice their objections against the diary, were some Orthodox Jews who felt it gave the Jews a bad moral image…Whether their objections were based on true moral grounds or for fear that the story was letting the cat out of the bag may be debatable. Talmudic sources are certainly not foreign to perverse sex.”

Just when one imagines that things cannot possibly get uglier, Felderer includes a section entitled “the Anal Complex,” in which he makes a seeming half turn and argues for the possible
authenticity
of the diary. The only reason the diary
might
be the real thing is “its preoccupation with the anus and excrements, a trait typical of many Jews. Pornography and excretal fantasies have always fascinated many of them and they have therefore also been the greatest exploiters of these things.”