Tag Archives: The Diary of Anne Frank

Amsterdam’s Holocaust Names Monument: What’s in a Name?

Flashes of silver announce the presence of the Holocaust Names Monument, fought over for years but finally opened in September 2021 thanks to the Netherlands’ highest court (once headed by Mr. L. Visser, whose colleagues voted to comply with the Nazi order to fire him because he was Jewish).

As we approach, a young couple stands in front of it, embracing. At first I think one is comforting the other, but they are simply in love and oblivious. No harm in that. We cross the busy street and entered the sharp corners of the brick walls, where 102,000 names are inscribed, each on their own individual brick with their birthdate and age when they were mass murdered.

The bricks’ colors are in a range of sandy and ruddy shades, but uniform in size whether they are for an infant or an octogenarian, a famous person or someone who was unknown except to family and friends. Once we enter the world that monument makes – “backward” at the letter Z, but it didn’t matter – it captures us completely. A wall of 1,000 blank bricks follows the Z listings, to allow for newly discovered victims, and those who remain unknown.

The walls are taller than we are, with the mirrors overhead bringing in the world of today, the modern building across the street, the trees which are the only adornment among the walls.

The traffic noise fades but is still prominent. Joanna and I drift in different directions. At first, the sheer numbers overpower me: where will it end? the walls seem to go on forever. A young tree’s branches spread like an opening hand among the bricks. Could I read the names one by one during this two-week visit? Only if I did almost nothing else. Patterns begin to appear: so many young people! The youngest I see is eight months old, but there are many, many adults in their twenties and thirties. Some names appear four or even five times with different ages, the intention of continuity in a family now torn like paper. And some families must have lost everyone, or almost everyone.

Is it my imagination, or are the reflections in the mirrors distorted? The visions of everyday life overhead seem a bit swirly, but at one point, I look straight up, and see myself and the names crystal clear, together. From reading, I know that the mirrors seen from above spell out in Hebrew letters “In memory of”. No embellishment or editorializing, simply that.

The monument from above

Among the tens of thousands, it’s irresistible to look for specific people who are as real to me as anyone I’ve ever met. I find Miss Henriette Pimental first, the heroine who oversaw the saving of hundreds of children right under the nose of the Nazis, just a few blocks from the Monument. Nearby are the Pais sister and brother whose photograph haunts me: they have the broad, appealing smiles of a nine and eight year old, wearing their Nazi-inflicted stars. Survivor Rudi Nussbaum had finally persuaded his parents to go into hiding, and arrived at their apartment to relocate them, only to find that they had just been deported the night before. I look for their names, but there are too many Nussbaums of about the right age for me to figure it out without their first names. This too brings the reality home. Too many means too few.

Bringing the search into the present moment, I wonder about the M. Pels whose house we are staying in, the man whose business was partly ice cream. There’s a restored business sign on the front of the building. Bricks cite Marcus, Moritz or Maurits (yes, two spellings). Is one of these our predecessor? Or is he still alive somewhere, or comfortably buried in an actual grave, unlike 80% of Amsterdam’s Jewish population?

The line of white rocks at the foot of the brick walls have a pure quality because they are all such a stark color in contrast to the bricks themselves. The shapes vary, however, unlike the bricks. Not only do they have symbolic meaning as recognition of the dead, but they are also a relief to the eye in that place of straight lines and sharp angles. Every time I go around a corner with its hard acute angles, I wince. Joanna is talking with a younger woman who is dressed all in black. We meet both her and her mother, who is my age; they come from the northern city of Groningen, and are engaged in creating an historical walk that will cover some of this history, but do so by walking and settling in a café and learning what can be seen from that place. It will “go live” May 4/5, the times of remembering and liberation, too late for me on this trip but not, heaven willing, the next. Joanna tells them all about my book. We smile and laugh together at the serendipity of our meeting. “The ghosts are at work,” I say, gesturing at the walls. Everyone nods and smiles, but nobody laughs. I think it would please them to hear laughter, and the pale pink flowers on the nearby tree would delight them. Only in one place have flowers been left. Tomorrow I can change that.

The Holocaust Names Monument has already started its work on me, in part because the site is caught between two worlds. On one side is the constant roar of vehicle traffic, the lanes of bicycles with their insistent bells, and the chats and giggles of pedestrians. On the other is a garden with carpets of purple and white crocus gathered at the feet of trees. One pale pink prunus peeks over the edge of the Memorial’s walls. The garden can be entered directly; a sign welcomes you to bring a picnic. On the other side stands the 1681 Amstelhof, once a retirement home for elderly women, now the Hermitage. Six years earlier, the Sephardic Jews had already erected their magnificent nearby Portuguese Synagogue. Amsterdam was a land of unique opportunity for them. No one could have imagined how much the Jewish population would expand in the coming years, nor that 80% of them would be rounded up and murdered. It still seems inconceivable. While I’m here, I plan to visit every day, and see what can be learned there. I’ll keep you posted.

Listening to Dutch Ghosts as We “Shelter in Place”

Photo of Anne Frank and her Diary — Anne Frank and her Diary

For the last several weeks, I’ve been asking myself what people in Amsterdam 1940-45 would say to us now, in the time of coronavirus. Yesterday, the New York Times published “The Lost Diaries of War,” with the subtitle “Volunteers are helping forgotten Dutch diarists of WWII to speak at last. Their voices, filled with anxiety, isolation and uncertainty, resonate powerfully today.” So the ghosts are speaking directly to us. It was so synchronistic that I wanted to share my thoughts with you immediately.

Even though An Address in Amsterdam was published more than three years ago, and I finished writing it a year before that, its characters still speak to me every day. For the first few years, they pushed me to be even more of an activist, to speak out about the perils of our times. More than anything, they told me, “Act now, before it’s too late. In this time of plague, I’ve again been looking to those ghosts for guidance. The resisters would probably counsel us to watch out for sleight of hand by those in power, to be aware of what they can do with one hand while our eyes are on the other. I think particularly of the suspension of environmental regulations and laws.

Learning from the People who Hid

But it’s not just the resisters who have something to offer us now. When I first began learning about 1940-45 in Amsterdam, I was shocked by a photo of bathing beauties stretched out langorously on lounge chairs – while in hiding from the Nazis. They were smiling and laughing, fashionably exposing their perhaps too thin figures. How could they possibly be enjoying themselves, I wondered; but they clearly were. Another picture showed two little kids, Jansje and Benjamin Pais, grinning and wearing their best clothes, perhaps for the first day of school. Someone had sewn the Stars of David on, not pinned them which was prohibited. (Jewish people were actually charged for the stars, so this increased the profits.)

Photo of two children smiling with Stars of David on their clothes — Jansje and Benjamin Pais, from the Jewish HIstorical Museum

The mystery of how these people could be happy in their appalling circumstances compelled me to dig more deeply into their collective stories. The more I learned, the more grateful I was for the many privileges of my own place and time – my access to food, my freedom of movement, my ability to be in touch with people I love.

In the time of coronavirus, I am again learning from them: to taste the sweets of the moment, whatever they may be. To be sure love flows out of me and my house every day. To notice every individual crocus and daffodil that breaks the soil in our garden, and everyone else’s. To let no small desire on my partner’s part – for raisins, for calm, for Chopin – go unfulfilled. To remember the people in detention and prison who are so much worse off than I am, and try to help them. To wash our hands as a sacrament, the way the Muslims do five times a day before their prayers. With the children in my life, I try to remember that this is their childhood, right now. It can never be replaced or deferred. They must play and have all the joy they can. Human creativity being what it is, they will find ways to make stories and sense even of the plague. They are wondrous beings who can pull us adults into the moment.

Beyond Survival

I’m sure the bathing beauties tried to keep each other’s spirits up, using whatever materials were at hand. If anyone faltered in security precautions or broke down, everyone would suffer or worse. For us in our much easier situation, our first duty is maintaining our good health and good humor. After reading many accounts of these circumstances as I researched An Address in Amsterdam, I did my best to re-create the life of the fictional Klein family in hiding. They, and the real people whom they represent, had to occupy themselves in a way that upheld their sanity and their health. Surviving until a better day was their first priority. How did they live with the fear? Not by saturating themselves with information, which was only available through their hosts.

All they could usually do to make themselves safer was stay quiet, so they distracted themselves. People who could read, read. The artists drew, and musicians found ingenious ways to practice (like Rose Klein with her piano keyboard handmade of paper). They played endless games. Some, like Anne Frank or the diarists the Times reports on, found solace in writing.

Anne Frank's Diary showing the outside, which is red plaid — Anne Frank’s Diary, from the Anne Frank House

People had conversations which probably would never have happened in normal circumstances. And they dealt with endless moments of terror when someone stepped the wrong way on a floorboard. Writing the part of An Address in Amsterdam when Rachel and her family are hidden was even scarier than writing the earlier chapters when she was on the street facing the Nazis.

The ghosts were living with far worse fear than we are, and a situation that seemed endless. Every action we take these days is a kind of Russian roulette, especially in my age group. But I find that the same things that helped the ghosts in their far more difficult predicament help me: love, a belief in justice, an appreciation of beauty, and the sense of being connected to others. Even years after I first met them in Amsterdam, the ghosts are still guiding me.

Anne Frank’s Birthday: Fact and Fiction

Anne Frank 1940 school photo

No one knows exactly when Anne Frank died in 1945, but we do know she was born on June 12, 1929. Every year, I remember how close I felt to her as an eleven-year-old reading The Diary of a Young Girl in a small closet in North Carolina. Anne was an intimate friend at a time when I had very few. Like so many girls, I completely identified with her nascent romantic and sexual longings, her hatred of her mother, her deep humanitarian, and her aspirations as a writer.

Four decades later, I had the joy of living in Amsterdam for six months, and discovered a distressing truth about that tolerant city: 80% of its Jewish people were rounded up and murdered. My child’s view that no one on earth could have suffered more than Anne was so wrong. She was much luckier than most. The Franks’ hiding place was ready in advance, they were all hidden together for 25 months, they had more room and comfort than most people (small as it was), and the quality of support from Miep Gies and others was extraordinary.

In 2002, while staying a few blocks from Anne Frank’s hiding place, I discovered that Jewish people had also been hidden in the attic above our apartment. When I learned that they were last seen fleeing over the rooftops as the Nazis shot at them, I had to learn more about the larger story of which Anne’s was only a part. I began imagining who those people were, and an historical novel began to take shape. For thirteen years, I read histories and memoirs; visited museums, archives, and libraries; listened to people who would talk with me; and wandered the canals looking for unmarked addresses where important events took place. That’s one of many reasons my book is called An Address in Amsterdam.

Resistance Courier at Amsterdam Verzetsmuseum

Resistance Courier at Verzetsmuseum, Amsterdam

As much as I regarded Anne with a child’s adoring eyes, and admired her with an adult’s greater discernment, I also realized that she was confined by her parents’ choices as well as the Nazi Occupation. She was not quite 11 when the Germans invaded the neutral Netherlands. If Anne Frank had been a few years older, it’s hard to imagine that she wouldn’t have found a way to help the resistance.

While I knew that my book would have a young Jewish woman as a heroine, I wanted to write about someone who was old enough to make her own decisions, but young enough that she would have to grow up fast in order to do so. How did an ordinary young woman decide to risk her life as a resister? What would she actually do, and how? As Rachel Klein, my heroine, formed in my imagination, I didn’t see her as an older Anne Frank, but as her own person, with different needs and ambitions than Anne. However, to be sure that I wasn’t unduly influenced, I avoided reading the Diary again until An Address in Amsterdam was done and in press.

As I re-read the Revised Critical Edition which compares all the versions of the Diary, I found my old friend Anne Frank still there – vulnerable, smart, fearful. Perhaps because the times had changed so much, I also heard more clearly than ever the warnings in her work, and her injunction to us now. Today, I’m not so much moved by the girl who wrote “I still believe that people are good at heart,” as the one who speaks to us now: “How wonderful it is that no one need wait a single moment before trying to improve the world.”

The Dutch thought it couldn’t happen there, too

Marcher places flowers at Amsterdam’s Auschwitz memorial

The New York Times reports that the Dutch are constructing a memorial wall and Holocaust museum in Amsterdam’s old Jewish Quarter because memory is fading or inaccurate – despite the worldwide readership of The Diary of Anne Frank. There is so much more to the story than one brilliant child writer’s account, despite her humanitarianism and universal appeal.

Historians have grappled endlessly with the question of how and why one of the most tolerant nations in the world allowed almost three-quarters of its Jewish population to be murdered. It’s especially ironic since the Netherlands was a refuge for Jewish people since the Spanish Inquisition.

While the answers to “Why?” are many and complex, a primary one is that the Dutch believed it couldn’t happen there, even after the Nazi invasion. The Jewish people had been assimilated for centuries, in professions from symphony conductors to medicine and art, shopkeeping, peddling, diamond cutting and trading. The head of the Dutch Supreme Court was Jewish. It was preposterous to think that people so integral to society at every level could be isolated and shipped off somewhere. Much less murdered. No matter what the Germans were doing in their own country, it couldn’t happen in the Netherlands. Dutch people wouldn’t allow that.

Hiding was the best policy

Nor was it only the Dutch Gentiles who believed this. In doing the research for my historical novel, An Address in Amsterdam, I learned that many Jewish people themselves refused to believe that persecution would turn into isolation, much less deportation and mass murder. At each step – registration, identity cards, restricted travel and business, stars, even deportation – some people continued to rationalize the Nazis’ actions. Others, like my fictional heroine, resisted. Only one Jew in seven hid, which turned out to be the best way to survive the war other than pre-emptive escape. Dutch Jewish citizens felt a misplaced confidence in their country and countrymen – much like the confidence many in the U.S. are feeling now, as we complacently believe that Donald Trump can’t win. Instead, we hear more and more hate rhetoric aimed at Muslims, refugees, and undocumented workers and their families. What can we do to provide them with the protection which the Dutch failed to give the Jewish part of their people?

What are we refusing to believe in 2016?

Donald Trump says we should bar members of one religion, Muslims, from entering our country, targeting them in a way that violates the core American value of religious freedom. He wants to build a wall to keep out the citizens of a particular nation, again singling out a group of people rather than judging them as individuals. This is directly contrary to the lessons of the Holocaust.

Fortunately, one of these is that resistance can have some effectiveness, even in the very worst situation – especially when it happens broadly and quickly as a unified action (as in Denmark). We live in a democracy where we can work to ensure that Trump does not get into office. Even if Hillary Clinton were a far less progressive candidate than she is, we should still work as hard as we can to elect her – persuading not only the lukewarm voters, but those who, like me, supported Bernie Sanders. If we believe not just in him as an individual, but in what he stands for, we have no choice but to learn the lessons of history. Let’s stand beside him and work for Hillary.