DIARY OF A VISIT TO THE ANNE FRANK HOUSE : Commentary

My wife and I arrived at Anne Frank House at 263 Prinsenghracht on a rainy gray afternoon last month. Ours was a long-planned trip to Amsterdam to commemorate the anniversary of the filming of “The Diary of Anne Frank” and to open a retrospective of the films of my father, George Stevens. It was a coincidence that a week earlier a Tennessee judge had ruled that passages Anne Frank wrote in her diary while hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam garret might prove to be an unconstitutional burden to American schoolchildren.

Anne Frank House is a museum to which half a million people come each year. They come to see the attic where Otto Frank, his wife and two daughters, a family of three called Van Daan and a Dutch dentist, Henrik Dussell, were in hiding from July, 1942, to August, 1944. A striking majority of the visitors one sees filing through the house are teen-age girls, many of whom are obviously deeply moved to see the cramped quarters where Anne and the others were confined in German-occupied Amsterdam, living in fear of discovery by the Gestapo.

They were eventually arrested and shipped off to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz and, in the case of Anne and her sister, on to Bergen Belsen where the two girls died of typhus a month before the camp was liberated. Only Otto Frank survived. He returned to Amsterdam to learn of the death of his family and to discover his daughter’s diary that had been left behind in the attic when they were taken away.

I had first come to this building alongside one of Amsterdam’s picturesque canals in the spring of 1957 with my father when we were preparing to film the motion picture based on Anne’s diary. We were taken by Otto Frank. He was then in his 60s, a man of exceptional dignity, geniality and charm with an erect bearing that reflected his youthful service as an officer in the German army in World War I.

His courtly manners and optimistic spirit masked the dispiriting experience of leaving his native Germany as a refugee after Hitler’s ascent to power and the harrowing persecution visited upon him and his family because of their Jewish faith.

Mr. Frank climbed those stairs with us that day because he was willing to do whatever he could to see his daughter’s story told with fidelity, and also, perhaps, because he had discovered the depth of my father’s understanding which came, in part, from his experience in 1945 as one of the liberators of the camp at Dachau and as the officer in charge of recording the atrocities on film.

I took photographs of the detail of the hiding place--located in a “secret annex” above the small spice factory that had belonged to Mr. Frank before his property was confiscated and he was forced into hiding--and listened as Otto Frank softly recounted his story and responded to my father’s delicately probing questions. I still recall the smell of spices that permeated the now empty and idle building.

It was in the cramped attic at the uppermost section of the hiding place where Mr. Frank sat in the darkness and haltingly told of the day their captors broke down the secret door that had concealed them for two years and herded them down the stairs to a waiting police truck. After a long silence interrupted only by the sound of gulls hovering outside the skylight, my father asked, “The diary, how did it survive?”

Mr. Frank told us that the arresting soldiers ransacked the hiding place, shook open a briefcase and gathered up currency, silverware and a few items of jewelry--leaving scattered on the floor papers and a small volume bound in plaid cloth.

Anne Frank was a precocious and very gifted writer. “I want to go on living after my death,” she wrote as she neared her 15th birthday. Yet the miracle of this diary that chronicles a life of persecution and deprivation is that it is filled with hope and tolerance. “In spite of everything,” she said, “I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

Last month as we toured the Anne Frank Museum we joined others around a bulletin board displaying current newspaper articles related to racism and religious intolerance, a guiding interest of the Anne Frank Foundation. Next to a press account of a recent visit by Anatoly Scharansky to the Anne Frank House was a story with a Tennessee dateline headed, “Parents Don’t Want Children to Read Anne Frank’s Diary.”

The objection to Anne Frank’s diary being part of the high school curriculum in Greenville, Tenn., which now has, at least for the time being, the force of law, is because the parents who brought suit consider Anne Frank’s writings to be anti-Christian. The objectionable entry in “Diary of a Young Girl” was written on July 6, 1944, four weeks before Anne was arrested. She was disappointed in Peter van Daan, the object of her first and only teen love, because he “(has) no religion, scoffs at Jesus Christ and swears using the name of God.” Earnestly wishing that Peter would discover his religion, Anne wrote, “People who have a religion should be glad for not everyone has the gift of believing in heavenly things. You don’t necessarily even have to be afraid of punishment after death; purgatory, hell and heaven are things that a lot of people can’t accept, but still a religion, it doesn’t matter which, helps a person on the right path.”

This is an earnest and humane statement about the value of religion by a young girl who died at the hands of men who believed in a doctrine of supremacy that had no room for religious freedom. It is disheartening that four decades later in our country there are men and women who see that passage as anti-Christian and fear the ideas of this brave young woman who espoused nothing more dangerous than tolerance and who believed, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.