…that Anne Frank turned 13. Her birthday present? A notebook; a diary. She wrote in it:
JUNE 12, 1942
“I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.” And you know, I like to think it was.
Thanks to Sheila for the reminder of this, and for the beautiful – beautifully cropped – picture she posts with it, of Anne and her sister Margot. There is something in Anne Frank that has always reminded me of my own little sister (hi Sis!) and indeed if you changed the hair colour in the two girls…
That’s a detail that only underscores the fact that the horrors that happened happened to very ordinary – ordinary clever, sparkly, slightly prickly, anxious, and sweet – little girls. (Yes. You ARE still a little girl when you’re a teenager. That’s the whole point of adolescence.)
25 Comments
June 13, 2008 at 12:45 am
What a great photo! I love how the little one in the front row is a total blur. Typical 4 year old behavior!!
I like to think that “Kitty” gave Anne comfort, too. What a writer she was.
June 13, 2008 at 3:02 am
I have trouble believing the diary is authentic.
It could be fiction.
June 13, 2008 at 11:10 am
[...] to Ms Baroque for this. A 66th anniversary may not be a particularly notable, but the story about Anne [...]
June 13, 2008 at 2:03 pm
R.H. – Anne Frank’s diary is authentic. Over the decades there have been a number of court cases in which antisemites, professional contrarians and others with an axe to grind have been sued for claiming that the document is a forgery, was written by Anne’s father, etc., etc.
June 13, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Sorry, I’m unaware of these court cases.
When did they occur, and what damages were awarded/paid?
Do you think I might get sued?
June 13, 2008 at 4:05 pm
R.H. – Google is your friend. And in this case at least Wikipedia is a reliable source of information.
Anne Frank denialism – it ain’t big and it ain’t clever.
June 13, 2008 at 4:12 pm
66 years – just about a year for a million people. Look at it that way. And Robert, part of the importance of Anne Frank is that she stands in, appreciably, for all those children and other people we don’t know. We’ve read her diary; we know her. And through knowing her, and the cmparatively few others we do know, we begin understand even more the scale of the event. It’s like negative space in a picture.
Or it’s like that godawful girl in the red dress in Schindler’s List – a device I’ve always hated because it’s so manipulative, but it was very powerful – by picking out one child, out of all those children and other people, Spielberg gave the disaster a scale we could relate to, and illustrated that each individual was a person just the same.
On that basis, even if this diary weren’t real – which I fully believe it is, having read it – it still would be.
Francis, glad you like the picture, I find it very mysterious and beautiful. Anyone would know instantly which child was Anne Frank.
I hope you also checked out the one Sheila had, it’s also wonderful in a different way.
June 13, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Some seem to think her old man wrote it. I don’t know who wrote it. But I can question anything. And I will.
And what? Google is my friend?
Thanks.
Marvellous faith.
Go straight to heaven.
June 13, 2008 at 5:11 pm
I live in Aus. Maybe you could do something about our radio talkback hosts.
Professional contrarians?
You’ve no idea!
June 13, 2008 at 6:36 pm
“Or it’s like that godawful girl in the red dress in Schindler’s List – a device I’ve always hated because it’s so manipulative, but it was very powerful – by picking out one child, out of all those children and other people, Spielberg gave the disaster a scale we could relate to, and illustrated that each individual was a person just the same.”
I’m with you here Katy, especially about the godawfulness of that device: completely sentimental, kitsch in fact. Effective? Maybe, if you can get over being so palpably designed upon. Howard Jacobson wrote great review of that film. He acknowledged that it was a good film, just not as good as it could be. He also thought the black & white was a bad idea: too moodily arty (my words) for such a subject. As Jacobson put it, there were blue skies over Auschwitz. A better film, I think, is Polanski’s The Pianist (in whioch there were, indeed, blue skies.
June 13, 2008 at 7:13 pm
PS
Not that I believe for a moment that Anne Frank’s diary is a hoax. I see no point in regarding such a work with suspicion unless there are VERY good reasons for doing so, and I haven’t come across any.
June 14, 2008 at 12:40 am
“even if this diary weren’t real – which I fully believe it is, having read it – it still would be.”
Absolutely. Without wishing to condone any deliberate attempts to mislead, I think that we are sometimes over interested in authenticity. I’m a performance storyteller, working with traditional material, and I’ve come to realise that it’s perfectly possible to tell the truth with a lie. Maybe that’s the only way, in some circumstances.
A lot depends on the intention (honest or otherwise) of the storyteller or writer , but we should also be willing to take responsibility for ourselves, our own reactions.
Love the photo – especially the blurred faces. Hard to be completely sure, but looks like they’re both boys. Anyone surprised?
June 14, 2008 at 3:02 am
We’ve got some dreadful teachers here. In year seven I contradicted one of them who’d just told the class a lie about me, and he hit me with the strap until I changed my mind. But I hadn’t really changed my mind of course; I just gave in. In my twenties the police tried the same thing, wanting me to sign a confession they’d written up, but by that stage it didn’t work on me; I took the beating instead. And I’m glad. Well I hadn’t pulled those jobs, but I’d done others, and if their means had been fair to get the truth I might have given in: ‘copped the rap’. It’s just that doing what someone else wants just to be let alone doesn’t appeal to me. That’s not me, it’s someone else.
June 15, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Well I’m sorry for that comment, I don’t know where it came from. Just a bit of RH hysteria.
June 15, 2008 at 1:02 pm
You’re fine Robert. I thought it had the ring of authenticity, that comment.
June 15, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Regarding the diary.
Just in case anyone’s interested, I did the obvious and checked Wiki. Sure enough, they have the entire history of the denials, the court cases etc. Interesting reading. Of course, Wiki is hardly the most reliable source, but it should be easy enough to check their extensive references and links, if anyone wants to look any further. After Otto Frank died the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation commissioned forensic tests on the diary through the Netherlands Ministry of Justice: ‘Their final determination was that the diary is authentic.’
There was at least one further challenge to this verdict.
Here’s the final couple of paragraphs, about the last case:
‘In 1991, Robert Faurisson and Siegfried Verbeke produced a booklet titled The Diary of Anne Frank: A Critical Approach. It claimed that Otto Frank wrote the diary, based on assertions that the diary contained several contradictions, that hiding in the Achterhuis would have been impossible, and that the prose style and handwriting of Anne Frank were not those of a teenager.
The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank Funds in Basel instigated a civil law suit in December 1993, to prohibit the further distribution of The Diary of Anne Frank: A Critical Approach in the Netherlands. On December 9, 1998, the Amsterdam District Court ruled in favour of the claimants, forbade any further denial of the authenticity of the diary and unsolicited distribution of publications to that effect, and imposed a penalty of 25,000 guilders per infringement.’
So, apparently people DO get sued. Here’s the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank
Scroll down to ‘Denials and legal action’.
June 16, 2008 at 6:27 am
Yes well I haven’t heard of iron-boot censoreship like that since Uncle Joe’s salad days when writers and academics had to flee the Soviet Union to avoid imprisonment. They published abroad. And Goebbels of course, the inventor of propaganda, ordered to be burnt any writing he didn’t like.
Meanwhile The Netherlands of course is a fine example of respect for human dignity, having been for a long time now the European Capital of drugs prostitution and pornography. Anything goes, apparently, except free speech. What a joke.
You may want to live in a society where doubt is punished -and many do, which seems to show the differences in people, and how oppression gets off the mark in the first place. I’m glad I live in a country where’s there’s no chance of getting prosecuted (or worse) for questioning things. And where it even became fashionable among the suave and well-educated to seriously refer to our esteemed leader as ‘the rodent’. I sure wouldn’t try that in the Netherlands, not to mention Stalin’s Russia. For me personally, if I couldn’t challenge rubbish taken for granted here as truth then I’d have nothing to say at all.
June 16, 2008 at 6:54 am
I do oppose comments that are plainly mischievous, or uttered by people to keep their names in the headlines. There’s a fair few of them here, and they should be prosecuted.
June 16, 2008 at 10:51 pm
“Meanwhile The Netherlands of course is a fine example of respect for human dignity, having been for a long time now the European Capital of drugs prostitution and pornography. Anything goes, apparently, except free speech. What a joke.”
Ah, those Dutch, a nest of heathens, whores and drug fiends. You might have signed that little outburst: ‘Deeply disgusted and disgruntled (but greatly enjoying it), Tunbridge Wells [or wherever you dwell].’
It has that ring to it.
“I do oppose comments that are plainly mischievous, or uttered by people to keep their names in the headlines.”
Since that comes hard on the heels of my last comment, it appears that you may be referring to me.
Firstly, I have never made ‘mischievous’ comments on this blog, much less this particular thread. I really did think the Wiki link was interesting, and was grateful to you and Katy for putting me on that thought-train). Besides, we could waste a LOT of time and space (and bore other people silly) arguing about just who is being mischievous here.
Secondly, of course I am devoted to ‘keeping my name in the headlines’ (nothing gets by you, does it?), and shooting the shit with people like your good self is the quickest way of achieving this hallowed ambition. Hey, we could make the cover of The Daily Mail by tomorrow.
June 17, 2008 at 2:22 am
What the hell are you talking about?
I’ve never bloody heard of you.
Are you nuts or what?
Idiot.
June 17, 2008 at 3:19 am
Begging your pudden squire I have never heard of you but I have been called a geeneyus
on ‘Dysthymiac’
okay?
google that!
ha ha ha!
-Geeneyus.
June 17, 2008 at 4:44 am
By ‘here’ I mean Australia, I don’t mean this blog.
Calm down.
June 17, 2008 at 10:22 am
Oops. Sorry about that. I must have been “centre of the universe” mode”. Should have thought twice (or better still, gone to bed).
June 17, 2008 at 10:24 am
Damn, I wish I could edit/delete my comments. That’s one advantage with Blogger.
June 17, 2008 at 1:28 pm
I often regret my comments and want to hit the monitor with an axe. I withdraw the insult, of course.