Schwab: This episode is sponsored by Jewish Lives, a prize-winning series of biographies from Yale University Press. To learn more about Anne Frank’s life, identity, and legacy, you should check out The Many Lives of Anne Frank by Ruth Franklin at www.jewishlives.org. And you can use the special promo code FRANKPOD to get 30% off.
Schwab: From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds. The podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories from Jewish history. I’m Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: And I’m Yael Steiner, and we are back with a special bonus episode about a figure that I’m fairly certain most of our listeners have heard of, unlike some of the other women Schwab that you have taught us about, like Rivka Tiktiner or Babatha. This one I’m fairly certain has made the rounds.
Schwab: Yes, we’re going to be talking today about Anne Frank, who is one of the most famous Jewish women in history, maybe the most famous.
Yael: One thing that is notable for me about Anne Frank is that I grew up very steeped in Holocaust history as a grandchild of survivors and having been educated in institutions that focused tremendously — sometimes to the detriment of other subjects — on Holocaust history. Obviously, I knew the story of Anne Frank and she loomed large in that educational sphere, but she wasn’t that important to me in my framing of the Holocaust because so many people in my actual life stood in that space. But when I went to Amsterdam as an adult and visited the Anne Frank House, I felt — before I went, I’ll admit I felt a bit jaded. I’ve been to so many Holocaust memorials and museums and I’ve been to Poland. I didn’t think I could possibly be so affected by it. And I was incredibly affected by it. So this podcast isn’t about me and how I feel about Anne Frank, and I’m going to let you talk now, but I do think I realize as an adult that she really affects me more than I anticipated.
Schwab: Her having spent a lot of time with Anne Frank and her interpreters over the last couple of weeks, I feel somewhat the same way. One of the big questions I want to use to frame what we’re talking about is: where does this story start and where does it end? And it’s actually a more complicated question than you might think. To start us off today, I want to start with a hinging moment — it’s a beginning of part of the story and an end of part of the story, but it’s not, I think, the place you would typically think to start.
Schwab: I want to start in January 1945. Otto Frank — Anne’s father — is liberated with the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Red Army. The Nazis shut down the camp, blew up the crematorium, tried to hide a lot of what had been happening there, and force-marched many of the prisoners out. Otto stayed in Auschwitz because he was quite ill, as he was for most of his five hellish months there. By the time he’s liberated in January 1945, he barely weighs over 100 pounds.
Schwab: As World War II is ending in much of Europe, he physically recuperates and makes the plan to return to Amsterdam. What he is looking for in returning to Amsterdam is to see if anyone has survived. He knows at this point that his wife, Edith Frank, is dead. He knows that his close friend Herman van Pels was gassed shortly after they arrived at Auschwitz together. He’s not very hopeful about Herman’s son Peter van Pels either — Otto had recommended Peter stay hidden in the hospital, but Peter was force-marched out instead. He has not seen his daughters, Margot and Anne, for many, many months. And he is hoping against hope that maybe they have survived and maybe they can be reunited back in Amsterdam.
Schwab: He finally, in June of 1945, gets back to Prinsengracht 263 — the address of his office and warehouse, where he had built a secret annex and hidden his family, the Van Pels family, and another man named Pfeffer — eight people — for more than two years. He’s greeted back at this building by his non-Jewish coworkers who were very involved in sustaining the family over the course of their hiding. And after about a month in Amsterdam, sometime in July, he receives a list of deceased persons from the Red Cross. It indicates that Margot and Anne both died in a concentration camp.
Schwab: It’s only at that point — once Anne is confirmed dead — that Miep Gies gives Otto something she had saved from the annex when the eight Jews who were hiding there were discovered and arrested. Anne’s writing. Miep knew that Anne’s diary was incredibly important to her. Almost immediately after the arrest, it was one of the most valuable items that needed to be saved in her mind. She recovered Anne’s writing and locked it in her desk drawer, intending to give it to Anne should Anne survive. She only gave it to Otto once it was confirmed that Anne was dead. She gives it to him and says: here is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you.
Yael: I told myself a story in my head — I don’t know if it’s the Mandela effect or a miscommunication — that Otto found it hidden under a floorboard or something.
Schwab: I think that’s the image a lot of people picture. But Miep knew how important the diary was to Anne. She recovered it and locked it away — intending to return it to Anne if Anne survived. It’s such a crucial part of the story: to whom does this text belong? She gives it to Otto and says, here is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you. Otto lived for a very long time — he died, I think, in the 1980s. In some versions of the telling he started reading it right away; in others he says he couldn’t bear to read it right away. Either way, he eventually starts reading this only thing, the only remnant he has of his family. And he says in reading it that it felt at once like he had his daughter back and that he never knew her in the first place — because there was so much of Anne that he recognized in her writing, especially her comic observations and her style of talking about people. But there was also a depth and self-awareness and a contemplative streak that he felt he never knew or understood.
Yael: One thing I’ve noted in the pieces I’ve read is that she is at once very much an adolescent girl — I have a crush on this boy, this is what I want to do when I grow up — and also exceedingly, exceedingly wise beyond her years. Her philosophical musings and the depth of her understanding of humanity are incongruous with the other events in her life that are taking place.
Schwab: Yes, and that is something I want to get to — how it is that both can be true at the same time, and how she does seem to be writing in two different registers, which is a big part of the draw of the book. Otto has that same experience. He almost immediately starts sharing it, at least with family. He starts typing up what’s been written and translates it into German for his mother, since the diary was written in Dutch.
Schwab: The image a lot of people picture is that he was handed a neat, single diary with almost daily entries from 1942 to 1944 — and that Otto prepared it for publication by fixing up some spelling errors and maybe taking out a few specific details. That is not at all the case. The real story, while more complex, tells us a lot more about who the people involved were. If you’re going to understand the story of Anne Frank, you really need to understand what the diary is and what happened with it.
Schwab: I want to be super clear because there have been accusations of forgery: this was written by Anne Frank. There are stitchings, there are editings, but it is nearly all her work. Less than 1% of the actual text is things that other people added. It is her voice. The question is what her voice means — and what she was writing for. Before we get to any of that, I want to briefly discuss her actual biography, because the text is only a two-year snapshot of her life. We owe it to Anne Frank to understand what the rest of her life looked like — which is short and horribly tragic and awful. You can’t talk about Anne Frank and just leave it as “and that was the last entry of her diary.”
Schwab: The Frank family are deeply associated with Amsterdam, but they were originally from Germany. They were assimilated middle-class German Jews — a type we’ve definitely talked about before, most recently in our Einstein episode. German Jews who bought into what we refer to as the assimilation bargain: if you recognize that you’re of Jewish heritage but see yourself as Germans first, you’ll be accepted into society. Otto very much saw himself that way. He served for Germany in World War I, rose to the rank of officer — fairly rare for a Jew — and did not really have a strong religious or ritual Jewish background. He didn’t learn Hebrew, didn’t have a bar mitzvah, didn’t really celebrate a lot of Jewish customs. His wife Edith came from a more religious background — she kept kosher, she attended synagogue. Anne and Margot didn’t have Hebrew names. They were given German names. The family really saw themselves as Germans — until the point when it became clear that no matter how much they saw themselves as Germans, they were not going to be accepted by Germany.
Schwab: In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, they made plans to leave Germany. Otto got a new job and started work in Amsterdam, then brought his family over the course of a couple of months. The entire family relocated to Amsterdam in 1933 and 1934. Anne was three, four, five years old. She has a few memories of growing up in Germany, but really mostly grows up in the Netherlands.
Schwab: From a young age it was clear — and this is a major part of the diary — that Anne and Margot were different, in very classic oldest child/second child ways. Margot was apparently very strikingly attractive according to many accounts. She was also an excellent student, very obedient, very organized — things that Anne was not necessarily. Anne had a lot of trouble sitting still. She would talk out in class. She did things very impulsively. Her parents sent her to a Montessori school because following rules exactly could be very difficult for her. From school reports and people’s recollections afterward, teachers said Margot was a brilliant pupil. From school, no one really thought that about Anne. Many teachers interviewed later said they were genuinely surprised to see the writer that she became.
Yael: It seems like she had a very vibrant inner life that became an outer life in her writing, but wasn’t necessarily shared with the people around her.
Schwab: Right, that’s a great way of describing it. She gets this diary as a 13th birthday present — as a familiar story probably to a lot of parents of children. She chose it for herself. It’s framed as a surprise, but she saw it in a store and said, that’s exactly what I want. And her parents then went back to the store and bought the thing she saw in the window.
Schwab: Otto was very perceptive and was a planner. He saw what was coming. He started making moves almost immediately when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. He made moves for his business to be transferred to his non-Jewish coworkers, because that was going to become a rule anyway. And then he started preparing the space above his warehouse and office building — not really an apartment, but it could be made into one. Many months of preparation went into this. They would invite non-Jewish friends and coworkers over for dinner, and those coworkers would take home pieces of silverware and bring them to the annex, because if someone saw you moving a lot of things they would grow suspicious. They very surreptitiously moved things over the course of several months. They had a date by which they thought they would go into hiding — and then ended up going in slightly earlier, because Margot got a letter calling her up for labor duty, which they knew was a euphemism for deportation to a concentration camp. So as soon as they got that letter, they executed their plan and went into hiding, opening the annex also to the Van Pels family and then later to another gentleman by the name of Pfeffer.
Yael: Knowing that Otto was such a planner — what was the cover story once they disappeared?
Schwab: They prepared an entire cover story and left a lot of breadcrumbs: they had escaped and had a specific route to Switzerland, where Otto Frank’s mother was living. They even had faked correspondence with a contact from his military days — a German officer now living in Switzerland, with back-and-forth letters talking about their plan to relocate. Ruth Franklin notes that Otto Frank was really an amazing strategist. One strategic error — it’s very sad, but worth mentioning — he had a cousin in England who offered to take the girls in, and he could have sent them there for the war. But he couldn’t bear the thought of splitting up his family. And it’s horrible to think of now, because we have to assume they would probably have been safer in England.
Yael: I know that he had a very dedicated attempt at trying to get the family to the United States that was later declassified. I worked briefly at the Center for Jewish History, and while I was there, there was an exhibit about what they called the Otto Frank File — all sorts of correspondence about Otto Frank’s attempts to get the family to immigrate to the United States, and the United States’s repeated denials of their pleas.
Schwab: Multiple attempts, actually. There were a lot of bureaucratic elements — you needed a travel visa, and you couldn’t get one from your home country. They were not citizens of any country. They did not have Dutch citizenship; they certainly did not have German citizenship anymore. They attempted, I think through Cuba, to get a travel visa to go to Cuba and from there try to go to the United States. All of this is detailed very well in the Ruth Franklin book.
Yael: It’s really remarkable to me, because I think of them as such an established upper-middle-class family doing so well and thriving in Amsterdam. I don’t think about them as having been refugees from Germany who really did not have any legal way of establishing themselves as Dutch. Even if the Dutch Jews had not been deported, they weren’t actually Dutch — they were stateless. Because it seems like, up until the point that they went into hiding, they were doing so well. It’s very misleading on the surface.
Schwab: That’s part of the Dutch story around them — a story that focuses on the heroic Dutch non-Jews who were their protectors and sustainers, the people who were friendly, and the fact that they were accepted. But they didn’t have Dutch citizenship yet. They were granted Dutch citizenship afterward — in some cases posthumously for the ones who were killed. They get discovered and arrested on August 4th, 1944. And the question a lot of people ask is: how? They had been in hiding for so long. They were so careful. Someone tipped off the SS that they were there.
Schwab: There’s literally a book called The Betrayal of Anne Frank. And there’s a whole discourse in response to it — the book has been pulled from print in Germany and the Netherlands because of arguments against what it concludes about who the betrayer was. Ruth Franklin, the author of The Many Lives of Anne Frank, makes a really good point: focusing on who might have betrayed them really shifts the blame away from the Nazis, who instituted this entire system. We can think that the betrayer was an awful person, but let’s not forget who the actual bad guys are.
Yael: Presumably it was someone with their back against the wall, and none of us know what we would do in that scenario. But the bottom line is nobody would have been in that situation if Hitler had not invaded the Netherlands.
Schwab: Right. And this is also worth noting: the Netherlands had one of the highest death rates for its Jewish population. 75% of all Dutch Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust — nearly all who were under the age of 15 or over the age of 60.
Schwab: The very difficult part — and I want to warn you about this — is what happened after the arrest. We have various eyewitness accounts. We know approximately where they were and what the rest of their lives looked like. This next part is going to be heavy and difficult. But if you’re talking about Anne Frank, there needs to be another image other than the smiling girl with the twinkle in her eye that we all know. So: they are arrested. At this point there are very few Jews left in Amsterdam — the Nazi project had succeeded very well. They’re deported to Westerbork, which was originally a place built by the Dutch Jewish community for German Jews who were fleeing Germany — a temporary resettlement area. It then became, in a terrible cruel irony, the waypoint for Dutch Jews being transported to concentration camps. They are on the last train out of Westerbork because there are no Dutch Jews left. They’re taken to Auschwitz first. They’re separated at that point — the women and the men. Then Anne and Margot are selected in October to be moved from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen for labor work. Edith, their mother, is left behind. She dies in Auschwitz.
Schwab: This is a personal note: my grandfather — may he live and be well — is a Holocaust survivor. He was in Bergen-Belsen around this time. I had the privilege recently of speaking with him and really interviewing him about his story on Yom HaShoah. In preparing for that I had been rereading his memoir, a book he wrote just for our family. He writes about seeing a train of women coming from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen. He describes the women coming from Auschwitz as a terrible, terrible sight — they must have looked so much worse than the people he was familiar with in Bergen-Belsen.
Schwab: One of the people who was transported with Anne and Margot is quoted in the book as saying: Auschwitz was organized hell on earth, and Bergen-Belsen was just chaos. When they arrived at Bergen-Belsen, they were put in tents — the tents were swept away in a storm. The most basic living conditions were not met at all. They both became ill. It seems like Margot was more ill and Anne tried to take care of her. They probably had typhus. There was also very serious body lice — everybody was covered in lice. At some point Margot falls off her bed and hits the floor. Anne tries to take care of her. At some point it’s clear that Anne is sick as well. Someone quoted afterward said Anne said: once Margot will rest, then I will feel better. But Margot dies, and a few days later Anne dies as well.
Schwab: This is such a contrast to the popular image we have of Anne Frank — the smiling girl at her desk. The image of what she looked like at the end of her life is an emaciated 15-year-old, lice-ridden, who winds up like another body on a pile of corpses.
Yael: I have very mixed feelings about the fact that Anne Frank is the face of the Holocaust to so many people who don’t have a more personal connection. Obviously every victim’s story deserves to be told, and she was particularly talented and illuminates the horrors of the Holocaust to a lot of people. But dying of disease, lice-ridden and emaciated in Bergen-Belsen is horrific — and in some ways I think it makes the Holocaust easier to bear for some of the people whose only exposure is Anne Frank’s story. I almost think that if Anne Frank had been killed in a gas chamber and her body burned in a crematorium, there are people who wouldn’t be off the hook of having to think about the mechanization of murder of the Holocaust. There is almost an ability of people to read her story and feel like they’re absorbing the horrors of the Holocaust, but also maybe getting off the hook a little bit.
Schwab: Right. And she died of disease makes it sound almost incidental. We’ll get to this at the end — but you’re part of a tradition of Jewish American women writers who criticize not the story of Anne Frank, but the story of the story of Anne Frank, the way that it is interpreted and understood. Dara Horn, in People Love Dead Jews, talks about this. She says: there are diaries from concentration camps — a diary written inside a concentration camp, buried in the ground, recovered afterward. That’s a diary of what life was actually like in a concentration camp. That’s not the text that people want to read when they read stories of the Holocaust.
Yael: Yes. She is a beautiful girl with a shining smile and adolescents can relate to her. Part of the educational mission of teaching the Diary of Anne Frank is wanting students to see themselves in her. That’s really powerful and it serves a purpose, but it can’t be the entirety of what people learn about the Holocaust.
Schwab: Right, but if that’s what you know about the Holocaust, you’re missing a big part. Okay, so now we’re going to talk about what the text actually is and get into some very specific textual details — because there’s a lot to unpack here.
Schwab: She gets this diary for her 13th birthday and starts writing in it, and she’s very interested in the idea of writing a diary. She was a huge reader and continued reading a tremendous amount throughout her two years in hiding. Lots and lots of books were brought to them. Clearly that is one of the things that made her into the writer that she is. At 13, she was very interested in a popular Dutch book at the time called The High School Times of Joop ter Heul, which was written in the form of a diary. Anne was very fascinated by this — it was one of her favorite books. She starts writing her own diary in a similar way. In fact, she famously addresses it as “Kitty” — “Dear Kitty” — because Kitty is the name of one of Joop’s very good friends. She was almost writing letters to that character. Actually, at the beginning she was writing letters to multiple characters and referring to things that happened in their fictional lives. Then she later decides: okay, it’s just Kitty. That’s the addressee.
Schwab: She’s keeping this diary for a while. Day 632 in hiding — almost two years. This is March 28th, 1944. The residents of the annex, as they often did in the evening, were listening to the radio. They were in an industrial area, so in the evenings they were freer to move around and even do some work in the office downstairs. They’re listening to the radio, and Gerrit Bolkestein, the Minister of Education, Arts and Science for the Dutch government in exile broadcasting from England, announces a planned archive of wartime material. He says on the radio:
Schwab: “History cannot be written on the basis of official decisions and documents alone. If our descendants are to fully understand what we as a nation have had to endure and overcome during these years, then what we really need are ordinary documents — a diary, letters from a worker in Germany, a collection of sermons given by a parson or a priest. Not until we succeed in bringing together vast quantities of this simple everyday material will the picture of our struggle for freedom be painted in its full depth and glory.”
Yael: Sounds like he knew Emanuel Ringelblum.
Schwab: Right — we did an episode about that idea. But he’s saying: we need to collect such things. And immediately, because Anne writes and says she listens to this and is moved by it. Sitting around, everyone has the same thought: Anne keeps a diary. What an important part that will be for this planned future archive. And then she begins writing in other entries: what would that look like? She wonders: what if I published — some translations write “romance,” some write “novel” — but what if I published a book, let’s say, of the Secret Annex? What if she were to publish this?
Yael: So her audience is changing.
Schwab: Right — now she’s thinking not “I’m writing a diary for myself,” but “what if people were to read it?” She thinks about this for a while, and we know because she writes on May 20th: at long last, I have started my Achterhuis. In my head, it is as good as finished, although it won’t go as quickly as that really, if it ever comes off at all.
Schwab: So here is what Miep actually handed to Otto. She hands him the original notebook Anne got for her birthday, which has diary entries from June 1942 to December 1942. There are two other notebooks — maybe there was another one that’s been lost — with entries throughout 1944. And then there are hundreds of pages of loose vellum paper, paper she got from the office downstairs, on which all the rewritten entries are written. Because what Anne started doing when she said “at long last I’ve started my Achterhuis” is go back to the beginning and rewrite her entire diary from the first entry, with the idea that this would be a publishable book. In the original diary she had an entry where she said “no one will ever read you” — she takes that out in the rewrite.
Schwab: For those who study Anne Frank: the original diary entries are called Version A. Her rewriting is called Version B. She makes a number of changes. One I want to talk about is from the second entry after they hear the radio announcement. In Version A she writes: “But seriously, it would be quite funny 10 years after the war if people were told how we Jews lived and what we ate and talked about here.” When she rewrites this entry, what she writes is: “But seriously, it would be quite funny 10 years after the war if we Jews were to tell how we lived and what we ate and talked about here.” It’s a small change, but a very significant one — from “what if people were told about it” to “what if we told it.” She’s saying: I’m going to tell my own story.
Yael: And do you think that’s a literary device, or do you think that’s a story she’s telling herself about her survival? She’s not only writing in the first person because it works in the context of a novel or memoir — it also works as an affirmation to herself that I am going to be here to tell it.
Schwab: I think both. It’s a literary device, and when we appreciate what a great writer she is, part of what makes her great is that she rewrote things she wrote when she was 13. My impression from spending a lot of time with both versions: she’s a precocious writer at 13 and 14 and 15. She’s an unbelievably impressive and talented editor. What she does with the raw material is really telling of someone who deeply understood how to write, how to craft.
Schwab: Miep says, more than anything, the diary saved her for the time that it did — it was the space for her to do what she needed to do to survive and make it through. And there’s a moment: at one point in one of the entries, they hear banging and are concerned that someone might come in. They’re worried because the people who protected them could be incriminated. Someone suggests: we need to burn the diary right now. And she says: not my diary — if it goes, I go with it. She couldn’t live without it.
Yael: It’s a very dramatic 13-year-old girl thing to say. It’s not wrong — it’s actually historically very prescient and important. But it is something that a 13-year-old girl would say, and that’s who we’re dealing with here.
Schwab: I want to look at a couple of other changes she makes. They have another one of these scares: a carpenter comes to work in the warehouse and they didn’t know, so they thought someone was breaking in. In Version A she writes: “Yesterday we had another terrible fright. The carpenter was working in front of our cupboard. We hadn’t been warned.” When she revises this, what she writes is: “My hand still shakes although it’s two hours since we had the shock. I should explain that there are five fire extinguishers in the house — downstairs they are such geniuses that they didn’t warn us when the carpenter, or whatever that fellow is called, was coming to fill them.” She knows what the word is — she wrote it in the original. She knows what a carpenter is. But she is capturing the voice of what people think a less mature 15-year-old sounds like. And she writes “my hand still shakes, although it’s been two hours” — writing this months after the fact. Her hand is not shaking. But she understood: this is really good writing, let me write this really, really well. All of it is still true.
Schwab: She doesn’t get to finish Version B. She’s in the middle of editing when she’s up to April 1944 — she continued writing original entries while going back and editing, so she’s almost caught up to the present but has four more months of material still to revise. She edits out a lot at the beginning because at the beginning she was much less mature as a writer and still figuring out exactly what this was going to be. One of her first or second entries from Version A is literally a list of people in her class and some really catty comments about them. She takes that out. She inserts a story early on about going to a dentist appointment and talking with her father, where he tells her they’re preparing in case they have to go into hiding. It’s very well written. None of it was in Version A — it may have happened and she never wrote it down, or it may be a narrative device, because otherwise the hiding seems to come out of nowhere. Now she sets it up.
Schwab: There are a number of different versions you can read now. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition presents all three on the same page — Version A, Version B, Version C. There has been a lot of accusation that it’s a forgery. The critical edition has, as part of its introduction, extensive forensic investigation into the handwriting of Version A and the word choices of Version B. This has been litigated in court — a German teacher claimed it was a forgery, and Otto Frank sued him and won. You can absolutely prove that this is her original handwriting, and that the things that have been changed are spelling errors and very minor edits.
Schwab: So: she has Version A, going up until August 1st, 1944. She has Version B, her rewrite, which only gets to April of that year. Otto receives all of this, and in preparing for publication, he takes the parts of Version A from April to August and adds those to make a complete text. But he also looks at some of the entries that Anne had edited out — full entries she removed going from Version A to Version B — and he puts them back in. The most notable example: there’s a lot about her infatuation with Peter Van Pels. He’s sort of a side character for the first year and a half, but around January 1944, she starts to become very interested in him. For a period of about three months, almost all of her diary entries talk about him. She writes at one point that Peter is someone who governs her mood daily. On April 15th, 1944, she writes about having her first kiss. And then it drops off — she stops talking about him nearly as much. In Version B, she removes almost all of this. Is it because she’s cooled on him? Is it because she’s taking herself seriously as a writer and it felt too personal, too girly? We don’t know. But her dad puts it back in.
Schwab: He also takes things out. He takes out her talking about menstruating. He takes out some of what she has to say about her mother — though he also puts some of that back in. His choices are hard to fully understand. They are his choices. The critical edition goes into this also.
Schwab: Until 1978, no one even knew there was another version. He’s being interviewed by a filmmaker — he’s 90 years old, it’s two years before his death. The filmmaker asks him about Anne’s other writings. What the filmmaker was referring to was, in addition to the diaries, Anne had short stories, and another book called Tales from the Secret Annex. Otto says in this interview: “You mean the first diary?” The filmmaker is baffled: what other diary? And Otto brings out Version A. That’s the first time anyone has looked at it. He says: it’s childish, she changed it herself, it’s never been published. And this book had been around for 30 years and this had never been acknowledged.
Yael: And a pin drop can be heard in the entire historical community.
Schwab: There’s actually a different version. Again, both written by Anne. But Version C — the one that was assembled and published — is mostly Version B, with a lot of Version A added back in, including stuff that Anne herself had chosen to edit out. Especially the Peter stuff. One possible reading of why Otto put it back in: Anne took this out because it’s very personal, but now they are both dead. Like, this would have been embarrassing for Anne or Peter to have published — but they’re both gone now. The even more charitable, and heartbreaking, reading is that Otto and Peter were close. He tutored Peter over their years in the annex. Then Otto, Peter’s father Herman, and Peter were all taken to Auschwitz together. Herman was killed almost instantly. Otto and Peter spent months in Auschwitz together. Peter has no family left. This is the only way he will ever be preserved or remembered. Otto also tried to convince Peter to stay hidden in the hospital and failed. Peter ultimately died. Maybe he felt some obligation or love or guilt. If I’m publishing this, how can I take out something about this boy?
Yael: Someone needs to remember this boy.
Schwab: I want to talk about the most famous line — “despite everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart” — because I think it’s worth reading that full passage and then reading another passage that’s an important counterpart to it. This is from July 1944 — three weeks before she’s found and taken away: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry. Yet I keep them. Because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hope on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.” It’s hopeful, but the larger context is not as hopeful as people think it is.
Schwab: Dara Horn talks about this. Both she and Cynthia Ozick — a very famous American Jewish writer who was around the same age as Anne Frank — criticize scathingly the way that Anne gets appropriated as this universalistic, lovely good person. Horn says: “despite everything I still believe that people are good” — before she met people who really were not.
Yael: Right. This wasn’t written in Bergen-Belsen. There’s no way that she would have still believed that or said that based on what actually happened to her after this. We talked about this with respect to Rav Klonimus Kalman Shapira in the Warsaw Ghetto — there is a point at which the tone of his sermons is said to change, and if you look at what happened in the ghetto at the time they changed, it was when someone who had escaped a death camp made his way back to the ghetto and reported on what was going on. And Anne doesn’t have that opportunity. When she gets to the point of seeing what human beings are truly capable of — beyond what happened in the streets of Amsterdam — she no longer has a voice, no longer has a pen and a diary to tell us that she still believes people are fundamentally good.
Schwab: Especially because she has another entry that’s a real counterpart to this. She writes, this is in May: “I don’t believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are responsible for the war. Oh no, the little man is just as guilty. Otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago. There is in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage. And until all mankind without exception undergoes a great change, wars will be waged. Everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and disfigured to begin all over again after that.”
Yael: How is that not presented in direct counterpoint? This is Dara Horn’s entire thesis. If you haven’t read her book People Love Dead Jews, I recommend it. It makes people feel so much better to look at Anne Frank as the bright, sunny, smiling, optimistic girl.
Schwab: Because as Horn says: it flatters us and it forgives us. In embracing that image of Anne Frank, everyone feels so good about themselves. Like, wow, we are still good at heart in spite of everything. But that’s all the other people.
Yael: And everyone believes they would have been Miep Gies. No one believes they would have been a bystander. Certainly no one believes they would have been a perpetrator. It lets everyone believe they would have been the one helping them hide.
Credits
Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds, brought to you by Unpacked, an open-door media brand.If you like this show, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and please give us a rating and review. It really helps new listeners find the show.Check out unpacked.media for everything Unpacked related, and go to Spotify or YouTube to watch our latest videos.Most importantly, be in touch. Write to us at nerds at unpacked.media. We really love to hear from you. Jewish History Nerds is hosted by me, Yael Steiner, and by me, Jonathan Schwab. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson, and our editors are Rob Pera and Ari Schlacht.We’re produced by Jenny Falcon. Thanks for listening.