For decades most of us thought we knew all about Anne Frank, whose famous diary, read by millions of people around the world, made her the Holocaust’s best-known victim.
But Anne Frank has been seen through two prisms–her own adolescent perspective of herself while in hiding in Amsterdam and the show-business sentimentality, fictionalizing and distortion of a Broadway play adapted from her diary and a subsequent movie in the 1950s.
Now comes Jon Blair, a London-based filmmaker, to free Anne Frank from the prison of mythology, in “Anne Frank Remembered,” an Oscar-nominated documentary opening Friday at the Music Box.
“If there’s such a thing as a Jewish saint, Anne Frank is it, isn’t she?” asks Blair during a visit to Chicago. “You go to her house in Amsterdam and people treat it like a shrine. But really, we knew next to nothing about the girl.
“She was an ordinary girl. God knows she was an extraordinary talent, but she was an ordinary girl. I’m sure if I had been at school with her I would have loathed her. She was bratty. There are aspects of her personality which she herself became very critical of, but she couldn’t do anything about. She called it her `public Anne.’
“When her friends were not giving her the attention she wanted, she would ostracize them. She would demand to be the center of attention. Those are not particularly nice attributes. Yet, particularly in America, `St. Anne’ is totally perfect. She was everyone’s perfect daughter, everyone’s perfect sister.”
Blair was able to forge relationships with the Anne Frank Foundation in Switzerland and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, which allowed him unprecedented access to their archives and the hiding place itself. In the process, he found the only known movie footage of Anne, at age 12, leaning out the window of the family’s apartment to see a wedding entourage below.
He also tracked down eyewitnesses–Anne’s schoolfriends, neighbors, her father’s secretary, concentration-camp survivors and Anne’s last living relative, her cousin Berndt Elias–and interviewed them, recording their memories of Anne as a person and as a prisoner in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died. By accumulating a raft of minute detail, the film fleshes out Anne and her family from the 1920s onward, making their tragedy all the more painful.
Blair says he labored under the presumption that he would be the last person making a documentary film about Anne and aimed for definitive interviews of the eyewitnesses, some of whom had told their stories before but not at such length. “There’s an actuarial aspect,” he says. “These people are dying. The chances of repeating this exercise in 5 or 10 years’ time were negligible.”
One of Anne’s schoolmates remembered the skinny, dark-eyed Anne as a precocious, irrepressible girl. “My mother always said, `God knows everything, Anne knows everything better.’ She was a spicy girl. She was always friendly with the boys. The boys liked her. She was always in the center of things.” When Anne wasn’t getting enough attention, the schoolmate recalls, she sometimes would pop her shoulder out of its socket.
Jacqueline van Maarsen, a slightly older friend, noted that as Anne entered adolescence she had an intense curiosity about sexual behavior and Jacqueline’s bodily changes. But Jacqueline would only tell her so much, suggesting that Anne ask her father about the rest.
When the Frank family went into hiding on July 6, 1942, a few weeks after Anne’s 13th birthday, Anne’s diary, a square book with a red-plaid cover, would become her friend (she addressed the entries to “Dear Kitty” as if they were letters to a friend) and the repository of her innermost thoughts.
Contrary to myth, the Frank family was not Dutch, but German. Anne’s father, Otto, was a businessman in Frankfurt who moved his wife, Edith, and daughters Margot and Anne from their apartment in 1931 because their landlord was a Nazi. Two years later, after the rise of Adolf Hitler, the Franks moved to Amsterdam.
There, Otto set up a small business selling pectin, an ingredient used in making jams and jellies. As the freedom of Jews became increasingly restricted, Otto began preparing an annex behind his business office as a hiding place for his family. When Margot, who was three years older than Anne, was ordered to report to a German labor camp, the Franks went into hiding, leaving behind the impression that they had fled to Switzerland.
The Franks were joined by Otto’s business associate Hermann van Pels, his wife, Auguste, and son, Peter, and all became dependent on Otto’s four employees, especially Miep Gies, who visited every day with food and news of the outside world.
In the film, Gies recalled that Anne would wait for her at the end of each of her visits and ask about everything that happened outside. “I told her the truth,” Gies said. “The terrible truth.”
With the help of Gies’ recollections and the microscopic detail in Anne’s diaries, Blair was able to re-create the annex as it was when Anne lived there.
He and his crew worked in the Anne Frank House for a week, filming from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., when the house was closed to visitors. The physical surroundings were photographed both as empty rooms and as fully “dressed” sets. In the film, those images dissolve into one another.
“When you go there you can step through the bookcase which hid the doorway to the hiding place and you find bare rooms, which in themselves are moving because you’re actually treading the same floor boards, looking at the same walls and looking out the same windows as they did,” Blair says. “It does send a shiver down your spine, if you’ve got any sense of place or history. Obviously that doesn’t work on film, so I had to find a way to give people that sense.”
A few weeks after the Frank and Van Pels families moved into the annex, they were joined by Fritz Pfeffer, who was Miep Gies’ dentist. Anne had to share a room with him and she hated it. In one diary passage she wrote of him: “Anyone who’s so petty and pedantic at the age of 54 was born that way and is never going to change.”
Blair tracked down Pfeffer’s son, Peter, whose meeting with Gies in the narrow room Pfeffer shared with Anne is recorded on film. He provided a different perspective on his father, calling the diary portrayal “a very large inaccuracy. My father was kind, though strict.” Two months after the filming Peter Pfeffer died of cancer.
On the morning of Aug. 4, 1944, security police, having been tipped off by an anonymous caller, arrived at the hiding place and arrested all eight residents and two of their four helpers, though Gies and another secretary were spared.
After the raid on the hiding place, the Nazis looted it. The arresting officer dumped the contents of Otto Frank’s briefcase, which included Anne’s diary, onto the floor. Gies retrieved the diary, Anne’s copy books and some loose papers and stowed them in her desk drawer.
The eight Jewish prisoners first were taken to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, where the courageous Gies rushed to plead (in vain) for their freedom.
The Franks, Pfeffer and the Van Pels family were then taken by train to the Westerbork transit camp in northern Holland. On Sept. 3, the final transport to Auschwitz carried away all eight prisoners from the secret annex. The men were separated from the women.
Hermann van Pels was gassed a few weeks after his arrival. Anne, Margot, Mrs. Frank and Mrs. Van Pels were placed in one of the women’s blocks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Mrs. Frank, whose relations with Anne had been stormy, grew closer to her daughters than she had ever been before. When the opportunity came for the women to move to another camp, Anne was too ill with scabies to make the transfer. Margot and Mrs. Frank chose to remain with her, forfeiting a transfer that might have saved their lives.
On Oct. 28 Margot and Anne were separated from their mother and sent to Bergen-Belsen. Anne began to lose heart, believing her mother and father were dead. Edith Frank died in Auschwitz-Birkenau on Jan. 6, 1945, from hunger and exhaustion. Anne and Margot died of typhus within days of each other in February or early March 1945. Otto Frank was the only one of the eight to survive. After much deliberation, he decided to fulfill his daughter’s wishes and arranged for the diary to be published in 1947. (He died in 1980.)
Blair, 45, a South African who won a 1983 British Academy Award for Best Documentary for his film “Schindler,” the story of a German industrialist who saved the lives of several thousand Jews, embarked on “Anne Frank Remembered” somewhat reluctantly. “I’m not a Holocaust director,” he says. “I’m not obsessed by those issues.”
But when he discovered that Anne Frank’s story actually had been told only “in bits and pieces, the chance to peel away the mythology and look at the reality, to do something that had historical resonance” proved irresistible.
“Her story has become very sentimentalized,” Blair says. “There’s a tendency to see her as the girl next door in suburban New Jersey. The whole thing has become generalized, rather than looking at the uniqueness of her life.
“There are lessons from Anne’s experience–albeit that it is the Holocaust, a Jewish persecution–that can be learned about discrimination wherever it occurs.”
