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Tag : Anne Frank
July 23, 2020 by admin
Anne Frank Behind the Iron Curtain
In 1960, U.S.S.R. authorities decided to “import Anne Frank’s diary, perhaps the only Holocaust document that managed to break through the “Iron Curtain.” Ironically, according to official Soviet history, the Holocaust as we know it—the mass murder of Jews only because they were Jews— did not happen at all. The U.S.S.R. authorities believed that Soviet Jews were murdered by Nazis not because they were Jewish, but because they were Soviet citizens.
Admitting that Adolf Hitler considered the Jewish people the Nazis’ main target would lead to another, much more dangerous idea: maybe there was something mysteriously good in Jewish values, something that made the very existence of Jewish people threatening to the absolute evil the Nazis represented. How could Communist leaders accept this when, according to their ideology, absolute good could be represented only by the U.S.S.R.—the most progressive country in the world?
The year 1960, when The Diary of Anna Frank was first published m Moscow, was the culmination of a period in Soviet history when ideological clutches were loosened. For Soviet Jews, a short break between two major anti-Semitic actions launched by the Kremlin: the infamous “case of medical doctors” and the rise of the anti-Zionist movement after Israel’s Six Day War Jews were relatively free of fear, guilt and shame then: they were no longer identified with the “killers in white medical gowns,” and not—yet—with Zionist aggressors that had trodden “friendly Arab people” under their iron heel.
During this “thaw,” Soviet values became more liberal, more respectful towards individuals. One could allow herself or himself to be not an ideal Communism-builder, an ordinary human being with a complex nature and a wide spectrum of feelings.
Anne Frank—a young middle-class German Jewish girl killed by Nazi evildoers, Anne with her rich inner world, sweet weaknesses and literary talent—ideally fit into that newly admissible model of a human being.
Still, I think, Kremlin leaders hoped that their subjects would not feel sympathy and compassion for Anne. They hoped, on the contrary, their subjects would regard Anne as a spoiled bourgeois brat who dared to complain when she should be grateful for not sharing other Nazi victims’ (especially Soviet people’s) terrible lot.
Anne Frank was let though the Iron Curtain for the wrong political and ideological reasons. But the reasons she was welcomed into the hearts and minds of Soviet Jews (and Soviet people in general) were not wrong at all. She won our hearts with her personality, her talent, her vulnerability and her tragic fate. Moreover, it was Anne’s “poisonous” influence that made us, Soviet Jews, start the long journey towards our heritage, towards discovery of our real role in World War II and in human history in general. Maybe it was Anne who, in the end helped us break through the Iron Curtain, or even to break the Iron Curtain itself.
Leah Moses (Moshiashivili) was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, former U.S.S.R. in 1953. She has lived in the U.S. Since 1994. She is a staff writer for Russian Jewish Forward.
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July 16, 2020 by admin
Reading The Diary
Had she lived, Anne Frank would be turning 75 in 2004. Her diary has sold millions of copies in more than 55 languages since it was first published in Dutch in 1947. Naomi Danis elicits some new reactions to the most-read book about the Holocaust.
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February 6, 2020 by admin
Anne and Her Shadows
I have kept her photograph, which I purchased twenty-five years ago on my first trip to the Anne Frank House. I embarked on the narrow climb to the hiding place and later, the descent, and imagined all that had occurred in between. I was attuned to the voices of visitors speaking other languages as I looked out a window and considered the view and the sounds of Amsterdam’s streets and wondered if this is what Anne saw and heard. At that point, I withheld no emotion and unabashedly cried in front of everyone else in that room.
Only recently have I begun to comprehend the extent of her profound influence on my writing and working life which began with a spring play. As a fourteen-year-old, I auditioned for and won the role of Anne in my high school’s production of The Diary of Anne Frank. At that time, I had already read the Diary and attempted to watch a television dramatization, but couldn’t do so in one sitting as I darted in and out of the living room because of a seven-year-old’s fear. I didn’t know if what I was watching, a family living in hiding, was still happening. I wondered: “If the Frank family is in hiding, shouldn’t I be as well?”
Although the scenes appeared as mere shadows and whispers, I couldn’t make them disappear. With age came a clearer sense of past and present. Being on stage playing Anne protected me from those fears. I was engulfed in performing well without a single dropped line or missed cue. But as the fear abated, something else quietly manifested, an inner sense of responsibility.
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May 31, 2018 by Chanel Dubofsky
Do We Need to Be Reading Those “Dirty” Anne Frank Pages?
If, like me, you were in the cult of Anne Frank as a young person, you read her diary, and every other book published about Anne, over and over, and when you were finished, you went looking for more.
For many years “more” meant various scandals and controversies over Anne’s legacy and imaginative works about her. But in May, researchers found two new pages in the diary. Because of its fragile condition, the original diary itself is photographed in order to assess how it’s being impacted by the wear and tear of time (to avoid damage, it’s only taken out of storage every ten years). While handlers were examining the book, the two pages, which had been covered by brown paper, were unearthed.
No one knows how to keep a diary a secret like a teenage girl, which you know if you’ve ever been one. There’s no question that Anne didn’t want anyone to find these pages‑—she covered them up herself, after all. She describes them as “spoiled,” and uses them to list a number of dirty jokes, as well as conversations with imaginary friends, and some discussion about sex education, including mention of her father seeing houses of prostitution while in Paris.
The published version of Anne Frank’s diary that won the world over was revised by Otto Frank, and in editing, he removed not only sections in which Anne referenced her own sexuality, but those that depicted himself and his wife in a less than positive light. These new pages haven’t been sanitized at all. The references to sex in them, Frank van Vree, director of the Netherlands Institute for War Holocaust and Genocide Studies told The Telegraph, make it clear that “Anne, with all her gifts, was above all also an ordinary girl.”
The Franks went into hiding in early July 1942, and Anne’s “spoiled” pages are dated September 18th, 1942. Barely two months into what would ultimately be twenty five months spent behind the bookcase at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, Anne was learning to cope with the stress of being contained, the charge of maintaining constant silence at the risk of discovery and almost certain death. While the new content portrays a curious young woman interacting with sexuality— her own and that of others, it’s important to remember that they were authored under circumstances that were in no way “normal.”
If you’ve read Anne’s diary, you know that she was both an ordinary and an extraordinary person. If you read the diary as a teenaged girl, you might have understood her fear that it would be discovered, or that she would be separated from it (Otto Frank did threaten to take it away from her at one point), and although we have learned a tremendous amount about her and the world she inhabited, do we really need to be reading these new pages? Should we even know that they exist?
The diary itself was found after the inhabitants, including Anne, were discovered by the SS and taken to the Westerbork labor camp, and later, Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, where she died. There’s a sturdy argument to be made that it was completely justifiable to publish the abandoned diary, that Anne, the talented writer, would have been more than fine with it, that she was writing not just for herself, but to leave a detailed account of her experience. She revised the book as she wrote it. But these pages? These deliberately hidden pages? It begs the question: do we really need access to everything about this person? These pages, which Anne deemed “dirty” ‑‑what do they teach us, and do we need to learn it?
Maybe it’s the part of me that kept my far less compelling diaries under lock and key (and another lock and another key and under my mattress) because I was so afraid of someone finding them, but I wish those pages had remained private. Because I can’t be the only one wondering—how much more proof do we need that Anne maintained the inner life of an ordinary girl, in spite of the world burning down around her?
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April 12, 2018 by admin
“Who here would be willing to house people?”
RABBI SUSAN SILVERMAN organized the Anne Frank Home Sanctuary movement in January to challenge the Israeli government’s deportation of African asylum seekers.
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February 3, 2015 by Holly C. Shulman
Losing My Anne Frank
I recently travelled to Amsterdam, and was invited by Dienke Hondius, one of the curators of the Anne Frank House, to visit the museum. I accepted with alacrity: the lines to get in always snake around the block, and I was especially curious to see it because it has come under fire recently in a piece in Haaretz.
After I toured it I wrote to Ms. Hondius.
Dear Dienke,
Here is an attempt to answer your question as to why I found the Anne Frank House Museum personally disorienting.
The nub of the question is what are we doing when we remember (and commemorate) Anne Frank: something about the Jewish experience, or something about the human experience?
When I was a child, the Holocaust was talked about in our house, but it was not the subject of general conversation – in society, politics, and literature – that it later became. Perhaps 1945-1968 (with the publication of Arthur Morse’s When Six Million Died) was a kind of liminal or marginal period of remembrance. In my house, we talked about my parents’ German backgrounds, especially my mother’s. She remembered my grandmother trying unsuccessfully to find living German relations in the late 1930s. Most of her family had arrived in the US around 1850, as part of a general wave of German emigration to the US. Like so many other Jewish immigrants, they steadily moved west until they reached Chicago. One of them sent letters home to Ohio during the American Civil War—these were preserved and were later published as A Jewish Colonel in the Civil War.
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