Editor’s note: As we approach Holocaust Remembrance Day April 15, we look back to Elie Wiesel’s review of “Anne Frank Remembered” by Miep Gies — who helped to hide the Frank family — with Alison Leslie Gold. The review, translated from French by Martha Liptzin Hauptman, first appeared in the Tribune on May 10, 1987.
Who has not read and reread “The Diary of Anne Frank?” Who has not been moved by the mischievous and innocent look that this unforgettable young Jewish girl gave to a beaten and ridiculed humanity desperately searching for reasons to hope?
Why has this book, above and beyond all others, had such an impact on the world? Because one finds in it purity and sadness, the purity and sadness that only a child was perhaps able to express before dying?
We love Anne. We cannot not love her. Of all the people who inhabited her closed universe still open to dreams, it is she who fascinates and touches us the most. One might say she is a guide who invites us to discover a dark, gloomy work. We follow her, we listen to her, we laugh with her, we cry also, we cry even when she laughs, perhaps especially when she wants to make us believe that she is only a young romantic girl who likes to amuse herself as she can.
How can one amuse oneself while Death watches with a thousand hateful eyes? How can one lead a normal existence — no, not normal but regular — for two years, in an attic cramped and cluttered where the prisoners knew they were condemned to silence? How can one, in doubt and anguish — if I may paraphrase Camus — imagine oneself happy?
A more practical question: How can one hold on for so long in a clandestine shelter which is dangerous to leave? How to nourish oneself, dress, follow events, not lose one’s mind? The inhabitants of the Annex, as Anne called it, were lucky: Some friends of Anne’s father, Otto Frank, decided, at the risk of their lives, to help them. Anne portrays them in her “Diary.” Each one of their visits is a holiday, each of their consoling words a miraculous offering. There is especially Miep; Anne seems to have a very special affection for her. There exists even a kind of complicity between these two friends that everything separates and everything brings together. One better understands their rapport by reading the testimony that Miep, in her turn, has just written (with the remarkable collaboration of Alison Leslie Gold).
Having met her by chance, Alison Gold spent 16 months with Miep Gies and her husband Jan — Henk in the book — questioning them on their memories of the occupation. Let us give recognition to Alison Gold. Without her and her talent of persuasion, without her writer’s talent, too, this poignant account, vibrating with humanity, would not have been written.
Miep relates with simplicity and sobriety her ties with the Frank family. Her first encounter with Otto Frank was in his workplace where the Jewish refugee from Germany manufactured jams. Thus she became acquainted with Mrs. Frank and her two daughters. Margot is reserved, discreet; Anne, the younger, is extroverted, restless, febrile. Miep sees them grow and blossom before they retreat from society. She shows them in the Annex in their relationships with one another and with the Van Dams, the dentist, young Peter and Mouchie the cat. As a privileged observer, Miep sees all, guesses the rest, recollects gestures, words, looks. Thus her book can serve as commentary on, as interpretation of, Anne’s “Diary.” Thanks to Miep, we better understand what the young girl tells us, and why.
And then there is the life outside, in the capital, in the country, that Miep — and not Anne — is able to describe. The suffering. The hunger. The humiliation of a proud nation. The manhunts, the police raids, the terror imposed by a merciless occupant. The first quiverings of the Resistance. The Dockers’ strike protesting the deportation of the Jews. The clandestine propaganda. The problems posed by courageous behavior: When a Jew hidden in a Christian home dies, what is to be done with the corpse? The nobility of some, the cowardice of others. And yes, men and women can be tempted by evil as others are by good. The same malediction can provoke contradictory attitudes. In the face of the enemy’s arrogant power, certain citizens chose to collaborate with them at the price of their honor, while others opted for dignity and fidelity at the price of their tranquillity and liberty.
Miep describes the Nazis who paraded in the streets, the “Registers” who held their heads high, the Germans who hurled death sentences and the Jews among them. The Jews are the first target. Some hide themselves, others take flight, most are trapped. Some fight. Miep evokes the incident when young Jews, in February, 1941, resisted the Nazis near the Jewish Quarter. In the guise of retaliation, the Germans seized 400 Jews and sent them to Mauthausen. At the time, one did not yet know the names Auschwitz or Treblinka. One knew them later, when the Germans interned the Jews in the camp of Westerborg. Few escaped.
Who betrayed the Frank family? The informer was never found. Otto Frank did nothing to search for him. He preferred to use the past in order to save the future. Is this the reason why his daughter’s book sustained such enthusiasm in the world? Because the reader wanted to reassure himself? Because he managed to believe, like Anne, that man is good … in spite of everything? Anne Frank has left an unfinished Diary. If she had been able to write in Auschwitz and in Belsen, what would she have said? Would she have manifested the same confidence in man? No one can answer these questions; no one has the right to.
Let us simply remember, in the name of truth, that it was only when Anne wrote the last word of the last sentence, that she entered, mute, into the night of silence.
