Anne Frank (8 page)

Of course, Miep was not merely guarding Anne’s privacy, but protecting herself and her coworkers. Later, she would say that if she had read the diaries, she might have felt compelled to burn them, out of concern for her colleagues. It would have been safer for her to destroy the diary, just as it would have been safer not to hide eight Jews, and certainly safer for her not to go to the police headquarters on Euterpestraat on the Monday after the arrest. Even by the standards of the previous two years, Miep’s attempt to bribe Silberbauer into freeing the prisoners was extraordinarily brave, an almost recklessly dangerous act that demonstrated the strength of her attachment to the Franks.

When the Opekta sales representatives were told that the Franks had been taken away, one of them (a man who was, in fact, a member of the Dutch Nazi party) took Miep aside and reminded her that the war was nearly over, the Germans were exhausted, and they would want to leave Holland with their
pockets full. He himself would take up a collection from among the many friends and business associates who had been fond of Otto Frank, and Miep could go to the police and make the arresting officer, her fellow Austrian, an irresistible offer.

When Miep phoned Silberbauer, he instructed her to come on Monday, but when she did so, he told her to wait until the next day. On Tuesday, he said that he lacked the authority to make such a decision and sent her upstairs, where some officers were listening to English-language radio, an illegal act. Presumably they were monitoring the bad news about the Allies’ progress. They ordered her out of the room. But in any case, there was nothing that Miep could have done. The prisoners had already been taken to the jail on Weteringschans in preparation for their transport to Westerbork.

Before the movers arrived to strip the upper floors of 263 Prinsengracht of furniture that could be shipped to needy German families whose own possessions had been lost in the war, Miep told one of the warehousemen—the same worker several helpers suspected of having betrayed the Franks—to pick up any papers still left on the floor. All of this was done in haste. There is no way of knowing if any, or how much, of Anne’s writing was lost.

A
LONG
with Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler was taken to the SS headquarters on Euterpestraat. The two men were briefly interrogated, then transferred to the prison on Amstelveenseweg, and later to the Amersfoort transit camp. In mid-September, Kleiman suffered a stomach hemorrhage and was released when the Red Cross interceded on his behalf. Kugler was sent to a series of labor camps. After escaping in the spring of 1945, he remained in hiding until the war’s end.

When Kleiman returned to the office, Miep refused to let him or Bep read the diaries. The books and papers remained in
her desk drawer for almost a year.

In June 1945, Otto Frank made his way back to Amsterdam. Liberated from Auschwitz, he had traveled by train to Russia and then by boat to Marseilles, and eventually reached the Netherlands by train and truck. He moved in with Miep and her husband. A month after his arrival in Amsterdam, Otto, who had already learned of his wife’s death from a prisoner he’d met on the train to Odessa, was informed that his daughters were also dead—first by the Red Cross and then by a Dutch woman who had known the girls in Bergen-Belsen.

In the film,
Anne Frank Remembered,
Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper recalls giving Otto Frank the sad news:

Like Otto, Miep had hoped that Anne might have survived. Planning to give the diary back to Anne upon her return, Miep concealed its existence from Otto until the day he learned that the girls had died at Bergen-Belsen.

The scene in which Otto Frank first read his daughter’s diary is painful to imagine. Even when children have grown into thriving adults, a scrap of paper covered with childish writing can induce, in parents, a stab of nostalgia for those years that, parents may think later, were the happiest in their lives. How much more grief such pages must have occasioned when they had been written by a child so recently murdered?

In Miep Gies’s memoir, she recalls that Otto Frank went to
his former Opekta office and closed the door. A short time later, she brought him the papers and the checked book.

Over the next months, Otto Frank tried, with little success, to reestablish himself in business. Meanwhile, he sorted through the diary, and the exercise and account books in which Anne had recorded her secrets and in which, he would say later, he met a daughter he had never really known. The same words that had consoled Anne may have provided some comfort for her father, or at least distraction, as he typed up sections of the manuscript, translated them into German, and sent them to his mother in Switzerland.

Relying mainly on the draft that Anne had revised but also borrowing from the original version and from the stories and occasional pieces that would appear as
Tales from the Secret Annex,
Otto Frank typed up a second and much longer manuscript of the diary. By now he was persuaded that Anne had wanted her diary to be published as a book entitled
Het Achterhuis.
Once the idea occurred to him, he was obliged to read the diary as something other than a personal record and with a view to how it might be read by strangers. Otto changed the names, as Anne had directed. But he kept his own family’s real names, though
Anne had wished the Franks to become the Robins: Frederik and Nora, and their daughters, Betty and Anne. He retained the first name of Peter van Pels, though Anne had specified that her young upstairs neighbor should appear in
Het Achterhuis
as Alfred van Daan.

Over the last half century, Otto Frank has been accused of prudishness, of being too ready to forgive the Germans, of censoring and deracinating Anne, of anti-Semitism, of sentimentality and cowardice, of greed and personal ambition. In fact, what seems most probable is that his editing was guided by the instincts of a bereaved father wanting to give the reader the fullest sense of what his daughter had been like. Otto cut a number of Anne’s sharpest criticisms of her neighbors, either because of a desire to make her seem like a nicer person, or to protect the sensitivities of the living—for example, the dentist’s sweetheart, Charlotte Kaletta, who was made unhappy enough by the passages that remained. (She was even more upset when the Broadway play of the diary portrayed her husband as a buffoon so unfamiliar with his religious heritage that the meaning of Hanukkah had to be explained to him.)

It’s true that Otto chose to remove Anne’s rare flashes of meanness and to tone down her impatience with smallness and hypocrisy. But if we search for the point at which her character was reduced from that of a young person with a complex, mature view of politics, history, and human nature to that of a cheerful teen, if we seek out the juncture at which her awareness that she was being made to suffer because she was a Jew became a more generalized identification with all of suffering humanity, we discover that those changes were not the result of Otto Frank’s editing but rather of the ways in which the Broadway play and the Hollywood film of her diary chose to represent its author. On stage and screen, the adorable was em
phasized at the expense of the human, the particular was replaced by the so-called universal, and
universal
was interpreted to mean
American
—or, in any case,
not Jewish,
since
Jewish
was understood to signify a smaller audience, more limited earnings, and, more disturbingly, subject matter that might alienate a non-Jewish audience.

N
EWLY
widowed, still in mourning for his wife, Otto Frank was understandably reluctant to see his marriage publicly judged and found wanting by his daughter. Later, Anne’s speculations about her parents’ relationship would become major news when the “suppressed” five pages of the diary were discovered. And yet the controversial conclusion that Anne reached—that her parents’ union was neither passionate nor romantic—was probably evident to the Franks’ relatives, to their friends in Amsterdam, and to anyone knowledgeable or even curious about how men and women behave in the presence or the absence of love and desire. Certainly, those questions were of great interest to Anne. In photographs of the Franks, charismatic, handsome Otto and his relatively plain wife appear to have accidentally wound up in the same frame. Otto’s snapshots of his daughters vastly outnumber those of Edith.

But though Otto cut Anne’s most bitter references to Edith, to his marriage, and to his wife’s contentious relationship with their younger daughter, he chose not to excise Anne’s accounts of her own darkest moments. He retained her pessimistic observations about the murderousness of her fellow creatures, as well as her most enraged and despairing protests against the anti-Semitism that had forced her and her family into hiding. Likewise, he left in the passage in which Anne asks why God has singled out the Jews to suffer. “If we bear all this suffering, and there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as
an example.”

After he had completed the preliminary editing, Otto asked a friend, the playwright Albert Cauvern, to check the manuscript for grammatical errors and mistakes in diction. The extant typescript suggests that at least someone besides Cauvern gave it a critical close reading. Also among its early readers was Kurt Baschwitz, a lecturer in psychology and journalism, who, in a letter to his daughter, called the diary “the most moving document about that time that I know” and “a literary masterpiece.”

People who encountered Otto Frank during this period recall a handsome, distinguished man with the bearing and reserve of a Prussian officer—but whose eyes were perpetually red from weeping. He carried the manuscript with him wherever he went, and, at times, tears flowed down his face as he read a few pages aloud, or urged friends and strangers to read it.

The edited typescript was passed from hand to hand and across desks that included those of Jan Romein and his wife, Annie, two prominent Dutch intellectuals who thought the book should be published but were unable to convince anyone who had the power to do so. The manuscript was rejected by every editor who read it, none of whom could imagine that readers would buy the intimate diary of a teenage girl, dead in the war. In addition, the Dutch had no desire to be reminded of the suffering they had so recently endured, and, regardless of what the Dutch cultural minister in exile had promised in his radio broadcast, it was assumed that there would be little interest in a first-person account by one of the Nazis’ young victims.

Luckily, the book had tenacious supporters. In April 1946, Jan Romein wrote about the diary in the daily newspaper,
Het Parool,
formerly the underground paper of the Dutch Resistance. Romein’s essay, entitled “A Child’s Voice,” was at once
impassioned and restrained. More than all the evidence presented at the Nuremberg trials, he wrote, the diary is an indictment of the “witless barbarity” of fascism, and of crimes that, only a year after the end of the war, his countrymen were already forgetting. Romein praised Anne’s gifts—“an insight into the failings of human nature—her own not excepted—so infallible that it would have astonished one in an adult, let alone a child”—and eloquently described the way that literature can affect us.

“When I had finished it was nighttime, and I was astonished to find that the lights still worked, and we still had bread and tea, that I could hear no airplanes droning overhead and no pounding of army boots in the street—I had been engrossed in my reading, so carried away back to that unreal world, now almost a year behind us.”

After Romein’s essay appeared in
Het Parool,
Otto Frank was approached by several publishers, among them Contact, located in Amsterdam. Its managing director was interested in the book but objected to passages in which, he felt, Anne wrote too freely about sex and about her body. Otto agreed to their deletion. Perhaps he was relieved to omit those entries, which Anne herself had left out when she revised her diary. Excised from the Dutch, these sections would be reinstated when the English-language edition appeared.

In the summer of 1946, five selections from the diary were published in a journal with which the Romeins were associated. The editing continued. On the request of the Dutch publisher, roughly twenty-five pages were cut from the manuscript, including a reference to menstruation and another to Anne and a girlfriend touching each other’s breasts.

Het Achterhuis
was published in the Netherlands in 1947 in an edition of 1,500 copies and with a subtitle that read:
Diary
Letters June 12, 1942-August 1, 1944.
Annie Romein’s introduction featured a somewhat more moderate estimation of the book’s merits than the rave, by her husband, that helped arrange its publication. Her preface was the first of many responses to the diary that praised the book while dismissing it as the unaffected, unpolished scribblings of an unusually gifted child.

This “diary of a normal child growing up in exceptional circumstances…will disappoint anyone who hopes to experience a ‘wonder ’…this diary is not the work of a prodigy.” The diary “is not the work of a great writer, but the awakening of a human soul is drawn so purely, precisely, and uncompromisingly that one seldom sees the like in the memoirs of the greatest writers.” Like the children in Richard Hughes’s
A High Wind in Jamaica,
wrote Romein, Anne Frank sees the world and especially herself “with a candid frankness, unjudgemental and down to earth.”