“I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death, I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness … yet if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right.”
These words, written by Anne Frank in her last diary entry, reveal the mind of a girl coming to terms with her extraordinary predicament. Though almost everyone has read excerpts of Frank’s diary, Anne Frank the Writer: An Unfinished Story at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum features a broader selection of her work, giving a clearer picture of a writer just beginning to mature.
Illuminated quotes from Anne’s writings hover on the wall, burning brightly for a few moments then fading away into a telling darkness, a reminder of the deaths that claimed all of the Frank family except Anne’s father, Otto. Through these words, Anne communicates her wishes for “tranquility and peace” and her insistence that, despite everything, she still believes that “people are good at heart.”
In partnership with the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam, this special exhibit contains material never before shown outside of the Netherlands, where the Frank family spent its last years in hiding.
The first wall of the exhibit showcases photographs of Anne and her family in happier times, stopping abruptly in 1942, when Otto Frank took his family to live in a series of secret rooms behind a bookcase at his workplace.
Though the original diary itself remains in Amsterdam, this exhibit displays a replica. Given to Anne just a month before the family went into hiding, the diary became at first a solace and then a potential manuscript for Anne, who hoped to be a published writer. The red and white replica seems so ordinary that one has trouble imagining the significance it would later achieve in history and literature.
A good deal of The Diary of Anne Frank chronicles the ordinary details of family life in a small confined space, such as squabbles with her sister Margot and tension with her mother. As Anne matures, she becomes more concerned with broader issues of cruelty and forgiveness than with tensions that accompany two families sharing a small living space. Some of Anne’s more creative endeavors, short stories and plays, are also on display.
Anne’s insights are often simple but not simplistic, the musings of a particularly insightful teenager devouring all the literature that she can. Pages of Anne’s fluid script show she meticulously copied her favorite passages from the works of Oscar Wilde and Wolfgang von Goethe. Scattered throughout the exhibit are alcoves containing televisions that quietly play portions of an interview with Miep Gies, a family friend who provided vital assistance to the Franks . She speaks of Anne demanding books, desperate to grow as a writer and to connect with the outside world in any way.
Many entries are intensely personal and show Anne struggling to make sense of her painful circumstances. Her vocabulary is at times astounding, but most poignant are such sentences as, “To never go outside bothers me more than I can say,” and her anticipation of the day when she and her family will be considered “people again, and not just Jews.”
In 1944, an informer betrayed the families and Anne ended up on the last train to Auschwitz. She died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany when she was 15 years old, missing Allied liberation of the site by only a few weeks. This exhibit is both a portrait of Anne and an elegy for the person she could have been.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is located at the corner of 14th St. and Independence Ave., N.W. “Anne Frank the Writer -An Unfinished Story” shows through January 13, 2003. Tickets are free, but to ensure entry should be reserved at tickets.com for a $1.75 surcharge.
