Meeting Anne Frank [Excerpt: DEAR KITTY - The Legacy of the Fatherland]

The unspoken codes of the Canadian school community seeped into my life over the next few weeks. I particularly enjoyed Mr Van Reemer’s English class which was held in the school library. He asked the class to prepare a talk on their favourite book. Out of curiosity or maybe vague remembrance, I picked up The Diary of Anne Frank and devoured it.

The day came for my turn to speak and the students sat lined along tables set up in a U-shape in the library. They jostled, leaning back in their seats and fooling around. Mr Van Reemer tapped his desk sharply. With an astute glance, he picked out a couple of troublemakers and separated them before settling his gaze on me.

‘Maggie, are you ready?’ he indicated the podium at the front of the room.

I had spent hours preparing but my excitement at sharing Anne’s story ebbed away when I felt two dozen pairs of eyes boring into me. My new classmates sprawled in their seats, all clad in standard Canadian teen attire, including college jackets, jeans, sneakers. They were sizing me up; my spectacles, my prim and proper little English girl look.

‘What’s the title of your book?’

‘The Diary of Anne Frank, sir.’ I felt my cheeks burning as the papers nearly slipped from my hands. This was followed by a coughing fit.

‘Take your time, Maggie,’ Mr Van Reemer said, handing me a glass of water. I faltered on my opening words but in a minute or two, the words flew through the air. Afterwards, he asked me why the book gripped me.

‘I guess because I found out that Anne Frank was a real person. She was born in Germany and she was exactly my age when she wrote her diary, so I thought I could learn a bit about the Germans. The book wasn’t what I expected. She and her family had fled to Amsterdam for starters. In 1942 they had to go into hiding in an attic at the top of a warehouse – they were squashed up for two years with four other people – until somebody must have betrayed them. I expected to feel sad or angry, but mostly I admired her.’

‘Oh, why is that?’ He pushed his glasses up onto his head.

‘Well, she wrote in detail about the times they were really frightened. The bombings, the roundups of the Jews. Sometimes, after the workers in the office downstairs had gone home she would creep down and watch the street below. The ragged children scrounging for food upset her. And seeing the people with the yellow stars – other Jews – being put on trucks by the military Wehrmacht to the work camps.  She felt bad about that too’.

‘Why do you think she felt that way?’

‘Well, sir, she mentioned how lucky they were to have supplies of food and a safe hiding place. It seemed unfair. It must have been hard to live with those thoughts day after day, especially when the adults in the annexe constantly squabbled – over food, over every little thing. Her mother was the worst. Then, if she said peep, they’d tell her she was ‘just a child’. At this point, I remember pausing in thought. How often had I heard my own mother’s words ring in my ears, ‘You’re just a child’?  ‘Anyway,’ I mumbled, ‘I thought she was very brave’.

Suddenly I felt bad too, but for different reasons. Until now, I’d been infuriated by my mother and groaned at her constant refrain ‘The war this, the war that’, ‘Eat what’s on your plate’, on and on. In a flash of insight, I realised that I wasn’t the only girl who fought endlessly with her mother. Anne had fought with hers too. And the girl, Anne would have been the same age as my mother now – if she had lived. She must have lived with the same harrowing sounds and pictures in her head as my own mother did. I gulped, blinking back tears. I’m not going to tell him that.

‘Maggie, Maggie!’ Mr Van Reemer had set down his glasses and he was looking at me. His words cut across my thoughts. ‘You say she was brave?’

‘Yes, Anne always stood up for herself.  She looked for all the positives in life, even in her life in Germany before they left’. I lifted my chin, looking around the room, daring them to laugh. I’d like to be like that in my life.

‘I never heard any stories about the war from my mother. And I didn’t hear stories like this one from my grandmother. She only told me how she and my mother survived the Liverpool Blitz. Mum was about the same age as Anne then, too. My nanna told me it was the most heavily bombed city in England. She calls the Germans the ‘Boche’ or the ‘Hun’…she only told me about brave people on our side. She told me that all Germans are cruel and burnt people up in ovens. I know it’s true they did it, but it’s hard to imagine’. I swallowed, then blurted out, ‘I’ve met some Germans recently, seen their beautiful forests and mountains, their Fachwerk…traditional houses…well…the Germans seem…you know, normal…like us. As I said, Anne Frank was German as well as being Jewish. And Dutch and German people helped her family, even though the German army might burst in and arrest them at any moment. It’s all so confusing…’

By now, the class was staring hard at me. I’d often heard my classmates disparaging the Germans as ‘the Krauts’, and worse – as ‘blockheads’ or ‘meatheads’ – as if to say, ‘What is there to think about?’

‘How did you feel about her situation?’

‘Well…Anne Frank said in her book, ‘I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.’ Her words made me think maybe there was more to this than old history and I went looking for it. That’s when I found out about the German student resistance in Munich, the White Rose organisation. My mum’s German friend told me about it. She grew up near Munich during the war. She found me some photographs of Sophie Scholl, her brother and friends who were killed by firing squad. Their side of the story confused me and made me want to cry. I said to her, the Fatherland was their Fatherland too, wasn’t it?’

‘And what did she say?’

‘When I asked her how grownups could do such things to their own people, at first she didn’t say anything. She just looked away. But later, she told me, ‘It was different then. Everyone was scared to speak out. It was life or death – for all of us’. That shocked me.

Mr Van Reemer went quiet after that. He looked at me, then at the class for a long time. For once, the kids sat stock-still. Then he said, ‘Thank you, Maggie'.

COPYRIGHT - Magz Morgan 2023