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Voice from the past
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An exhibition of Anne Frank's diary and photographs travels across Indian cities trying to share the Holocaust experience — of extreme nationalism, persecution and destruction — with a multicultural society in India, writes ROMAIN MAITRA.
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Anne Frank ... an icon of indomitable spirit and hope.
"Six million Jews were not murdered. One Jew was murdered, six million times over."
Abel Herzberg
WHEN the Nazis in Latvia shot Simon Dubnow, a Jewish historian, in 1941, his dying message to fellow Jews was "Write and record". This was the impulse that led the shocked world to later discover the barbarities committed in the name of civilisation — in the memories of Auschwitz survivors, or in Warsaw Ghetto diaries. But no chronicle on the experience of Nazi terror can perhaps match with The Diary of Anne Frank. Translated into 60 languages, the Diary covers only the two years of Anne's life, when she and her family were in hiding in Amsterdam during the war.
Anne Frank has come to symbolise the one-and-a-half million children among the 10 million people murdered by the Nazis, of which six million were Jews. Through her diary, presented to her by her father Otto on her 13th birthday, Anne recorded all her thoughts, feelings, and experiences. As the exhibition clearly demonstrates, she has become an icon of indomitable spirit and hope.
"One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did, but whose faces have remained in the shadow," remarked Primo Levi, the Italian author who spent 20 months in a concentration camp but survived to tell the tale. In 1995, through the documentary film "Anne Frank Remembered" viewers learnt, for the first time, what she did during the years not covered by the diary.
As part of the on-going celebrations by the Royal Netherlands Embassy to mark 400 years of Indo-Dutch relationship, a travelling exhibition of 30 panes on Anne Frank "A History for Today" is doing the rounds in different Indian cities. Conceived and designed by the Anne Frank Stitching in Amsterdam, the exhibition spans her life through rare black-and-white and sepia photographs while also visually documenting the concurrently gruesome anecdotes of Nazism. Premiered in Delhi last November, having travelled to Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Pondicherry and Kolkata, and now heading towards Chandigarh, the object of this exhibition is to share the Holocaust experience of extreme nationalism, persecution ad destruction in Holland with a multicultural society like India.
Born on June 12, 1929, Anne was the younger daughter of Otto Frank, an energetic German-Jewish businessman from Frankfurt. Otto fled to Amsterdam with his wife Edith and their two daughters, seven-year-old Margot and little Anne in 1933, soon after Hitler rose to power. In Amsterdam, although Anne learnt to speak Dutch well, she was never completely fluent in written Dutch and her diary is peppered with grammatical errors. On her 13th birthday, Anne got a significant present from her father that she herself had chosen: her first diary. A few weeks later, on July 6, 1942, the family went into hiding in the "Secret Annexe", an empty storage area behind Otto's office building along Amsterdam's Prinsengracht. It was arranged that 33-year-old Miep Gies, Otto's assistant, would daily bring them food, provisions and news from the world outside. Rare photos of the Annexe, Gies and others who helped them and those who were also forced to join them can be seen.
Each panel is sensitively designed with texts primarily from Anne's diary. In one place, she writes: "Oh, it is sad, very sad that the old adage has been confirmed for the umpteenth time: `What one Christian does is his whole responsibility, what one Jew does reflects on all Jews'." Or in another: "I'm becoming more and more independent of my parents. Young as I am, I face life with more courage and have a better and truer sense of justice than Mother. I know what I want, I have a goal, I have opinions, a religion and love." Does it not ring true today, when we read her lines, written almost 60 years ago — "Why are millions spent on the war each day, while not a penny is available for medical science, artists or the poor? Why do people have to starve when mountains of food are rotting away in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy?"
Anne wrote in her diary for the last time on August 1, 1944. Three days later, the inhabitants of the Annexe were betrayed and sent to a concentration camp. Two months later, Anne and Margot contracted typhus and both died in 1945, a few days before British soldiers liberated the camp. In the camp, Anne had met her former schoolmate Hannah Goslar who wrote later: "I always think, if Anne had known that her father was still alive, she might have had more strength to survive." After losing his family, Otto Frank finally returned to Amsterdam and found that Anne's diary and the family photo albums had been saved.
A panel in the end unites the past deeds of history with the present world by showing statements of a cross section of people summoning their inner strength to withstand the forces of intolerance and aggression. Says Anthony Brown, a 26-year-old American: "I have been shown disrespect for being Black and being gay. For being Black, it has been very subtle. I refuse to walk closely behind another person, because I don't want them to clutch their handbag or to pull their coat closer... "
The writer is based in Kolkata and writes on art and performance culture.
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