Books: Lost Child

ANNE FRANK: THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL (285 pp.)—Doubleday ($3).

Ten years ago this month, a Jewish girl named Anne Frank received a diary for her 13th birthday, and began to keep it with care. The entries were gay-spirited—even though the Franks, refugees from Hitler’s Germany, were living in occupied Holland. Anne saw an old Rin-Tin-Tin movie and told her diary about it; her teacher made her write an essay on an “Incurable Chatterbox” because she talked too much, and Anne recorded that too. Then one day, Hitler’s Gestapo summoned the Franks for a screening.

The Franks did not keep the appointment.. For some time they had been preparing a hideaway in an unused part of an old office building in Amsterdam. There, with the help of Dutch friends, eight hunted Jews spent two years: the Franks with their daughters Anne and Margot, the Van Daans with their son Peter, and Albert Dussel, a dentist.

Anne kept writing in her diary. Her entries darkened in tone, her writing skill blossomed, her mind leaped to astonishing maturity. The resulting diary is one of the most moving stories that anyone, anywhere, has managed to tell about World War II.

Why Do Grownups? Quarrel? Life was tense in the “Annex.” All day, one had to remain quiet for fear of being overheard by those who worked in the building; at night no lights could be shown. By day, Anne shared a tiny room with bristly Dentist Dussel, and had to fight a heroic campaign before he let her share the writing table. Their food, slipped in by Dutch friends, soon began to thin out. Always there was the danger of the police. But worst of all was the strain of being thrown together in a small space, without work or recreation, sometimes without hope.

“Why,” wondered Anne, “do grownups quarrel so easily, so much, and over the most idiotic things?” Though their lives were never secure, the two families re-enacted all the banalities of normal domestic life, fighting over how to wash pans and whose plates to use. Anne was constantly being reprimanded for her impulsiveness and chattering. “You only really get to know people,” she reflected, “when you’ve had a jolly good row with them.”

“Miss Quack-Quack,” as Anne called herself, nonetheless managed to live a rich life. She read Goethe and Schiller, and from newspapers she memorized the plots of all the new movies. She studied Greek mythology and gave herself lessons in shorthand, noting hopefully that for fugitives “it’s extremely important to be able to write in a code.” She watched herself with constant curiosity, and one day she was delighted to have her older sister Margot tell her she “was quite attractive and . . . had nice eyes.”

Most of all, Anne studied her parents with intense interest. She decided that she loved only her father: “I long for Daddy’s real love: not only as his child, but for me—Anne, myself.” With amazing acuteness, she analyzed her relation to her mother: “We are exact opposites in everything; so naturally we are bound to run up against each other. I don’t pronounce judgment on Mummy’s character, for that is something I can’t judge. I only look at her as a mother, and she just doesn’t succeed in being that to me; I have to be my own mother. I’ve drawn myself apart from them all; I am my own skipper, and later on I shall see where I come to land.”

Through the tense months Anne kept firm hold of her sense of humor. When Mrs. van Daan appeared with an injured rib, Anne wrote: “That’s what happens to elderly ladies who do such idiotic exercises to reduce their large behinds.” When Dentist Dussel went to work on Mrs. van Daan’s molars, Anne was gleefully reminded of “a picture from the Middle Ages entitled ‘A Quack at Work.’ ” But she could make fun of herself too: her beloved diary she called “the unbosomings of an ugly duckling.”

The Cremated Pen. As the war dragged on and news trickled in of mass deportations of Jews, Anne became desperate. She had terrifying fantasies about the death of Jewish friends. Often she saw “rows of good, innocent people accompanied by crying children [walk] on and on . . . bullied and knocked about until they almost drop.” With appalling prescience she wrote that “there is nothing we can do but wait as calmly as we can till the misery comes to an end. Jews and Christians wait, the whole earth waits; and there are many who wait for death.” When her pen fell into the fire, she wrote that it “has been cremated.”

Though not much interested in politics, Anne tried to understand what was happening to the world. “I don’t believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war,” she wrote. “Oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged …”

But sometimes she cried out from the heart, as if for all the Jews of Europe: “Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up to now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again.”

“I Am So Longing . . .” Anne became a young woman. “Each time I have a period—and that has only been three times—I have a feeling that in spite of all the pain, unpleasantness and nastiness, I have a sweet secret . . .” By her 15th birthday she had fallen in love with Peter van Daan. In the evenings she would visit him in his tiny attic, and the two adolescents would talk for hours, hold hands and occasionally kiss goodnight. Anne was not sure how to behave (“I am so longing for a kiss, the kiss that is so long in coming”), and was relieved when her father counseled restraint; In the last entries of her diary, amid careful reports of what the fugitives ate and striking sketches of how they lived, there rises a shy peal of ecstasy at the discovery of love.

But for Anne and Peter there was no time. In August 1944, the Gestapo raided the Annex. All its occupants were sent to concentration camps, and of the eight, only Mr. Frank returned. In March 1945, two months before the liberation of The Netherlands, Anne Frank, 15, died in Belsen of malnutrition.