(…) [Trudy] didn’t like Anne Frank. At first I couldn’t absorb the sentiment, couldn’t really believe my ears. It was like hearing a Catholic say she wasn’t fond of the Virgin Mary, that she was sick of all her tiresome bragging. Virgin birth – big deal. But then I realized that Trudy’s distaste for Anne Frank the person – whatever girlhood tiff set it off – returned the Holocaust to where it belongs, in prosaic human history. It’s not a myth, or a sacred narrative, with demigods and martyrs and supernatural heroines. It’s not a biblical story, a tragic moment pointing to redemption. It’s a story of girls and boys, Annes and Trudys, and their brothers and sisters and parents, murdered and tortured the way humans have murdered and tortured since time immemorial.
But the next day, at lunch, I discovered that Trudy’s Anne Frank induced scowl wasn’t merely personal (it was mostly personal). “Of course, she was a mean girl – like you see today in the movies, yes?” Trudy said. “A mean girl. That was Anne. But that wasn’t really her fault. It was her father, you see, who spoiled her, and, well, never mind, I’ve said too much. But to me, what became insufferable was her optimism. ‘I know in my heart that people are good.’ That was from her diary, yes? People are good? Do you think she believed that in Bergen-Belsen?”
I’m not sure she realized it — she didn’t follow Jewish intellectual arguments — but Trudy had stumbled onto one of the key controversies surrounding Anne Frank’s diary: its supposed optimism. It was actually the hit Broadway play that highlighted Anne’s line about the essential goodness of the human heart; both the play and the movie end with the quote. The diary itself includes the line, but also Anne’s observation that the world would be better off without any people. Critics of the play, including Cynthia Ozick in an influential Commentary piece where she half-wishes the diary had never been found, accuse the playwrights and their supporters of using the diary – and therefore the Shoah – to promote an anti-Zionist, anodyne universalism that negates Jewish national concerns.
But Trudy wasn’t responding to the diary’s politics, or to the political uses others made of the book or the play or the movie. She was just pissed off at Anne Frank because, in her opinion, Anne got it wrong: People aren’t basically good. For Trudy, the Shoah was never a rhetorical weapon or a political tool – it wasn’t up for grabs to the loudest shouter. It was her personal story. To me, it felt like Trudy longed for Anne to have survived, just so that Trudy could have told her off, survivor to survivor, person to person.
I cried a little the day Trudy’s daughter emailed me that her mother had died; she was a friend, and I will always miss her. But a deeper gloom hit me the next day, when I realized that as the last of the survivors pass away, the Holocaust is truly up for grabs. Without the grounding of Trudy and her contemporaries, we’re free to hurl the term “kapo” at whoever doesn’t share our politics, free to spin the Auschwitz narrative whichever way suits our ideology, free to twist and bend and stretch the Shoah so that it speaks to whatever issue is on our mind. Trudy is gone, so there’s no one to shame us into stopping.
This is genuinely one of the most well-written things I’ve ever read about Anne Frank and the universalization and dehumanization of the Holocaust and its victims.
germansingergirl
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
prguitarman
andulkaphoto
ellievsbear
