THESIS
INTIMACY AND SELFEXPRESSIONS. CHILDREN’S HOLOCAUST
DIARIES AS A VALUABLE HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL PHENOMENON,
PRESENTED ON THE EXAMPLES
Submitted by Ewa Kalińska In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Master Degree in History Holocaust and Genocide Studies School of Humanities University of Amsterdam Fall 2016 Master’s Committee: Advisor: Dr. Karel Berkhoff Second Reader: Professor Johannes Houwink ten Cate
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ………...3 Chapter I: The Diary of Anne Frank ………...11 Who was Anne? ………..11 The diary of Anne Frank as a part of the process of mediation ……….14
The essence of The Diary of a Young Girl universality………....16
The power of Anne Frank’s diary the concept of hope……… 20 The Diary of a Young Girl and other children’s diaries ………. 23 Chapter II: The distinctiveness of children’s Holocaust diaries ……….26 Children during the Holocaust ………26 Categories of diaries ………...30 Why children wrote diaries ……….34 How children see and understand the world ………...36 The importance of the concept of trauma ………...43 Chapter III: The diary of Dawid Sierakowiak………....49 Life and death of Dawid Sierakowiak ………51 The diary by Sierakowiak as valuable historical source ……….53 Life in the ghetto ……….59 A forgotten diary? ………...62 Chapter IV: The diaries of Dawid Rubinowicz, Rutka Laskier and Renia Knoll………63 Three diaries ………....63 Dawid Rubinowicz……….………..66
The specificity and fate of Rubinowicz’s diary………...71 Two teenage girls …………...………..………… 75 The value of Rutka Laskier’s diary ………....…… 78 The diary of Renia Knoll ………...…….79 The value of Knoll’s diary ………..81 Conclusion ………..………89 Bibliography ……….……..92 Acknowledgements .………... 99
INTRODUCTION
The diary of Anne Frank plays an important role in perception of the Holocaust, especially in the United States, where it is greatly used for education purposes. As the authors of the book Anne Frank Unbound. Media, Imagination, Memory, Barbara
KirshenblattGimblett and Jeffrey Shandler, have noted, the various forms of presenting and interpreting the story of Anne Frank can serve different purposes, depending on current circumstances and concepts. Meanwhile, Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who suffered through the Second World War, had to live in hiding and then tragically died in the concentration camp, almost fades away from the conversation. She became a symbol, serving more as a medium for dialogue than as a true historical source with authentic historical relevance. Mostly because of that, in 1986, NIOD the Institute of War, Genocide and Holocaust Studies decided to publish the most complete to date version The Critical Edition of the diary. It was created for historical reasons as the members of the Institute had noticed inconsistency between different published versions of the diary. This confusing situation raised doubts about the relationship between the original text and its translations, and could devalue its historical meaning. It could also impacted future translations and, therefore, its further perception and understanding. And finally, this could harm personal integrity of Anne Frank herself. The editors stated in the forward that: “The main aim of this edition has been to offer the reader the chance to compare the extent, original diary entries of Anne Frank with each other, as well as with Het Achterhuis, the original Dutch version of the
Diary of Anne Frank”. 1
1 Barnouw, David and Gerrold van Der Stroom, eds, The Diary of Anne Frank. The Critical Edition, New York: Doubleday, 1989.p. ix.
Without proper commentary and context the impact of Anne Frank’s diary turned out to be somehow harmful and even defensive at times. The complexity of the Holocaust should not be oversimplified by omitting some facts. It should be rather explained more indepth with significant attention paid to details. The diary of Anne Frank, at some point, lost or was very close to losing, its authenticity.
In Salvaged Pages. Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, Alexandra Zapruder notes that the significance of Anne Frank’s diary has persisted over the years and has influenced academia. She says: “Thus, it no longer mattered whether the diary reflected the internal life of the writer, whether the writer spoke to circumstances or truths larger than his or her own experience, and whether the diarist expressed hope for humanity. Indeed, many writers who introduced diaries of other murdered children no longer sought meaning from what was in the text at all, but simply applied the familiar frame of Anne Frank’s diary to each new one that surfaced”. 2 However what has received little attention is how much can actually be derived from young writers’ diaries. In Their Childhood and the Holocaust. A Child’s Perspective in Polish Documentary and Autobiographical Literature, the Polish scholar Justyna KowalskaLeder introduces a set of diaries written by Polish children during the war and the Nazi occupation in Poland. She notes that the diaries are a specific literary form where the authors do not choose to portray the broader context of their comments and hardly explain themselves. According to KowalskaLeder, this is why this type of writing can be quite challenging for the reader. It is not easy to see, comprehend and fully appreciate all the information, and the clues left by the diarist. In the diary it is possible to observe the dynamics of the author changing over the course of some events. The reader has to detect
2 Zapruder, Alexandra, Salvaged Pages. Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 1971, p. 6.
those small nuances and adjust the way the text is perceived. KowalskaLeder notes that: “For deeper understanding that it is necessary to have more knowledge drawn from other sources and imagination, allowing the reader to come closer to these aspects of the situation, which the author of the diary does not turn their attention to, considering these to be obvious”. 3 According to KowalskaLeder children wrote diaries in order to be able to cope with stress and fear during the war. Very often they felt lonely and by writing a diary they created the sense of private conversation. KowalskaLeder introduces an interesting concept of selfconfirmation which children were aiming for by writing diaries. She writes: “During the war life loses the status of being obvious in the minds of those threatened with extreme danger and begins to be one that turns towards death, which is often expressed in well worn expressions such as ‘life with a sentence’ or ‘in the shadow of death’. Such a context forces one to put forward the fundamental existential question; what do we live for, whither strides our existence and by what means is it, if at all, justified”. 4 In case of the diaries an important question concerns their credibility, and how to determine whether the author intentionally omits certain information, makes something up, or changes his point of view. KowalskaLeder points out that history might be told through the perspective of the metaphors used by the memory of the person. It might make the process of interpretation much more problematic, but should not be disregarded. KowalskaLeder also notes that during the war, and according to the occupier, the role of the child, and the childhood itself, was redefined. Children were seen as the enemy, used 5 3 KowalskaLeder, Justyna, Their Childhood and the Holocaust. A Child’s Perspective in Polish Documentary and Autobiographical Literature, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2015, p. 7. 4 Ibid, p. 170. 5 Interestingly, The Association of Children of the Holocaust in Poland does not recognise the childvictims under the Soviet occupation, even when they match the most significant
as the labor force, moreover at the end they were not seen as the humanbeing. They shared the same, tragic fate as the adult victims of war and the occupation. They experienced trauma and tried to cope with difficult situation which, very often, they could not actually understand. KowalskaLeder says: “The different nature of the experience despite the fact that they also experienced trauma, proved decisive in not including these testimonies into a study devoted to the Holocaust”. Moreover, usually children verbalize their experiences 6 differently, if at all, which makes interpreting their diaries historically and psychologically difficult. The diary of Anne Frank was published as early as in 1947 in the Netherlands, and quickly became popular in the United States after its publication in English in 1950. However children’s diaries in Poland were not published before 1960s. Polish academia had to 7 struggle with the censorship during the time when the Communist Party was in power since the end of the war until the year of 1989, and actually till the first entirely free Parliamentary elections in 1991 when the political reforms could start and, eventually, influence academia. Dawid Rubinowicz’s diary was published in Poland in 1960, but the full edition of Renia Knoll’s diary was published as late as in 2013 by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Before that, only some fragments of both of the diaries were printed in the Institute’s bulletin, but the full edition came much later. Likewise Dawid Sierakowiak’s diary had to wait over 70 years for the publication of its all five parts. The diary, as any literary form has strengths as well as limitations. A diary can be direct, intimate, fresh, and honest all of these elements bring unusual depth in understanding of the past. But the same elements can make it hard for a reader to fully grasp element of the definition used by the Association which is the fact that the child could not be older than thirteen when the Second World War started in 1939. 6 KowalskaLeder, p. 25. 7 That is the year of publication the diary of Dawid Rubinowicz.
what the diarist tries to convey. Diaries are interesting but they can be confusing. Nevertheless, they should never be forgotten but rather challenged by the researchers and students. Dick van Galen Last and Rolf Wolfswinkel wrote in the epilogue to their book Anne Frank and After. Dutch Holocaust Literature in Historical Perspective that literature is associated with fantasy, but academia is associated with the facts. Therefore it seems difficult to read diaries, being undeniably a form of literature, and to look for solid and reliable information, based only on facts. If there is anything like “literature of the Holocaust”, diaries would be it. Different from the testimonies of the survivors, written from the perspective of experiencing and surviving tragedy, the Holocaust diaries refer only to the concepts of “here” and “now”. Human memory can be misleading, but diaries are written at the very moment, sometimes without much reflection. Usually diaries were kept by people who were looking for stability, for support, who wanted somehow regain control over their lives, put order to what was confusing and frightening. Diaries of children are a special kind of literary expression for the war was the only thing these writers knew. They wanted to give sense to what they could not understand. Sometimes children were not even able to name what they felt and struggled to express their thoughts in the way they sensed was the most appropriate and sufficient. They learned to exist in world which seemed impossible to live in. Children ask other kinds of questions than adults do or they do not ask them at all. Their diaries, written in times of turmoil, are one of the most incredible kind of primary sources. They speak to the reader not only through the content, but also through the style, grammar, pace of the entries, intensity of the emotional load. They present constant deterioration of the environment children were accustomed to, loss of their families, and constant struggle to cope with constantly changing surrounding.
This thesis looks at children’s diaries as a specific sort of literature with all its limitations and possibilities. I describe the most interesting aspects of the research about the diaries the possible reasons why children decided to write diaries during the war, and how they wrote it while their life was all the time under the threat. I also look closer at the concept of trauma and what impact it could possibly had on the way children expressed themselves. The focus here is on specific examples of the children’s diaries mostly originating in Poland, with the exception of Anne Frank’s. I have decided to look closer at the most famous Holocaust diary of all time the diary of Anne Frank. The purpose of mentioning her diary is to show that the intentional process of universalization of the diary led to its misunderstanding, and the misplacement of its role in the Holocaust historiography. Anne Frank became an iconic symbol, outside of any historical context. I analyze in more detail two diaries written by boys, whereby the age difference between them was quite significant, as was the environment in which they lived. Dawid Sierakowiak, who was fifteen when he started writing his diary, lived in the ghetto in Łódź and suffered of starvation. His diary is quite detailed and was kept with extraordinary scrupulousness. Dawid Rubinowicz, on the other hand, was much younger only eleven when he started his diary. He described his life in the countryside during the Nazi occupation. Both boys paid a lot of attention to their diaries. Sierakowiak attempted to write a chronicle of the ghetto in Łódź, but quickly was overcome by hunger. Dawid Rubinowicz let his fears speak in his diary as he was afraid he and his family might be in serious danger. The other two Polish diaries analysed here were written by Renia Knoll and Rutka Laskier. Both girls were fourteen when they decided to write and, similarly, they were much more than the boys focused on private affairs. Nevertheless, the reader can find in their texts a lot of details about life in wartime Kraków, in the countryside and in the ghetto. Rutka
Laskier mysteriously hints that she might not allow the reader to know everything about her person although she could be quite direct and honest about some topics. Renia Knoll survived the war but even in her postwar testimony never commented on her diary. This thesis tries to find an answer to the questions whether there is any clear literary and scholarly value in the children’s diaries, and what can be gained from reading them. Are children diaires, as a literary genre, distinct from other literary forms of expression and if so, what would be that difference? Would it make it an easier or more difficult read? Each diary shows how differently children tried to face the difficulty of the situation of the war and occupation in different ways. The reader might see the traces of trauma and children’s coping system presented in their texts. Diaries were treated by children as close friend they missed during the war, but needed to talk to. Daily entries were the only way they could express their fears and search for possible answers as they tried to organize and bring back any kind of order into their lives. Thus I argue that each diary is not only a valuable historical source but also psychological study of a lonely person who suppresses emotions and reactions and releases them only on the pages of the diary. Finally I will like to point out the depth of psychological analysis which is required to effectively interpret such diaries, even they might seem infantile and simple.
CHAPTER I: The Diary of Anne Frank
“Hence, this diary. In order to enhance in my mind’s eye the picture of the friend for whom I have waited so long, I don’t want to set down a series of bald facts in a diary like most people do, but I want this diary to be my friend, and I shall call my friend Kitty”
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, June 15th, 1942.
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is the best known child Holocaust testimony, and “it is the most widely read book in the world, after The Bible”. Opinions about the diary of 8 Anne Frank are almost always polar some voices are celebratory, stating that Anne speaks for all of us, and her text is one of the most influential Holocaust account ever discovered, the other opinions are rather dismissive, criticizing the credibility of the text and even assaulting for the Anne Frank herself. One might wonder why specifically this one diary became so famous, although so many children around Europe kept writing while enduring the horrors of the Nazi occupation and war. This chapter presents the phenomenon of Anne Frank’s diary and puts in context the role other children’s diaries might have in the future historical research and educational process. Who was Anne? Anne Frank was a young and ambitious girl who had a dream of becoming a famous writer. Although she did not live to witness it, she became one of the best known writers in history. Her diary is still read by millions of people around the world and and has been translated in many languages. There was a movie and the award winning play where both those artistic 8 van Galen Last, Dick, and Rolf Wolfswinker, Anne Frank and After. Dutch Holocaust Literature in Historical Perspective, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996, p. 10.
initiatives were a success. But as Ian Buruma notes in his article titled: “The Afterlife of Anne Frank” published in The New York Review of Books: “[...] with fame of this scale, the quality of the original work does not fully explain the legendary status of its author”. 9 Buruna says that Anne was too intelligent to write just simple message of “Universal redemption”. Anne Frank is destined to live forever, as so many people can relate to her, although her situation seems to be impossible to relate to. Despite the pressure of living in isolation and the denial of the right to fully live, Anne wrote about her teenage problems, complicated relations with her parents, and her first love. To some point, those elements lessen the impact the diary might have in terms of the descriptive document. On the other hand, whatever there is for the reader to refer to can make Anne’s prose more moving and more private. Buruma claims that Anne Frank is an icon for those who have turned the Holocaust in the kind of secular religion. Almost anyone can find 10 something for himself in the book the inspiration, hope and the answer to many questions. Ian Buruma adds: “Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl is known universally and is the most widely dramatized work of its kind”. 11 Anne, together with some members of her family was in hiding in one of the buildings in Amsterdam from July 1942 to August 1944. Her diary is considered a personal account, but as it is known nowadays, its publication is a compilation of her notes she arranged in daily entries. Anne started writing her diary after she heard in the Dutch radio in London calls for writing war testimonies. The diary in the form it is known today was edited by her father
9 Buruma, Ian, “The Afterlife of Anne Frank”, The New York Review of Books, February 19th, 1998, [Accessed: April 11th, 2016],
<http://www.nybooks.com.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/articles/1998/02/19/theafterlifeofannefr ank/>.
10 Ibid,.
11 Eisenberg, Azriel, The Lost Generation. Children in the Holocaust, New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1982, p. 75.
from Anne’s initial notes. The girl found pleasure in writing it, and was dreaming of a literary career. Anne Frank did not survive the war she died at the beginning of 1945 in the BergenBelsen concentration camp after she became sick with typhus. The only person who previously was in hiding together with Anne and survived the war, was her father. When the war was over, he published his daughter's texts but he did not reveal its origin. The version Otto Frank gave to print was partly edited by him, some elements were added from the other notes of Anne. He also omitted some passages he considered inappropriate. Otto Frank also fixed majority of spelling and punctuation mistakes. THe 12 diary was published first in Holland as soon as in 1947. American writer Meyer Levin who was in France at the end of the war reporting on liberations of the concentration camps read it soon after the publication. Upon arriving to the United States Levin: “[...] came to believe that ‘someday a teller would arise from amongst themselves to recount the story of the genocide of European Jewry”. 13 According to Alicia Nitecki, a reviewer of Lawrence Graver’s Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary , says that according to Graver, Levin asked Otto Frank for the permission to dramatize the diary so it could more accurately speak for the story of the Holocaust. Moreover, Levin believed that only Jewish writer could do this diary justice since “no stranger can as well express the soul of people as someone from that people”. Robert 14 Alter claims that Levin’s obsession with Anne Frank’s diary was already a pathology, which he connects with the American culture of 1950s and how the destruction of the Jews was perceived and presented at that time. Levin believed that this “teller” should account for all 12 Barnouw, David and Gerrold van Der Stroom, eds, p. 63. 13 Zapruder, p. 12. 14 Nitecki, Alicia. “Echoes of the Holocaust”. The Sewanee Review 105.4 (1997): cxviii–cxvcxx. [Accessed: April 7th, 2016], <http://www.jstor.org.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/stable/27548410>.
the horrific things which happened to the Jews during the war. Moreover, Levin wanted to make that story as comprehensive as possible, since he realize how difficult it might be to American audience to understand the horror the Jews of Europe had to endure. Upon coming across the diary Levin wrote that through the diary: "The world could finally and clearly absorb the enormity of the mass murders perpetrated by the Nazis". Levin writes in 1952 for 15 New York Book Review: “Anne Frank’s diary is too tenderly intimate a book to be frozen with the label ''classic',' and yet no lesser designation serves. For little Anne Frank, spirited, moody, witty, selfdoubting, succeeded in communicating in virtually perfect, or classic, form the drama of puberty. But her book is not a classic to be left on the library shelf. It is a warm and stirring confession, to be read over and over from insight and enjoyment”. 16 The diary of Anne Frank as a part of the process of mediation
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is a phenomenon on many levels and in so many instances. Barbara KirshenblattGimblett and Jeffrey Shandler introduce in their book 17 Anne Frank Unbound the concept of mediation which takes place where the text is translated, becomes a material for the movie script, a theatrical performance, a part of the museum exhibition, or even it is focused around the chestnut tree which Anne could see through her window and which she actually mentioned in the diary. Through the process of mediation something new and different is produced and it is only related to the original material. Moreover: “Mediations also create new relationships: between the creator of this new work and its subject and audience, as well as between the new work and other works”. 18
15 Alter, Robert, “The View From the Attic”, The New Republic, December 4th, 1994. 16 Levin, Meyer, “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank”, New York Book Review, June 15th, 1952.
17 KirshenblattGimblett, Barbara and Jeffrey Shandler, Anne Frank Unbound. Media, Imagination, Memory., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012, p. 6.
One of the examples of this mediation is the way Anne Frank’s death is perceived almost completely apart from the text of the diary. In the former BergenBelsen concentration camp, as the result of the dramatization of the memory about Anne Frank, people started seeking ways to commemorate her death. Henri Lustiger Thaler and Wilfriend Wiedemann in their essay “Hauntings of Anne Frank: Sittings in Germany” describe the first instance when, in the result of growing awareness of Anne Frank’s life and dramatic death, students from Hamburg arrived to Bergen Belsen in 1957 in order to mourn after Frank. Although it was, and still is, unknown where Anne and her sister Margot were buried, the students put flowers on the mass grave and dedicated this gesture to Anne. This action have motivated thousands of young people to participate and also commemorate Anne Frank. The attempts to reconnect with the past was derived from the very specific political situation in Germany at that time. Anne Frank was a way young people in Germany wanted to search for the past of their parents and their nation as a whole. Anne Frank became the medium connecting the young Germans with very difficult past of their country. The authors of the essay say: “Anne Frank appeared in German public culture at this crucial moments, defined by the moral imperatives of a new generations. Initially, the diary and its dramatization, presented Anne’s story to Germans as a tragedy with universal implications. This reading soon gave way to using Anne’s story as a vehicle for articulating a generational drive that centered on exposing a postwar culture of ignoring Nazi war crimes”. 19 Moreover, certain mediation can inspire another kind of mediation and so on, when the relation with the original text consequently fades away. For example the building in Amsterdam, where Anne was hiding, nowadays is a museum. This very institution represents its own political and historical agenda, and, in addition to that, the building itself became 19 KirshenblattGimblett, Barbara and Jeffrey Shandler, eds, p. 147.
symbolic and exists in popular culture independently as the selfexplanatory concept. Similar can be the example of the famous pictures of Anne Frank, which has been used in various ways, not necessarily connected with the diary. She became an icon and a celebrity. Her face is well recognized, associated with her diary and the specific time period in history. It is also used symbolically to convey different messages. Examples of this could be combining her picture with Palestinian headscarf what speak for the Jewish solidarity with Palestinians or promote support for human rights issues by the Stay Vocal Foundation created by Alex Eaves in 2004. Each of those processes add new meaning to the diary itself, and to the way the 20 reader can analyze the text. Anne’s face became an icon of the twentieth century, a present day Mona Lisa. 21
The essence of The Diary of a Young Girl universality
The essential element of the phenomenon of the diary of Anne Frank is the text itself. There were examples of the stories of the missing parts of the diary what established the legendary dispute over the originality of the text and the course of editing it by Anne herself, as well as her fathers and later, the editors and publishers. The text also has been changed through many translations to different languages. Thus we may wonder what do we actually talk about when we talk about the diary of Anne Frank. If only because of the process of postwar editing done by the third party, it is clear that whether it should be considered as the same kind of historical account as other war children’s diaries. There are a lot misunderstanding and controversies about the origin of the text itself, as well as its genre. Anne Frank became a symbol of the Holocaust, although her experience does not reflect the experiences of most of the children who lived during the war. First 20 KirshenblattGimblett, Barbara and Jeffrey Shandler, eds, p. 21. 21 Ibid, p. 13.
versions of the diary were edited by Otto Frank who removed fragments which he believed would picture his daugher in a wrong, inappropriate way. The version from 1991, published in English, had enclosed the parts with the reflections Anne made about her nascent sexuality and relations with other family members. Actually the horror of the German occupation is only reflected in her complaints about the inconvenience of not being allowed to go outside. Later in the diary Anne wrote a little bit more about her fear of being denounced, and she described physical hardship of staying cramped in a small room with other people. Nevertheless, she was mostly focused on her relations with the members of her family and other hideouts in the flat. KowalskaLeder suggests that Anne Frank’s diary should be rather considered as a psychological study of the interactions between people living in a small space, under the pressure and threat, than the Holocaust diary. Also she says: “The diary is also a rich account of the growing up period of a teenager, one that is in isolation from the outside world, who in the hideout finds evoke an essential unwillingness or in fact pure hatred”. A scholar proposes that the reader should recognise the specificity of the situation 22 of Anne Frank, and not necessary treat her diary as a representative account for the children’s experience during the Holocaust. Otto Frank possibly needed to universalize the diary so his daughter could be connected with his own experience of being assimilated Jew, and also the tragic loss of his family, and the fact that he was the only surviving person. The only danger KowalskaLeder sees in the popularity of the Anne Frank’s diary is that without adequate commentary, but with inclusion in many educational programs, nowadays many young people falsely believe that Frank’s life was the exact experience of the majority of children during the war. Most of the children’s diaries written in Poland were published much later 23 than Anne Frank’s and with no additional commentary. The main focus in their interpretation 22 KowalskaLeder, p. 161. 23 Ibid, p. 161.
is on their factual value and they hardly play any symbolic role. In this sense, diaries of Polish children are not as universally used as the diary of Anne Frank. Neither their texts nor they themselves exist separately from the literary form they represent.
Although, at the end, the fate of Anne Frank was the same as that of other children during the Holocaust, but it was long after she stopped writing her diary. Dick Van Galen Last and Rolf Wolfswinker in their book Anne Frank and After wrote that: “she does not, nor can she, represent the suffering of so many other children in the ghettos of Warsaw or Łódź, or the children who died at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen or the police battalions”. The 24 authors recall the argument presented by A. Dresden that the reader is able to deal with just a small doses of suffering and therefore the diary of Anne Frank is so popular simply because it is not “terrible enough”. 25 The way the diary is presented can actually reduce the meaning of Anne Frank’s life, and her tragic experience during the Holocaust. Cynthia Ozick refers in her article to the Pulitzerwinning Broadway play based of the diary, made as the adaptation of Frank’s text by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. She claims that as the Broadway show was supposed to be “funny, hopeful, happy”, it devalued the diary itself, and, moreover, put the Holocaust as the historical event in completely different light. Cynthia Ozick is criticized by Ian Buruma who replied to her review in The New York Review of Books. He was quite shocked by Ozick’s selection of wording she used to describe Otto Frank, and the project Meyer Levin was on quest to do in order to popularize Anne Frank’s diary. According to Buruma, Ozick should not imply that Otto Frank was trying to fix the diary to support his own agenda. Buruma quotes after Otto Frank who, when asked if he intends to continue his struggle against antiSemitism, said that would rather act against discrimination, and lack of 24 van Galen Last, Dick, and Rolf Wolfswinker, p. 14. 25 Ibid, p. 14.
understanding among the people in general than just focus on antiSemitism alone. Otto 26 Frank decided to transform his daughter’s diary in a tool for further education. In times of creating the patterns of collective suffering, this kind of rhetoric helped people to rebuild their own identity. Nevertheless, Cynthia Ozick refuses to refer to so called identity politics and competitive victimization what she sees Ian Buruma tries to do by talking about antiSemitism, and objectivity of the presentation of the diary. 27 Several features of the Anne Frank’s diary give a lot of opportunities to expand the meaning of her book and her person. The diary can be considered as the open text, where it is not finished itself, the same as the life of Anne was dramatically cut short when she died in the concentration camp. Barbara KirshenblattGimblett and Jeffrey Shandler suggest in their book that the style of Frank’s writing can give hope, and then her tragic death, create “a disturbing affective disparity as well as a narrative gap”. This inspires some people to look 28 for the answers, alternative endings to that inspiring story of a girl hiding in the attic. Since 1970s, people's’ focus on emotional aspects of survival of the Holocaust, personal stories, and the concept of guilt, pulled the attention away from the actual events and proper analysis. The diary of Anne Frank is a good example of the attempt to look at the heart of the dramatic event and not seeing its core meaning, and the consequence. History of the young girl, who tried to survive and hid for over two years, is nothing more than tragic. 26 Buruma, 1998.
27 Ozick, Cynhia, “Anne Frank’s Afterlife”, The New York Review of Books, April 9th, 1998, [Accessed: April 11th, 2016],
<http://www.nybooks.com.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/articles/1998/04/09/annefranksafterlife/>. 28 KirshenblattGimblett, Barbara and Jeffrey Shandler, eds, p. 324.
The power of Anne Frank’s diary the concept of hope The diary of Anne Frank is also widely used in education. As the Ilana Abramovitch states in her essay: “Teaching Anne Frank in the United States”, American teachers use the text to present to their student variety of topics ranging from history, race relations, future, selfexpression or even sex education. Many educators claim that students prefer to start 29 their education about the Holocaust from learning about the diary first. Also, analyzing personal texts allows students to establish better connection with the topic and stay more engaged throughout the process of learning. 30 The diary of Anne Frank can introduce the concepts of hope in times as harsh as war, which appears no matter what. As present world is focused on the future, conversation about the past and discussing history can be problematic. Nevertheless education is essential and the diary of Anne Frank comes handy. It seems easier to talk about the tragedy of genocide but at the same time to build up on Anne’s idealism and faith in a better future. There is, however, a paradox. It is known that using personal texts helps to teach about history and allows the students to bound with the protagonists. As the same time, students resist hearing of dramatic fate of those they have already bounded to. Ilana Abramovitch cites Karen Spector and Stephanie Jones quite shocking results of the experiment done among the eightgraders in the United States, one student wrote in class: “Knowing Anne, she was happy in the concentration camps. She didn’t have to be quiet anymore; she could frolic outside. She could be in nature. She loved nature. I think it was a welcome relief for her”. 31 32 Moreover the authors of the article add that improper ways of using the diary can actually 29 KirshenblattGimblett, Barbara and Jeffrey Shandler, eds, p. 160. 30 Ibid, p. 167. 31 Ibid, p. 167. 32 Spector, Karen and Stephanie Jones, “Constructing Anne Frank” (Critical Literacy and the Holocaust on EighthGrade English,” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 5, no. 1 (September 2007), p. 3648.
lead to the situation when student lose the ability to see the nuances of history and Anne’s life itself. Spector and Jones say that the moral lesson the pupils take away from studying historical texts is derived from the context which accompanies whole process of learning. Therefore it can be easily changed by the teacher and directed into more in depth form. Therefore hope and optimism is what people choose to see in Anne and her diary. This hopeful narrative is what fits into postwar political agenda in the United States, and still is easier to convey than the grim historical reality of the Holocaust. This prism stresses the importance of individualism presented through selfexpressive forms of writing. Abramovitch says that the diary is used excessively as a tool in the American educational system because of geographical and temporal distance events Anne describes took place in far Europe and between the time where Anne wrote her diary and when the diary is being read by contemporary students significant number of years have passed. The diary is supposed to help to mediate that distance and through the text and the person of Anne teach the students more about the Holocaust. At the same time it is a major challenge not to ignore the distance between what has been presented as familiar (the diary and Anne) and the distance concepts (the war and the Holocaust). Anne Frank’s diary proves that the imagination does not have its limits. Hyman A. Enzer and Sandra SolotaroffEnzer in their book: Anne Frank. Reflections on Her Life and Legacy elaborate further on the topic and say that: “At the same time, the universalization and Americanization of its (diary’s) content fit into the dominant mood one that was simultaneously repressive and liberal a time when being ‘different’ suggested either the wrong political attitude or the wrong social attitude. Within this environment , The Diary of Anne Frank became accepted as a symbol of the Holocaust”. 33
33 Enzar, Hyman A., and Sandra SolotaroffEnzar, Anne Frank. Reflections on her Life and Legacy, Chicago: University of Illinois, 2000, p. 135.
The diary of Anne Frank is one of the most important books of all times, and for sure, the most famous book about the Holocaust in general. Meyer Levin for the first time noticed in his review what enormous power is in the diary as a literary genre, and how Frank presented it: “Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment Anne Frank's voice becomes the voice of six million vanished Jewish souls. It is difficult to say in which respect the book is more 'important,' but one forgets the double significance of this document in experiencing it as an intimate whole, for one feels the presence of this childbecomingwoman as warmly as though she was snuggled on a nearby sofa”. Levin suggested in his review that words from the diary can bring to live those who 34 perished during the Holocaust and, of course Anne Frank herself. Already, at that time, in his review, Levin suggested the way Frank’s diary should be read by the future generations. The diary of Anne Frank was supposed to restore hope in humanity, the general belief in goodness, and hope in future, as he quotes from her the fragment: “'It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. 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, I hear the everapproaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again...”. Besides quite important and influential first review of the 35 diary done by Levin, Alexandra Zapruder also noted that the moods of audience at the time of 34 Levin, 1952. 35 Levin, 1952.
publication of the book, as well as the slowly evolving reactions to the past, played important role in the way the diary was received at that very moment in history. 36 The Diary of a Young Girl and other children’s diaries The way the diary of Anne Frank has been read around the world and over the years has influenced how diaries, especially children’s diaries, are perceived in general. Celebration of hope despite the tragedy, disconnected the writers from their diaries. Their texts are not seen and interpreted individually but they are rather seen through the already prepared set of categorizations. The diaries: “[...] became a series of absolute truths about what any such diary would mean, regardless of its attributes, the literary talent of the writer, or its content.”37 Sadly most of the diaries, which were discovered and published after the war, were in the end interpreted through the pattern already constructed in the relation of the diary of Anne Frank. Robert Alter says that: “[...] many diaries of Jews who perished have been published that reflect a complexity of adult perspective and, in some instances, a direct grappling with the barbarity of Nazism; and these are absent from Anne Frank's writing. For this reason, the emblematic power attributed to her book seems a little odd.” He claims that the popularity 38 of the Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is connected to two elements her not full adolescence but not childlike writing either, and the fact that her Jewishness is quite marginal. Diaries of children are generally difficult to read full of psychological depth, unexplained and sometimes completely misunderstood and, at the same time, irrelevant for the adult audience. Moreover Alter claims that the diary is what the American people of 36 Zapruder, p. 5. 37 Ibid, p. 5. 38 Alter, p. 40.
1950s were ready and eager to hear the :”[...] feelsad and feelgood representation of genocide [...]”. Distinctiveness of Frank’s diary helped to present a Holocaust which is less 39 troubling and easier to deal with. In the diary the Jewish people are not presented as separate group with its own traditions and identity, who could be singled out as the targeted group of the victims of the racial discrimination. At the same time, the world from the perspective of a 14year old girl follows quite simple patterns and is easier for the reader to absorb. People 40 unwittingly look for simplicity when they feel distracted and psychologically overwhelmed.The diary of Anne Frank seems to be the remedy for those who still were not able to fully comprehend what had happened to people during the Nazi occupation. Marianne Hirsch in the article :Who was Anne Frank? Who is she now?” from The Women's Review of Books says there are two kinds of readers of the diary. First group are 41 those who identify with Anne and who are able to associate with her experience. This requires seeing the diary not only as the primary source, but also and mainly, as the secondary source. Anne Frank’s prose allows to build bridges between the time differences. This was possible because Anne Frank aimed at publishing her diary after the war, therefore she rewrote most of the part of the diary jumping from one time span to another, and adjusting her text to the new situation and her new approach. The second group of readers are those who are critical about the diary and does not see much of the value in Frank’s prose. Cynthia Ozick in 1997 wrote for The New Yorker the article where she stated that thinking of Anne Frank as being a young literary genius is just a nonsense. Ozick claims that: “The diary has been bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly denied. Among the falsifiers have 39 Alter, p. 41. 40 Ibid, p. 42. 41 Hirsch, Marianne. "Who was Anne Frank? Who is she now?" The Women's Review of Books Mar.Apr. 2013: 8+. Literature Resource Center. Web. April 11th, 2016.
been dramatists and directors, Anne's own father, Otto Frank, and the public, both readers and theatregoers, all over the world.“ 42 An important question is whether a child, age 14, can have selfawareness developed on such high level as Anne Frank presented in her diary. She says: ‘‘I have one outstanding character trait that must be obvious to anyone who’s known me for any length of time: I have a great deal of selfknowledge. In everything I do, I can watch myself as if I were a stranger. I can stand across from the everyday Anne and, without being biased or making excuses, watch what she’s doing, both the good and the bad. This selfawareness never leaves me’’. The 43 reader might wonder what enabled this girl to write so profoundly, when most, if not all other children’s diaries written during the war are rather focused on basic subjects of family, hunger, closeness of death. Their texts are clearly marked by trauma which the children experience more or less consciously. The reader might speculate that Anne Frank was an extraordinary writer and she was simply mature enough to write in such style. That of course is true. But it is also inevitable to say that she was in a different situation than most of the young diarist during the Nazi occupation. Comparing and contrasting, which in this situation, very often leads to simple omitting the rest of the diaries, could be misleading for the reader who wants to learn more about the experience of people during the Holocaust. 42 Ozick, 1997. 43 Carey, William, B., M.D., :Development of Self Awareness Anne Frank”, Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, Vol. 27, No. 2, April 2006, [Accessed: April 11th, 2016],
The quotation from Anne Frank’s Diary comes from edition: rank A: The Diary of a Young Girl. New York: Doubleday; 1995, p. 326. Translated by Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler.
CHAPTER II: the distinctiveness of children’s Holocaust diaries “[...] Hiding the hurt and emptiness to smile instead of cry It's more harder now knowing someone else knows It would have been better if I kept my secrets closed You never would expect anything like this from me It can get anyone can't you see Not all scars show not all wounds heal Sometimes you can't always see the pain someone feels”. Lisa French Scars , 44 Secrets Someone Else Knows Children during the Holocaust “Diaries, selfreport instruments used repeatedly to examine ongoing experiences, offer the opportunity to investigate social, psychological, and physiological processes, within everyday situations. Simultaneously, they recognize the importance of the contexts in which these processes unfold”. Diaries allow to examine the events in their most natural context without 45 the likelihood of the retrospective due to the fact that the time difference between the describe event and its account is limited. Accounts written from the perspective of time usually are, at least to some extent, planned and have clear composition in structure and meaning. In case of diaries, not only the element of possible audience could be vaguely confusing and sometimes not specified, but also the factor of composition and planning is 44 Hutchinson, Luisa, “London Bomb Blast Victim Lisa French to Tell her Emotional Story”, Chronicle Live, April 21, 2013, [ Accessed May 7th, 2016], <http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/northeastnews/londonbombblastvictimlisa29515 87>. 45 Bolger, Niall, Angelina Davis and Eshkol Rafaeli, Diary Methods: Capturing Life as it is Lived, Annu. Rev. Psychol. No. 54, 2003, p. 579–616.
only as structured as the literary form of a diary allows it to be. For example Anne Frank took under consideration the existence of the reader of her diary, and she kept in in mind throughout all the creative process. At the same time, small Dawid Rubinowicz did not express in the text any intention of showing his diary to anyone. Studying diaries allows to look at psychological features of individuals, personal interactions, as well as sociological events. A study done at Psychology Department at the New York University by Bolger, Davis and Rafaeli suggests that studying diaries allows to look at temporal dynamics of the person and his experiences which are always put in specific context of the events. 46 Diarists quite randomly pay attention to the possible audience. In order to read and interpret diary it is necessary to understand its author’s way of thinking and seeing the world. It is challenging since diarist do not explain themselves. They reflect on the world through their personality and experiences which usually are unknown to the reader. Diaries are the authentic source of information about past events. In addition to that, children’s diaries very vividly illustrate things which usually has already been categorized and, in consequence, omitted by researchers. Young diarists tend to as different kinds of questions. Majority of events are their first experiences which, later on, build on their worldview and perspective. The Nazis regime murdered 1.5 million children. This number included over a million of Jewish children living in different European countries targeted by the Nazis between year 1933 and 1945. Children were killed for racial reasons, as the members of the partisans groups and categorised as “dangerous”. Older ones were more likely to survive, as the Nazis used them as forced labor. According to the information provided by the United States 46 Bolger, p. 579–616.
Holocaust Memorial Museum, the fates of Jewish and nonJewish children during the Holocaust can be ordered into five categories: 47 1. Children murdered in the killing centers right after the arrival usually small children, unable to work, and at the same time survive on their own. 2. Children killed right after birth were dying because parents were not able to take care of them outside or in the the concentration camp or in the ghetto. 3. Children who were born in the concentration camps or in the ghettos and were hid by the prisoners some survived but most of the children died in the camp due to bad living conditions and hunger. 4. Children older than twelve years old, who were subjected to the medical experiments or used as labor force that was the fate of the majority of the children in the concentration camps. 5. Children killed in partisan operation many older children took part in very dangerous partisan operation. Survival of each child was a miracle. Despite physical and mental suffering, many children have managed to find ways to adjust to the situation which seemed almost impossible to handle. However, there is that difficulty in researching the topic of the children survivors of the Holocaust. Testimonies they gave after the war are marked with their post war, adult experiences, sometimes very tragic. Also some of the memories are unconsciously departed from their memory as the element of the selfdefence system. Sometimes it is their own, survivors’ choice not to go back to the painful past. Zofia Banet, a member of the Association of the Children of the Holocaust in Poland, said: “There is less and less of us 47 “Children during the Holocaust”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, [Accessed: May 2nd, 2016], <https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005142>.
the children of the Holocaust, who miraculously survived this hell on earth. The term “survived” is not adequate to describe our state, since the pain and trauma has not left us and never will; it is inside of us, and takes its toll on our families”. Stories of children who were 48 deprived of childhood and instead endured tragic events of war, are truly extraordinary evidence of the past. Children can provide the researchers with the perspective on war and the Holocaust which is different from what can be found in the writings of the adults. Children are focused on absorbing and adjusting, they hardly interpret and change the facts. The way they see the world is simple, and therefore, it can be almost symbolic and emblematic. The Yad Vashem the World Holocaust Remembrance Center states on its website: “Important primary sources for the study of children have been ignored for many decades and include official papers and documents, diaries and memoirs, private correspondence between family members. The personal materials are extremely interesting when focusing on social aspects. Diaries can for example show the increasing hardships that affected children in the different stages of the Shoah from being separated from the society to the painful separation from their families; they give important insights into the ways children dealt with the increasing deterioration of their life, how did they cope with their continually changing universe, both practically and emotionally. The diaries can also demonstrate that children played a central role in the struggle for survival as well as maintaining family cohesion”. 49 According to Barbara Engelking, a professor from Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, reading diaries is about something different than just historical analysis of events or sources. She agrees with Stanisław Różycki who claimed that it is more about the respect for 48 Banet, Zofia, “Pamięci Osoby Mojemu Sercu Bardzo Bliskiej” The Association “Children of the Holocaust” in Poland, Warsaw, April 2008, [Accessed: May 2nd, 2016] <http://www.dzieciholocaustu.org.pl/szab9.php?s=myionas_20.php>. 49 The Yad Vashem. The World Holocaust Remembrence Center, [Accessed: May 2nd, 2016], <http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/institute/children_and_the_holocaust.asp>.
the victims and letting them to leave out some things unspoken of. She also refers to the 50 highest feeling which are hidden and visible only in human soul. Engelking says that personal testimonies are to provoke, and inspire to search for new topics, which sometimes might even seem to be too difficult to research. She adds that if we show a lot of respect for the writers, we look into their silent reactions, and we are going to be patient, we might find some answers, full of surprises. 51 KowalskaLeder’s work notes that the reader always needs to remember that there is no one ultimate version of the Holocaust. Also children's diaries have to be carefully analyzed. Children’s diaries are only one of the ways to look at the Holocaust, which interestingly demands additional engagement from the reader since the diaries demand new moral and psychological perspective in order to be interpreted and put in context. Only complex knowledge of various sources can be a base for more detailed understanding of the Holocaust we, the readers, should never limit ourselves to only one kind of texts. Categories of diaries Specificity of the document can influence the way certain material is read and understood. It can be analyzed from the specific perspective of the authorreader relation or through the category the material belongs to, which here would be a children's’ diaries. Moreover, Justyna KowalskaLeder adds: “[...] it should be continually remembered that in researching testimonies it is not a question of testimonies as such, but their linguistic record in which the culture and practice of speaking in the case of the author play an enormous role”. The 52 meaning of the diaries is not only in their wordy content but also in the form of the material. 50 Engelking, Barbara, “Tajemnica Hesi. Zapis Emocji w Świadectwach Zagłady”, Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, Nr 10: 168184, (2014), p. 170. 51 Ibid, p. 184. 52 KowalskaLeder, p. 11.
The diarists unknowingly leave many additional information, in countless ways in changing handwriting, crossing outs, possible drawings, or notes on the margins. Essential is reading those texts in a particular context. At the same time, this context is shaped by specific cultural environment. 53 Out of at least 1.5 million of children murdered during the Holocaust only small number decided and was able to keep diary. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum suggests that the diaries can be divided into three broad categories. The first category would be the diaries written by children who escaped German controlled territory and joined the partisans group. Those diaries would be usually composed in the late 1930s or early 1940s by children of assimilated Jewish parents, from countries like Germany, Czech or Austria. They usually describe the issue of displacement, being far from home, and missing home. Children usually reflect on lost home, language, culture, and environment they were accustomed to. They are homesick and confused. They describe the trouble with bureaucratic process of getting visa and obtaining the rest of required papers to be able to live the country in order to save life. If they left illegally , they often write about the constant fear and hard troubling journey to get out of the country. The second category of diaries would be journals written by children living in hiding. Their diaries are very dramatic. The children very often give up on their emotions or movements simply out of fear that it can alarm someone, and their life might be at risk. Some children were hiding on false papers pretending that they are nonJewish. Stress and pressure they were forced to endure, sometimes even for years, very often turned out to be devastating in a long run. In addition, children knew that if they misbehave they might cause harm not only to themselves but also to the rest of the family as well as their rescuers. 53 KowalskaLeder, p. 11.
The last category of the children diaries would contain the journals of children who were living in the ghettos or under other kinds of restrictions from the Nazi occupier. According to the information provided by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, these are the majority of the diaries which have been retreated after the war. Children who were hiding in the ghettos usually describe everyday situations which they had to witness and heard of. Very often the diaries reflect of segregation, hunger, physical suffering, everyday struggle to find any kind of job in order to earn some money and be able to survive another day. Children describe the tension between the family members, where parents go through nervous breakdowns, and child is left without any psychological support. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that each diary presents only fragment of its author’s life, but they are all significant and provide readers with a lot of information about the Nazi occupation. Children’s diaries hardly ever give the correct chronological order of the events. 54 Children also tend to omit any kind of the listing of the names, or political references. They rather present subjective version of events, as important as any other kind of historical account. While reading a diary the interpretation provided by a child is then completed with the interpretation of the adult. 55 Most of the Jewish children, whose diaries have been found, died during the Holocaust. Alexandra Zapruder, the author of Salvaged Pages. Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, adds” “Indeed, the tragedy of a diary that survives its writer is not that we can read the text, come to know the writer in some concrete or abstract way, and grieve his or her 54 “Children’s Diaries During the Holocaust”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, [Accessed: May 7th, 2016], <https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007952>. 55 Kopciowski, Adam, “Recenzje i Omówienia: Mosche Frank: To Survive and Testify. Holocaust Traumas of Jewish Child from Zamość, Tel Aviv 1993”, Zeszyty Majdanka, t.XXI, 2001, Lublin: Paśtwowe Muzeum na Majdanku. Towarzystwo Opieki nad Majdankiem, p. 371.
