Year: 1988 (1953, 1947)
Publisher: Hökerbergs
Language: Swedish (Translator Ella Wilcke)
”The Diary
of a Young Girl” (”Het Achterhuis”) by Anne Frank is the authentic diary of an adolescent
Jewish girl in the Netherlands from the time her family goes into hiding from
the Nazis in 1942 until three days before the Gestapo raided their hiding place
in 1944. And it is an overwhelming read.
Two weeks
after I finished the book, I have still not managed to regain my composure. It
rattled me to the core. It is a challenge not to think about what I have read and
still, I am barely able to collect my thoughts and make sense of the experience.
Rendered
unqualified to process Anne Frank’s diary intellectually, my emotional response
is all the clearer. I feel horror, grief, and disbelief. I feel love, fear, and
confusion. I feel anger. So much anger. But in this dense brew, one feeling towers
head and shoulders above all others.
Shame.
Through
every word and every page, shame followed me like a heavy load on my chest
which sometimes made it hard to breathe and which still forces me to gasp for
air when the memories force themselves to the front of my mind.
Shame came
in several shapes and for different reasons.
At the
beginning, the mere act of reading a young girl’s diary made me uncomfortable.
This is, after all, a diary of a regular teenage girl living under highly
irregular conditions. Anne Frank wrote about everyday things such as her
favourite books and music, her friends and love interests, about which subjects
in school she liked and disliked. I was reading the thoughts of a girl who made
every effort to keep her diary secret to people around her (in the entry of the
21 September 1942 Anne writes expressively about how she had to physically protect
her diary from the prying eyes of one of the other fugitives cooped up in the
hiding place).
As she got
older, her choice of topics developed. Being stuck in a confined space without
access to classmates, friends, cousins, games, movies, sporting events, and
concerts, Anne became introspective and resorted to writing about her crowded miniature
world. She entrusted every secret, sensitive, and sometimes embarrassing detail
to her beloved diary (or “Kitty” as she called it) and as a reader I was
constantly reminded that I was an intruder in a supremely intelligent and impressionable
young woman’s most private sphere.
I also felt
shame about not having read this monumental document much earlier. In secondary
school at the latest. For a person who prides himself on being reasonably
informed on the Second World War, not having read Anne Frank’s diary is an
unforgivable educational lacuna. History may have been made by Hitler,
Churchill, and Truman, but history was suffered by Anne Frank and her family
and millions of others like her. Their experiences constitute the basis of our
knowledge about the era. They are the ones who lived and died in the midst of
the world created for them. If one does not know their story, one knows
nothing.
Still, most of all I felt shame for mankind. For
the scum who orchestrated the Holocaust, for the many who remained silent and
allowed it to happen, and for the measly waste of a person who betrayed Anne
Frank along with all the others in the yard house. How brutal, barbarous,
simpleminded, and savage does a species have to be to make up an imaginary
divide between people and use it as an excuse to unleash mayhem, torment, and
misery on them for no other reason than that they can? What a bankrupt people
we are, if our own satisfaction and self-worth require the oppression and agony
of another? How lowly does one have to be, if one cannot stand on one’s own two
legs but has to support oneself on the mutilated bodies of others?
None of Anne
Frank’s despair, hope, fears, or confusion was her own choice. She was forced
into hiding, forced to flee like a hunted animal from men who did not know her
but judged her for her background. How can I not feel ashamed on behalf of
humanity for this?
Having said
that, dignity can still be restored.
On the 29th
of March 1944, Anne wrote in her diary that Mr Bolkestein of the Dutch exiled
government had encouraged the citizens of occupied Netherlands to preserve all
written material from the war and announced that an archive of testimonies was
to be created once peace was restored. Anne Frank immediately began to plan for
the publication of her diary and even gave it the title “Het Achterhuise” under
which it was later published in its original Dutch. Suddenly, the shame of
reading her words was remedied. I realised that by reading her book, I was
granting her wish. She wanted me to do it. What joy! What relief!
The second source
of shame has also been addressed. Admittedly far too late, but I did end up
reading the book in the end. Maybe I needed to grow into it longer than most.
Maybe you would gain from reading it at a mature age, too. Be as it may, I did
end up reading “The Diary of a Young Girl”, an omission had been corrected and
my life became all the richer for it.
It remains
to address the third source of shame for it, too, can be redeemed. The forces
that time and again fling the world into chaos are rarely unopposed. But they are
still frequently victorious. Their success depends less on their own strength
or the weakness of the opposition and more on the silence of the masses. By
remaining silent, we side with the oppressors. It is imperative that people of
good will unite and take action whenever the stench of pettiness, inferiority
complex, narrow-mindedness, and hatred poisons the air.
But it is
not enough to detect it in others. We must all be aware that we are human, too.
We are, whether we like to acknowledge it or not, specimens of the same base
species that for generations has slandered, slated, and slain each other for
the silliest reasons. We need to recognise and reconcile with the fact that we
are different from the butchers of Amsterdam not in nature, but in our ability to
allow reason to trump our instincts.
Anne Frank’s
death was pointless, but I for one will do what I can to make sure that her short
life was meaningful. I will not live in shame.
