a voice beyond her years

a vo ice
b eyon d h e r
ye a r s
This March marks 70 years since Anne Frank died in
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Stylist explores
her life and the legacy of one girl’s diary
Word s: Kate Graham
wo months ago, as
jihadists attacked
French magazine
Charlie Hebdo, on
the other side of
Paris, Amedy Coulibaly, another
Islamic extremist, took shoppers
in a Kosher supermarket hostage.
He killed four of them – all Jewish.
Two days later, Paris police
ordered all Jewish shops in the
Marais to close down for their own
protection. In the UK, the editor of
the Jewish Chronicle tweeted that
all the French Jews he knew were
leaving Paris or actively trying to
find a way to flee. A month later in
Copenhagen, outside the Grand
Synagogue, a Jewish man was
shot dead.
Newspaper articles predicted
a mass Jewish emigration – Jews
fleeing to North America, Israel,
Britain. Suggesting that if we
knew our history, there was
a cycle repeating itself, that before
the Holocaust began in earnest,
before Hitler’s Final Solution took
it’s ultimate, terrible form, this was
how it all began – anti-Semitism at
its creeping, insidious worst.
So, it’s incredibly poignant,
following Holocaust Memorial
Day on 27 January, that this
March marks 70 years since the
Nazi regime claimed the life of
T
52
S T Y L I S T.c o.u k
15-year-old Anne Frank. The
young girl who had sat in a hidden
annex above her father’s
workplace – her secret home for
over two years – writing about
the suffering of millions and yet
hoping for peace, believing it was
just within reach. Her life was
tragically cut short in BergenBelsen concentration camp, but
Anne’s diary, her legacy, has sold
more than 30 million copies in 73
languages, and turned her into an
icon of this devastating period in
human history.
She may have given a face to
the six million murdered Jews but,
the family fled to Amsterdam,
only to see the terror of the Third
Reich spread to Holland. By the
time Anne was given a red and
white checked diary on her 13th
birthday Jews couldn’t own
businesses, attend school with
non-Jewish children and had to
wear a yellow star at all times.
They were banned from using
trams or cars, going to beauty
parlours or from being outside
after 8pm. Otto knew it was time
to put a plan in place.
He kept his thoughts from his
daughters, leaving Anne to fill
her diary with the musings of
“she was a normal, fallible,
self-centred, sarky,
rebellious young teenager”
says Carol Anne Lee, author of
Roses From The Earth: Biography
Of Anne Frank, Anne is so much
more than an untouchable
symbol. The diary is the work
of an ordinary girl – albeit one
with an extraordinary talent.
Anne was born in Germany on
12 June 1929, the younger sister
to Margot, and daughter to Otto,
who later owned a company
which supplied ingredients to jam
manufacturers, and Edith, a
housewife. With the rise of Hitler,
a popular, attractive and
vivacious girl, all addressed to an
imaginary friend ‘Kitty’. An odd
normality within the horrific world
she lived in. As well as her
thoughts on the treatment of her
community there’s the sometimes
brutal analysis of her friends (“J is
a detestable, sneaky, stuck-up,
two-faced gossip who thinks she’s
so grown up”), struggles with her
teachers and, of course, boys.
Anne is pretty and she knows it.
“As soon as a boy asks if he can
cycle home with me and we start
talking, nine times out of ten I can
be sure he’ll become enamoured
on the spot,” she writes on 20
June 1942. It is this normality
which makes her so relatable.
Anne was the girl bestselling
author Deborah Moggach – who
adapted the diary for a BBC
mini-series in 2009 – fell in love
with when she read the diary at
13. “She was a normal, fallible,
self-centred, sarky, sometimes
rebellious young teenager.”
life in hiding
On the 5 July 1942, three weeks
after she wrote about boys and
bikes, Anne’s carefree life
was over. A letter
demanding 16-year-old
Margot to report for
a ‘work camp’ in Germany
put Otto’s plan into
action. Having circulated
rumours they were
fleeing to Switzerland,
early in the morning
wearing as many layers
as they could, the
Franks walked in the
pouring rain to
Prinsengracht 263, the
office of Opteka, Otto’s
former company,
and vanished.
Anne Frank
anne frank’s legacy
still helps people in the
fight against prejudice
and hatred
S T Y L I S T.c o.u k
53
Anne Frank
Stepping through a door
on the third floor (it would
later be covered by a moving
bookcase) Anne’s world shrank to
just 70 square metres; three
storeys of hidden rooms that
would act as bedrooms, kitchen
and living space. They’d been
carefully furnished and stocked
with the help of four of Otto’s
colleagues, who put their lives at
risk to save the family.
A week later, the Van Pels
family joined the Franks: father
Hermann, mother Auguste and
son Peter. Dentist Fritz Pfeffer
arrived in November, bringing
the total crammed in hiding to
eight. The group knew they
were luckier than many; the
horror of what was happening
in the camps filtered through,
as did the fates of other Jewish
families forced to separate and
hide in damp cellars.
But the harsh reality of life
in hiding leaps off the page.
Anne’s frustration at having to
share a tiny bedroom with
Fritz, a man she despised;
using a bucket as a toilet and the
monotony of eating nothing but
rotten boiled lettuce for days;
hiding in terror as the building
was burgled. All with no privacy
and no escape.
The expression of Anne’s
claustrophobia is painful to read.
“I wander from room to room,
climb up and down the stairs and
feel like a songbird whose wings
have been ripped off and who
keeps hurling itself against the
bars of its dark cage. ‘Let me out,
where there’s fresh air and
laughter!’ a voice within me cries,”
she wrote on 29 October 1943.
You can feel her ache to be
free says Gillian Walnes, executive
director of the Anne Frank Trust
UK. “Here was a teenager full of
life who must stay absolutely
silent, her whole day lived in
whispers, having to stifle every
laugh. Each morning waking up
to think this could be her last. In
constant fear and tension.”
For Lee, too, some of the most
evocative entries are those
expressing Anne’s desire to be free.
“She writes about being in the attic
looking out at the chestnut tree,
trying to sniff fresh air through
a tiny crack in the window.
Anne has an incredible ability
to put us in those moments, we
read them and will her to fly free.”
But, says Moggach, what
makes the diary so wonderful is
Anne’s balance of the serious and
the everyday. “You can’t sit in that
annex for two years and just think
about the fact that you might die.
Your lavatory is blocked and
you’re getting your first period,
quarrelling with your mother and
making up again, being normal.”
So the old Anne – the
precocious girl who, as her cousin
Buddy Elias told Lee, “would
come into a room and it would be
anne’s red and whiTe
checked diary was given
To her as a gifT
anne frank’s passion
for wriTing would
make her famous long
afTer her deaTh in 1945
40 quickfire questions” – was still
there, driving the adults a little
nuts. The boy-crazy Anne hasn’t
gone either, she falls in and
then out of love with Peter, who
Walnes calls, “the object of her
attention, affection and growing
sexual awareness”.
A normAl girl
Anne’s struggles for
independence and identity,
alienation from her sister,
frustration with her mother
and wonder at her burgeoning
sexuality are so universal, you
can’t help but see your own
teenage struggles on the page.
That’s because Anne wasn’t just
an extraordinary writer says Lee,
she was also an incredible editor.
On 28 March 1944 she heard
Dutch Cabinet Minister Bolkestein
on the radio asking people to
keep documents as a record for
future generations. Anne was
determined hers would play its
part, creating an edited version of
the fumbles with Peter and her
then-provocatively liberal view
of sex outside marriage – “It’s
not wrong for a man to bring
a little experience to a marriage.
After all, it has nothing to do with
the marriage itself, does it?” –
was just the start.
The entries on her changing
body were some of the most
controversial. “Until I was eleven
or twelve, I didn’t realise there was
a second set of labia on the inside,
since you couldn’t see them,” she
wrote on 24 March 1944. “What’s
even funnier is that I thought urine
came out of the clitoris. I asked
Mother once what that little bump
was, and she said she didn’t know.
She can really play dumb when
she wants to!”
These passages illustrate
Anne’s skill as a writer. She
instinctively knew that brutally
frank and funny worked for a
reader, creating a precursor to
Taken in march 1933,
a phoTo of anne (lefT)
today’s confessional journalism
wiTh her moTher ediTh
and blogging. Lee suggests it is
and sisTer margoT
Anne’s searing honesty that
connects with readers. “There are
passages where you feel sorry for
the others because of the way she
wrote about them. But the person
she was always most unsparing
with was herself.”
The final, moving entry shows
the intense internal struggle
15-year-old Anne is having: “My
lighter, more superficial side will
always steal a march on the
deeper side and therefore always
win. You can’t imagine how often
I’ve tried to push away this Anne,
which is only half of
what is known as
Anne – to beat her
down, hide her.”
“She’s grappling
with the two sides of
personality,” says
Walnes. “The
precocious, flippant,
sarcastic Anne, and
inside anne’s diary: she
the real Anne,
was an exTraordinary
wanting to take
wriTer and ediTor
responsibility, go
out and change the
her diary. “What’s so remarkable is world. She’s fighting to let the
good Anne win.” She never
that when she went back over her
had the chance.
diary with a goal of publication,
We’ll never know who betrayed
she didn’t edit out the incredibly
them, but we do know that when
personal sections,” says Lee. “She
the Gestapo burst in on 4 August
knew they were interesting and
1944, they were incredibly close
would speak to people.”
to being saved. Instead,
A gimlet-eyed analysis of the
all eight were sent to
failings of her parents’ marriage,
S T Y L I S T.c o.u k
55
Anne Frank
Westerbork transit
camp. One girl who
saw Anne there told Lee she
expressed a relief to be out
in the open after being inside
so long. “They also thought
they had a very good chance
of survival. They knew the
Allies were on their way.”
Then a second terrible
twist of fate: all eight were
put on the last train to
Auschwitz. Once there, they
were separated and the women
were stripped, shaved and
tattooed. Anne and Margot were
sent on to Belsen while Edith
remained in Auschwitz where
she died of starvation.
If they’d remained at
Auschwitz, there was a chance
they could have survived says Lee,
because the camp was liberated
on 27 January 1945. Instead the
sisters arrived at Bergen-Belsen in
northern Germany – a neglected,
disease-ridden, freezing hell.
Hanneli Goslar, a childhood
friend Anne mentioned in her
diaries, saw Anne again at Belsen.
“She described a girl who was
lice-ridden with no clothes,
clinging onto one thin blanket,”
a TOmbsTOne sTands aT
bergen-belsen where
anne and her sisTer
margOT died in 1945
OTTO frank’s wOrkplace
in amsTerdam, which was The
hiding place fOr The family
fOr Over TwO years
says Lee. “Completely riddled
with typhus, Anne was a shadow
of herself in every possible sense.
She thought both her parents
were dead. She was broken.”
The sisters shivered on
a bunk near a barrack door, where
survivors told Lee they could
literally see them losing their
lives. “One described them as just
two frozen little birds.”
No-one knows the exact dates
they died, or in which of the mass
graves they were buried. More
than 17,000 people died in Belsen
in 1945 alone. But Margot
succumbed to typhus in either
late February or mid-March, and
Anne died soon after, just weeks
before British troops arrived on
15 April 1945.
u n k n o w n fa m e
What happened to the diary is in
its own way extraordinary. After
the Gestapo left the annex, Miep
Gies, one of the Franks’ helpers
while they were in hiding, saved
the papers at huge risk. Otto
somehow survived Auschwitz
(the only resident of the annex
who made it out of the camps)
and honoured Anne’s wish for the
diaries to be published. The
original 1947 print run of 3,000
sold out and by 1950 it was on its
sixth reprint. An English language
version was published in 1952,
making the book a bestseller.
Otto, who had decided to publish
his daughter’s work to honour her
heartfelt wish, lived until 1980
and became a custodian of his
daughter’s legacy saying of her
posthumous fame: “If she had
been here, Anne would have been
so proud.” He also helped to set
up the Anne Frank Foundation
and answered thousands of
letters from readers of the diary.
Today, Jacqueline van
Maarsen, a childhood friend
of Anne, vividly remembers
receiving the diary from Otto.
“I thanked him in a letter and
said, ‘Maybe Anne’s diary will be
famous one day!’ I wrote this just
to please him, I didn’t believe this.
I thought: who’d be interested in
the writings of a little girl? It
turned out I was wrong.”
At the Anne Frank Trust
UK they are marking the
anniversary by asking everyone
to spend 60 seconds reading
aloud a section of the diary. After
all, says Walnes, at a time of
increasing anti-Semitism and
racism, when people are being
set against each other, this is the
time to speak up, not stay quiet.
“Anne was a girl with so much to
say, forced into silence for so
many hours of her life. We
can honour her best by
raising our voices.”
The Anne Frank Trust Campaign
#Notsilent; annefrank.org.uk
Diaries of conflict
Teenage journals have and continue to provide some of the most insightful and moving accounts of war
Diary of
a Pa k i S ta n i
Schoolgirl
iraqigirl
by Malala yousafzai
Following the Iraqi conflict in
2003, teenage blogger ‘Hadia’
began to write about life in the
occupied city of Mosul. Using
a pen name, she says, “I forgot
what peace looks like. If you
could see what my eyes see,
you would understand what
I mean.” And she wants to tell
Obama, “If you can’t get things
back to the way it was, then
please at least stop the
damaging.”
Her writings
were turned
into the
book
IraqiGirl
(Diary Of
A Teenage
Girl In Iraq).
(iraqigirl.blogspot.co.uk)
(news.bbc.co.uk)
When Malala was 11, she wrote
an anonymous diary for BBC
Urdu charting her struggle
under the Taliban occupation.
“On my way home from school
I heard a man saying ‘I will kill
you’. I hastened my pace and
looked back to see if the man
was still behind me.” In 2012,
aged 15, she was shot in the
head for opposing
the regime and
came to the UK
for treatment.
She is the
youngest
ever Nobel
nObel peace
Peace Prize
prize winner
malala
yOusafzai
Laureate.
my Syrian Diary
by ‘Marah’ (syriadeeply.org)
In 2011, when ‘Marah’ was 15,
her city came under siege as
the armed conflict between
the Free Syrian Army and the
government began. She
started a diary using a pen
name to provide a harrowing
insight into life inside a war
zone. She asks, “What fault
have we committed to live this
bitter reality?” She now
studies prosthetics at college
in Damascus to help heal
those injured in the conflict.
thiS iS kabul
by sadaf fetrat, sahar fetrat
and nargis azaryun
(journeyMan.tv)
For girls living in Kabul, life is
harsh and oppressive. Sadaf,
23, Sahar, 19, and Nargis, 22,
spent two years videoing their
everyday lives. The result is a
short film posted on YouTube
to show the harassment they
face daily for doing ‘normal’
things. Nargis says, “In
Afghanistan, a girl has to fight
for her rights from the day
she’s born to the day she dies.”
ALL ANNE FrANK MATErIAL (© ANNE FrANK FONDS, BASEL)
ADD ITIONAL WOrDS: STEPHANIE JACKSON PHOTOGrAPH Y: GETTY IMAGES, rE x FEATU rES
by ‘hadia’