The term “literary pilgrimage” tends to be tossed around lightly, but in this case it truly feels like one. To visit the Anne Frank House is to feel that you are on sacred ground.
Visitors queue up for as long as four hours for the chance to get inside. It’s a phenomenon you won’t find at the home of any other writer, no matter how celebrated. Not Shakespeare’s, not Dickens’, not the Brontes’.
“I want to go on living, even after my death,” Anne once wrote of her desire to become a famous writer. It may have seemed, at the time, to be girlish bravado.
And yet, it has come to pass. “What would she make of all this?” you can’t help but ask yourself.
It’s a question I pondered with Sharon Crockett of New Jersey, whom I met on my way to the Anne Frank House.
“There are so many people from around the world, from all walks of life and all age groups, who had nothing to do with her and no direct connection to the time period, Crockett marveled. “And yet, they could all relate to this small girl.”
It’s disquieting, at first, that the Secret Annex is so bare of furniture.
It is stark, sunless, the windows blacked out.
Was it a curatorial mistake, I wondered, not to furnish it the way it would have looked when the family was in hiding? Authentic décor brings the homes of many famous authors to life, after all, even when it’s not original to the house.
Crockett, an interior designer, helped me to see it differently. “The lack of furniture created a stronger impression of lost lives, of lives stripped bare,” she observed. “The house is stripped bare not only of the things that were there, it is stripped bare of the people.”
The effect is haunting, she added: “There’s the echoing effect of the visitors’ footsteps. The emptiness reminds you of the lost voices that could be echoing through these rooms. I’m walking through these spare, deserted rooms, I felt a little frightened. Our imagination is stronger than any physical objects could be. By leaving it so bare, they left space for your imagination to make it so present.”
Anne wrote poignantly about her longing for fresh air, for the simple freedom to ride her bike. Her words become even more visceral as you enter the Secret Annex after leaving the bustling streets of Amsterdam, boasting more bicyclists than pedestrians.
Anne wrote vividly about all the people in the Secret Annex, sparing the foibles of no one — least of all herself. You feel their presence still, more than 70 years after they were betrayed to the Nazis and arrested Aug. 4, 1944. Otto Frank was the only survivor.
The museum features a videotape in which Frank talks about reading his daughter’s diary for the first time. It was a revelation to him, proving, he said, “that you never really know your children.” Visitors nod their heads in agreement.
It is the writer’s talk to transform the personal — the intimate bric-a-brac of a life — into the universal. No writer ever did that more movingly than Anne Frank. As John F. Kennedy said in 1961, “Of the multitude who throughout history have spoken for human dignity in times of great suffering and loss, no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank.”
A World War II veteran, after visiting the museum, wrote that “this is why I fought, from D-Day to Elbe.”
As I peered through the glass at that original diary — a present for Anne’s 13th birthday — I realized the role that it played in my own journey as a writer. After reading “The Diary of a Young Girl,” I decided to start a diary of my own.
Anne taught me to write it all down, to write it for myself alone. She showed me what it meant to write in your own authentic voice — not the voice the world expects of you.
It’s hard to underestimate the impact of seeing that small volume that was the genesis of a towering work of world literature. As Crockett observed, “It’s has become totemic, but it started out as a red-and-white little girl’s diary with a key. It struck me how innocent it looked — how Anne had hopes and dreams and fantasies and wanted to confide them in a diary like any young girl.”
She reminds us of the magnitude of what the world lost in the Holocaust. All that untapped potential, all those unlived lives, multiplied by many millions.
Crockett, who is the great-great-granddaughter of a slave woman, believes that she speaks for all of the persecuted and oppressed: “I felt I had to pay my respects to someone who sacrificed herself in a way that enlightened me and enlightened the rest of the world.”
And Anne Frank speaks to us today, reminding us of the wisdom of children.
Have we learned the lessons of her life if we fail to listen, truly listen, to the children steaming across our borders? To the children languishing in a Syrian refugee camp?
“We don’t think they have anything interesting to say,” Crockett observed. “And yet there was a little girl in the attic who had a lot to tell us.”
Columnist Mary McCarty will be appearing at Books & Co. at Books & Co. from 2 p.m. to 3:30 today to lead a free Antioch Writers Workshop mini-seminar on “Great Beginnings,” sharing techniques and ideas for creating compelling beginnings for articles, stories, essays, columns and works of fiction. She can be reached at maryjomccarty@gmail.com.
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