Anne Frank (4 page)

The camera waits outside a door, peering up a stairwell. In search of something to focus on, it pans up the side of a building. In the open windows are neighborhood residents, girls and young women, their elbows propped on the sills, waiting. The women at the windows alter the look of the street, so the scene begins to look more like a village in southern Europe.

The newlywed couple appears, arm in arm, the groom in a top hat, cane, and formal wear, the bride in a flattering pale suit, a jaunty white fedora, and gloves; she carries a bouquet. They walk down the stairs and pause like movie stars obliging the paparazzi. Passersby lean against their bicycles, staring.

Suddenly, the camera zooms toward the sky and finds Anne Frank, watching from her window. She turns and speaks to someone inside the apartment. She looks back at the couple, then away. The camera appears to lose interest. It glances at a few more spectators, then returns to the Amsterdam street.

On the Web site for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, you can watch those few seconds of Anne on film, in blurred and grainy close-up. Anne’s body language is quick, electric. A breeze, or maybe the motion of her body, lifts her hair as she turns, and her eyes smudge into dark ovals as she gazes down at the bridal couple.

As familiar as we are with images of Anne Frank, as inured as we may think we are to the sight of her beautiful face, the
film pierces whatever armor we imagine we have developed. It is always shockingly short and always the same, and yet you are never entirely sure what you have, or haven’t, seen. It’s less like watching a film clip than like having one of those dreams in which you see a long-lost loved one or friend. In the dream, the person isn’t really dead. You must have been mistaken. You wake up, and it takes a few moments to understand why the dream was so cruelly deceptive.

The film was shot by a friend of the groom, who still had the footage when Ernst Schnabel interviewed him for
Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage.
The groom, identified only as Dr. K., showed it on a screen with a home-movie projector. Dr. K. explained that he didn’t know Anne Frank, and that his wife, the bride in the film, “knew her only from Anne’s girlhood days on Merwedeplein, simply as one knows the children of neighbors, from seeing them on the street and greeting them in the early morning. The friend who had filmed their wedding also did not know Anne, and the doctor guesses that there was a small strip of film left on the reel, not enough to do anything with, and so his friend had simply taken a shot into the blue. He had certainly never imagined that out of the blue he would catch in his lens ten seconds of history.”

F
ROM
the June 20, 1942, entry:

Otto Frank was smart enough to leave Germany a full five years before the orgy of broken glass, intimidation, and gang violence that would become known as Kristallnacht. And he reached Holland before the Dutch had had time to become alarmed by the growing number of Jewish refugees streaming across the German border.

By 1939, when Edith’s mother finally left Germany and came to live with the Franks, the influx of Jews was so heavy that the Dutch government decided to build a resettlement station in the center of the country, a site to which the queen, Wilhelmina, objected because it was too near her estate. The proposed camp, which was to be financed by Jewish organizations, was relocated to Westerbork, in the raw, cold, sandy, fly-infested northeast. Later, as simply as reversing the hinges on a door, the pestilential camp was turned into a detention center for Jews being shipped out of the country by the Nazis. Tens of thousands, including the Franks and Van Pelses, were deported from Westerbork to their deaths in the east.

The Dutch remained so convinced that their neutrality would be respected that when the German invasion began, on May 10, 1940, even savvy Dutch journalists failed to pay attention to the evidence crashing around their ears. “All the correspondents report strange noises that have been audible along the border since nightfall. The heavy droning of motors, explosions, and other noises harder to identify. Also angry barking, apparently from startled farm dogs, and the lowing of restless cattle.”

The battle lasted five days. Near the end, the Nazis threatened to bomb Rotterdam if the Dutch refused to surrender, and when negotiations stalled, the Nazis carried out their threat, killing nine hundred people. The Dutch rapidly capitulated. Queen Wilhelmina attempted to join the resistance in the south, but was persuaded to escape to Great Britain and form a govern
ment in exile. After trying to flee by boat, more than a hundred and fifty Jews committed suicide on May 15 and 16, when the Germans marched into Amsterdam. That was when, as Anne wrote four years later, in the phrase that the fifteen-year-old found to express the innocence of her younger self, “the good times rapidly fled.”

In fact, the good times lasted slightly longer in the Netherlands than they did in other Nazi-occupied countries, in part because the invaders wished to preserve good relations with the Dutch, fellow Aryans whom they hoped might welcome the chance to join an ethnically pure greater Germany. But despite the gradual pace at which the Nazis implemented anti-Jewish regulations in Holland, their intentions soon became clear.

By that fall, all Jewish-owned businesses were required to register with the appropriate government offices. Over the next months, Jews were fired from university and government positions, Jewish newspapers were shut down. An illegal student newspaper announced that a “cold pogrom” had begun. In January 1941, all Dutch Jews were forced to register with the state and were banned from movie theaters. This would have been a hardship for the movie-star-struck Anne, who fails to mention this as the reason for her friends being treated to a private showing of a Rin Tin Tin film at her birthday party in June 1942. By then, the basic necessities of life—food, transportation, shelter, safety—had become problematic for Jewish families. Nonetheless, the Franks sent cookies to school with Anne so she could celebrate her birthday there as well, and found a way to entertain “lots of boys and girls.”

Otto and Edith Frank did everything they could to regularize their family’s increasingly restricted daily existence. If the children couldn’t go to the theater, they could watch Rin Tin Tin at home. On her first visit to the Franks’ apartment, Miep Gies observed toys, drawings, and other signs that the chil
dren “dominated the house.” Later, she noticed that the adults’ conversations about the war ended abruptly when the girls appeared, and didn’t resume until after the girls had finished their cake and left the room.

When Anne describes the fun she has with her Ping-Pong club at the only ice cream parlors to which Jews were still permitted to go, she doesn’t allude to the incident at Koco, a similar establishment that was the scene of a battle between German police and Jewish customers. The incident led to the execution of Koco’s German-Jewish owner, who refused, under torture, to name the person whose idea it was to rig up a device that sprayed the Nazis with ammonia.

Jews were forbidden to give blood, to sit on park benches, to attend horse races, or to travel. The Nazi newspaper celebrated the exclusion of Jews from the country’s beaches: “Our North Sea will no longer serve to rinse down fat Jewish bodies.”

As the political violence increased, Dutch citizens began to witness random street roundups
(razzia)
of Jews. In retaliation for a street brawl in which a Dutch Nazi was killed, four hundred young male “hostages” were arrested in a raid that began on the night of February 22, 1941, and resumed the next morning. Incensed, the unions and labor movements organized a general strike that shut down Amsterdam. The Nazis imposed a curfew, shot four strikers, and jailed twenty-two more. The strike ended two days later, or as Miep Gies recalls more sanguinely, it lasted “three marvelous days.” The four hundred hostages were sent first to Buchenwald and then, as punishment for the fact that the Jewish Council had requested their release, to the labor camp at Mauthausen, where the commandant had given his son fifty Jews for target practice as a birthday present, and where nearly all four hundred hostages died.

During the spring and summer in which the ten-second film of the bride and groom was shot, Jews were forbidden to
frequent parks, zoos, cafes, museums, public libraries, and auctions. No wonder so many Merwedeplein residents had nothing to do on a sunny June day but watch a newlywed couple walk down a flight of stairs.

That autumn, another law made it illegal for Jewish children to attend school with Christian classmates; all summer, the employees of the Dutch educational system had worked overtime to ensure that the segregated system was operational by the start of the fall term. A teacher at the Montessori school that Anne was forced to leave recalled that they lost eighty-seven students as a result of the new decree. Until then, they had not realized how many of their pupils were Jewish. Of those eighty-seven children, only twenty would survive the war.

Several short reminiscences collected in
Tales from the Secret Annex
concern Anne’s experience at the Jewish Lyceum, to which she and Margot transferred after the ruling was put into effect. In “My First Day at the Lyceum,” Anne describes being more afraid of having to take geometry than of the law requiring her to change schools. She reports having little sympathy for a gray-haired, mousy teacher, “wringing her hands” as she made organizational announcements. Perhaps her hand wringing had to do with a premonition about the Nazi educational policies, a worry which would have seemed less urgent to the children adjusting to new surroundings. Postwar research has shown that many Jewish children enjoyed their time at the Jewish Lyceum; reunions have been held, at which survivors recalled how glad they were to be at a school where they felt, however temporarily, safe.

Whatever anxiety Anne experienced was dispelled when she managed to get her friend Lies (Hanneli Goslar) moved into her class. “The school—which had given me so many advantages and so much pleasure—was now smiling down on me,
and I began, my spirits soaring again, to pay attention to what the geography teacher was saying.”

Other sketches portray the math teacher who called Anne Miss Quack Quack and the biology instructor whose favorite subject was reproduction, “probably because she’s an old maid.” In a series of answers to the questions that Anne wrote in the exercise book and titled “Do You Remember?,” subtitled “Memories of My School Days at the Jewish Lyceum,” the longest section is devoted to an incident in which Anne and Lies, accused of cheating on a French test, explained that the entire class was cheating, then wrote a letter of apology to their schoolmates for having snitched. The piece ends with Anne’s hope that someday she will again be able to enjoy carefree school days.

The historian Jacob Presser taught history at the Jewish Lyceum. In the summer of 1942, at a ceremony to celebrate the lyceum’s first anniversary, a usually reserved and circumspect colleague told Presser that the war was growing worse with every hour. Later, Presser would learn that the professor had just heard about the proposed mass deportations. As the raids and roundups became more frequent, there were often empty seats in the classroom. Presser recalled the pantomime with which he and the children acknowledged these absences. The teacher nodded at the empty desk, and the others either made a quick hand gesture, meaning
underground,
or a fist, meaning
arrested.
All this was done in silence. Hanneli Goslar remembered Presser bursting into tears during a lecture about the Renaissance; his young wife, who would be killed in the war, had been taken away the night before.

After the war, in cooperation with the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, Presser would go on to write a definitive history of the period,
The Destruction of the Dutch Jews.
Among the remarkable aspects of Presser’s book is his
documentation of the bizarre respect for the legal process—the concern that everything be done according to the letter of the law—that went hand in hand with the Nazis’ brutality. Each order depriving the Jews of their dignity, their liberty, and their ability to sustain themselves featured clauses and subclauses designed to make everything “clear.” If a law was found to be “flawed”—for example, if it was discovered that the Jews required to hand in their radios were giving up old or damaged sets and keeping better models—a new law would be passed, modifying and improving the old one; now, upon surrendering their radios, Jews were forced to sign a statement swearing that they had not substituted inferior ones, and those who had already given up their sets were called back to fill out a declaration. When it was decreed that Jews could no longer ride in motorized vehicles, an exception was made for funerals; the corpse could be transported in a hearse, but the mourners still had to walk.

In January 1942, the Franks signed up for “voluntary emigration.” And in April, the Jewish Council, established to control and pacify the Jewish population, distributed over half a million yellow stars, with directions on how they should be worn by every Jew over six years of age. The mandatory stars were given out along with a bill: each star cost a few pennies and one textile-ration coupon. One teacher at the Jewish Lyceum refused to wear his star because, he said, he refused to be led like a lamb to the slaughter. When his students argued that they had been told the star was a badge of honor—as Anne says in the dramatized versions of her diary—the teacher replied that those who thought so should wear it. Ultimately, he gave in, and his wife, weeping, sewed the star to his jacket. After a week, he decided to face the consequences and removed the star.