A Teenager vs. the Reich

Anne Frank Huis, Westermarkt 20, Amsterdam

Of course I read her diary in high school.  Didn't you?  But there is the aspect of being here, walking through (and under) the doorjamb behind the fake bookcase that led to the Secret Annex: the three story bungalow that served as the hiding place for the Frank family for more than two years. 

When you arrive, you can choose between two handheld audio guides.  The first choice is a sort of professional documentary, dispensing facts as you move through the old house and Annex, given in a professorial manner.  But the second audio guide is perhaps the more powerful, because it is narrated by a young girl, a voice that would've been the same age as the adolescent who endured living through the reality of a Nazi invasion.

Her young voice sets the stage early on: you hear her cheerfulness as she describes her classmates; you comprehend her love of socializing with her young school friends; you participate in her cautious dread as she begins to understand (especially after Kristallnacht) the kind of societal evil that was headed toward the Netherlands. 

This child's voice takes you through the ground and first floors of the Frank business and home.  But when the threshold is crossed into the Annex, her voice becomes silent, just as Anne's own voice had to be silenced throughout the day, in order not to be heard by the workers below.  The effect is both ominous and reverential at one and the same time.

Kristallnacht, the November pogrom, took place in 1938.  Anne was nine years old at that time, and by then Jews in Germany began to leave the country en masse.  The Frank family was no different, choosing Amsterdam as their city of relocation.

To hear an innocent voice narrate the litany of restrictions placed upon their faith and culture was chilling in its own right: shopping at restricted times; no provision for transportation (bicycle or automobile); Jews fired from their jobs, both artistic, professional, and administrative; no athletic facilities or parks to be used; curfews were set; and, of course, there was the accursed yellow star.

For more than two years, with the assistance of a handful of highly trusted friends, the Frank family hid under the noses of the Gestapo.  Food stamps and necessary goods were purchased by their secretive supporters on the black market.  But in early August, 1944, the Annex was raided.  The family was sent first to Auschwitz, where they were then separated from one another.  Only Otto Frank, the father, survived the concentration camps. (His own odyssey back to the Netherlands after being liberated, and discovery of the deaths of his wife and daughters, is its own heartbreaking tale).

Anne's notes, her diaries and her short stories, were miraculously saved by one of those confidantes – Mrs. Miep Gies.  The courageous salvaging of a teenager's journal served to inform the world of atrocities from a completely different perspective than those reported by the liberators of the concentration camps.

Just how much money, GDP, propaganda, paper and ink, matériel and pure bloodshed was let loose by the Third Reich?  None of it endured.  But a simple, naive and thoroughly honest journal by a young teenager has now been translated into 70 different languages; the Secret Annex that they once called home for more than two years has become a place of international pilgrimage, drawing more than a million people annually.

This teenager did, indeed, make her voice heard around the world.  Though she lost her life in Bergen-Belsen, her writings have, indeed, gone out into the world.  There, they continue to witness and to work for all humankind.