Anne Frank: not a happy ending
25 Jun 2012 10:19 pmAnne Frank is a consistent topic in my reading. I have read all of her published works, including several editions of the Diary, and a substantial amount of what has been written about it in English.
I recently finished Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, by Francine Prose -- an excellent treatment of Anne's work as a writer, a much-neglected area of study. She also offers some discussion about how the book is taught in schools, and when I approached another book, The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, with some reluctance, despite being well acquainted with the stories of transports and camps and suffering that were likely to be found there, I remembered a passage from Prose's book: in a class (high school age, I think) where the Diary was taught, the students were given the assignment of writing about what they thought happened to Anne after the events recorded in her diary. Many of them, ignorant of or ignoring the reality, wrote happy endings for her: She escapes! She survives! She becomes a famous writer! (In a sense, all these are true -- but some only abstractly.) Similarly, people are known to have seen the play and/or the film over and over without even realizing that they are based on a true story. This staggers me. And yet there is a powerful urge to believe in good things for this brilliant and generously-minded young optimist -- so much so that even I, well familiar with the painful details of her story, am reluctant to read the first-hand accounts of people who witnessed her final months and days, her desperation, psychological retreat, and pain. No wonder people are so happy to remain on the academic level of debate about the Diary; it is so much easier to depersonalize it and argue its merits as a Holocaust document, a Jewish document, a universalized argument for tolerance, or even an illustration of a young writer at work.
I did read The Last Seven Months, and I'm glad I did, but it's true that I don't want to think about that part. I want to believe in the little girl of the Diary and not have to face the fact that her worst fears really did come true.
I recently finished Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, by Francine Prose -- an excellent treatment of Anne's work as a writer, a much-neglected area of study. She also offers some discussion about how the book is taught in schools, and when I approached another book, The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, with some reluctance, despite being well acquainted with the stories of transports and camps and suffering that were likely to be found there, I remembered a passage from Prose's book: in a class (high school age, I think) where the Diary was taught, the students were given the assignment of writing about what they thought happened to Anne after the events recorded in her diary. Many of them, ignorant of or ignoring the reality, wrote happy endings for her: She escapes! She survives! She becomes a famous writer! (In a sense, all these are true -- but some only abstractly.) Similarly, people are known to have seen the play and/or the film over and over without even realizing that they are based on a true story. This staggers me. And yet there is a powerful urge to believe in good things for this brilliant and generously-minded young optimist -- so much so that even I, well familiar with the painful details of her story, am reluctant to read the first-hand accounts of people who witnessed her final months and days, her desperation, psychological retreat, and pain. No wonder people are so happy to remain on the academic level of debate about the Diary; it is so much easier to depersonalize it and argue its merits as a Holocaust document, a Jewish document, a universalized argument for tolerance, or even an illustration of a young writer at work.
I did read The Last Seven Months, and I'm glad I did, but it's true that I don't want to think about that part. I want to believe in the little girl of the Diary and not have to face the fact that her worst fears really did come true.
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