Paper has More Patience than People
What we as writers can learn from the extraordinary diary of Anne Frank
Book review: Diary of a Young Girl
I have a keen interest in opshopping. Luckily my part of Melbourne has a good selection of opportunity shops — or thrift stores, as some might call them — and I can hardly resist poking my nose inside to see what’s new. Naturally the bookshelves, full of donated books, always attract my interest. Cheap prices and almost infinite variety, what’s to lose?
I snapped this treasure up. Twenty dollars for a Folio Society book is a good price for a beautifully-produced hardback book in slipcover at the best of times, and this iconic title came with a few extras.
A ticket and brochure from the Anne Frank House at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam was a poignant link with history, not to mention the simple cover design, a match for the cloth cover of the notebook that formed the first volume of Anne’s diary.
You know Anne Frank, of course?
When Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist party came to power in Germany during the 1930s, they set about gradually removing Jewish people from Europe, at first making life difficult for them, imposing petty regulations, and then pursuing active violence and pogroms, culminating in the appalling industrial scale death camps where millions were murdered.
The Frank family moved from Frankfurt to Amsterdam before the war to avoid the Nazis and when the Netherlands were occupied in 1940, their lives became increasingly restricted. When Anne’s older sister Margot was called up to be deported for “labour service”, the entire family moved into hiding in a “Secret Annex” to father Otto Frank’s place of work, where they remained for two years until discovered and sent off to the camps.
During that time Anne wrote a diary, most of which survived, and when Otto — sole survivor of those hidden in the annex — returned after the war, he set about publishing it as a memorial to his murdered family and a record of the suffering of European Jews.
Why?
I once visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC — a mightily sobering experience it was — and as I wrote some words in the visitors’ book, I looked through the previous entries.
I have long since forgotten what I wrote but one entry, one of many written by members of a school group, has haunted me ever since.
Why did they have to kill the children?
As a character in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys says of the Holocaust,
But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained than it can be explained away.
There is no answer, there is no explanation. A society in which children are murdered by the State is so flawed and distorted that it cannot be defended or supported.
The Nazi regime killed tens of millions, cynically extracting the last measure of profit by seizing their property and exploiting the labour of their victims. It was a bitter choice: work or die. If there was a choice.
Naturally the very old, the infirm, and the children — useless as slaves — were the first to be killed.
Anne and her diary
Hitler’s Mein Kampf manifesto and self-serving autobiography sold over 10 million copies. I doubt that more than a tiny fraction of that number were read cover to cover, it is so turgid and rantingly repetitive.
Anne Frank’s diary has sold 35 million copies and it is a book so compelling, so lively, so authentic, and so poignant that it is a treasure to read. Anne, who harboured dreams of being a writer after the war, showed a different side to the precocious moody girl her family and friends knew.
She wrote with frankness and perception, her pen guided by keen eyes that noticed every subtle feeling of those who shared her cramped quarters. It would not be too much to compare this teenage girl with someone like Jane Austen.
She initially wrote for herself, not so much as a simple record of events and circumstances but as a series of letters to imagined friends in which she could discuss her situation with insight and charm, with depth and detail. Her own adolescent emotions are recorded, sometimes in startlingly honest words of self-exposure.
We get such an authentic picture of a talented, engaging, innocent girl on the brink of adulthood that it is a swift and savage blow when the diary comes to an end and in short order we are told of her arrest, deportation, and death in the concentration camps, along with every one of her companions in the annex apart from her beloved father.
We share his pain and begin to understand his emotion at returning after the war and finding the pages of the diary, scattered during the arrest and gathered later by one of those who supported the family.
Just a teenage girl
At fifteen, I was chanting Sanskrit, writing Devanagari poems with a bamboo pen, discussing Plato in class, and meditating an hour a day. It certainly wasn’t normal but in the community of which I was a part, all this and much more was taken for granted.
I eventually rebelled, left all my friends, and found a life of more freedom if not quite so much demure concentration.
Anne Frank, in her teen years from thirteen to fifteen, went overnight from the relatively carefree life of an outgoing schoolgirl with a lively social round in Amsterdam to being shut away in cramped quarters with people who got severely on her nerves. She could not poke her nose outside, let alone slam the door and go for a long walk to burn off bad feelings.
Every day for over two years she lived with the knowledge that at any point the police could knock on the door, arrest her and every member of her family, and take them away to almost certain death. Even showing a light at night or making a noise during the day was out of the question.
My mind boggles at the marathon effort of control and patience required.
And yet, far from giving up or withdrawing her mind from active duty, she devoted herself to becoming a writer. Not just in a “Dear Diary” way, but composing what amounted to essays on topics of deep insight and meaning.
I’m afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side. I’m afraid they’ll mock me, think I’m ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously. — Anne Frank, 1 August 1944
As if! Anne Frank died more than 75 years ago but as a spokesperson for not just Dutch Jews but all those living under the Nazi jackboot she is more well-known than anyone else.
A teenage girl whose diary is a classic around the world the length of a lifetime later.
She explains her reasons in one of her final entries.
“Paper Has More Patience Than People”
I thought of this saying on one of those days when I was feeling a little depressed and was sitting at home with my chin in my hands, bored and listless, wondering whether to stay in or go out. I finally stayed where I was, brooding. Yes, paper does have more patience, and since I’m not planning to let anyone else read this stiff-backed notebook grandly referred to as a “diary,” unless I should ever find a real friend, it probably won’t make a bit of difference.
Now I’m back to the point that prompted me to keep a diary in the first place: I don’t have a friend. — Anne Frank, 20 June 1942
By all accounts, Anne could be sometimes difficult to know. Sure, she was popular at school and had any number of admirers and schoolmates but she lacked anyone with whom she could get really close. A few lines later, she continues,
No, on the surface I seem to have everything, except my one true friend. All I think about when I’m with friends is having a good time. I can’t bring myself to talk about anything but ordinary everyday things. We don’t seem to be able to get any closer, and that’s the problem.
This is not an uncommon attitude. When speaking face-to-face we tend to deal in conventions, our words circumscribed by “what will others think?”
Really deep, honest, unfiltered discussion is relatively rare. We can confide in a close and intimate partner, or we can write down our private thoughts in a confidential diary in a secret annex.
Here is the real beauty of Anne Frank’s Diary. We share the emotions of a girl becoming a woman in an environment so far removed from our everyday lives that we grasp the peril and the normality at the same time.
We are forced to contemplate the dreams of the future, of a life unconfined, of a career, a family, a freedom most of us take for granted, all the while knowing the tragedy awaiting after the final days’ journal entries.
It hit me hard in the heart
I first read The Diary of a Young Girl in high school. It was a set text and we discussed it in the context of the Holocaust, discrimination, and history. It all seemed so far away in time and space.
I remember my feelings, years later, when I discovered a brass plaque in the old city square in Frankfurt, marking the place where the Nazis had burned books.
They had burned people as well, not too far away. Brass squares set amongst the cobblestones mark the lives of those lost in the Holocaust.
It is not only that they deliberately set out to murder a talented young writer, an innocent girl. It is that they set out to murder millions. Men, women, children, babies.
I'd like to think that we have moved on. As a species, as a civilised folk, as people with ready access to thousands of years of history and wisdom.
But we haven’t. It seems.
Maybe I can’t change much, but I can open up my own heart. I can buy a book by a young woman, and I can read it cover to cover.
And I can speak out against injustice and hatred. Maybe the life I save will be my own. Maybe it will be yours.
And maybe together — you, me, Anne Frank, and 35 million other readers — we can make a difference.
How do we do this?
If I could use just one word, it would be this:
Mindfulness
Anne was focused on listening and observing the tiniest detail of life, and not just the mundane everyday activities — she goes into some length at one point over hours spent shelling peas — but the hidden thoughts and emotions that are only revealed by having a truly open mind.
In addition to being a keen observer of everything — everything! — that went on around her, she wrote with complete honesty, holding nothing back.
No wonder she worried about others mocking her seriousness and why she didn’t want anybody reading her journal until she was good and ready. Some of those she wrote about would have been embarrassed, even mortified.
Not that there is anything startling, merely that in writing privately on paper she avoided the social conventions of conversation where we tend not to be too brutally honest.
Anne Frank, in her tragically short life, teaches us that to be extraordinary writers we must break out of convention. Calm, reflective, focused observation of the details of life, recorded honestly and fully.
Almost like being a camera with a lens of heart and mind.
I can try. I can think of Anne every remaining day of my life, not with sadness and regret, but with a happy thankfulness for her existence and the lessons a teenage girl taught about acceptance, endurance, observation and honesty.
We can all do this. Think of that happy face and let her tell us, a lifetime beyond the grave, that we can be extraordinary. We can be beautiful, and we can be majestic.
Don’t let Anne Frank’s efforts to reach out be in vain. Whatever ambitions and objectives we have in life, we can learn from her steadfast focus on detail and deep truth to make our own dreams a reality.
Britni
I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. — Anne Frank, 15 July 1944, a few days before her arrest
