Three thoughts about Anne Frank:

#1: When Anne Frank pops up in folks’ social media timelines these days, it’s usually to point out that she shares a birth year with Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Newhart, and Barbara Walters. This fact is supposed to warp one’s sense of history, as Anne Frank, captured in black and white in an ostensible author photo, is always frozen in time – a dark time. How could she have been born in the same year as folks we remember in colour?

And then, in 2009, footage surfaced of Anne Frank.  And she’s moving!  On July 22 1941, Anne’s neighbour at Merwedeplein 39 was getting married.  Young Anne leans out of the window of her house at #37 to get a good look at the bride and groom. Have a look below.

And here is the same footage, colourized.

The first comment for the first video is: “Who’s cutting onions here?!?!” 

Every time I see this footage, my eyes, too, succumb to “onions.” Perhaps it’s because, for a moment, Anne Frank has life and movement… Or perhaps because we see an extraordinary young woman enjoying an ordinary moment before her life was overtaken by extraordinary barbarity. (This is the very definition of dramatic irony. We know what awaits her, but she does not. How awful.)

#2: For Anne Frank’s 13th birthday in 1942, Anne received an autograph book, bound with red-and-white checkered cloth and with a small lock on the front. She decided she would use it as a diary, and named it Kitty. She began writing in it almost immediately. 

Today is Anne Frank’s birthday.

She would have been 95 today.  She would have witnessed so many important events in our people’s history had she survived the Second World War. And I am sure she would have had some thoughtful things to say about them.

And so, on her birthday, I take a moment to think of her, but also to consider what many regard as her indefatigable optimism.

#3: She famously wrote on July 15, 1944:

“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 ever approaching 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.”

The first line was transformed into a song I’ve heard day school choirs sing on Yom HaShoah. For many, it is the essence of Anne Frank’s diary.

However, this paragraph appears in the middle of her diary. One might wonder if that’s how she felt at the end. Would she feel the same after being arrested, deported, being separated from her parents, forced into labour and then dying in a camp? She was about to turn 15. She never made it. The last days of her life were marred by suffering. What would she have written then had Kitty been with her?

I would like to think that she would have remained hopeful.

I am not alone.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl recounted his experience as a prisoner at various concentration camps during the Second World War - and how absolutely essential hope was for survival. He related that between Christmas 1944 and New Year’s 1945, the camp’s sick ward experienced a death rate “beyond all previous experience.” It was not because of starvation, a further deterioration of living conditions, or rampant disease. Frankl states that people died because “the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naïve hope that they would be home again by Christmas.” When this hope was dashed by harsh reality, prisoners found no reason to continue holding on. With nothing to look forward to, the mind let go, and eventually the body. Frankl developed a concept he dubbed “tragic optimism” - an optimism in the face of tragedy. I believe Anne Frank would have embraced this with a ferocious passion.

David Gillham’s 2019 novel Annelies imagines as much as well, positing an alternate reality where Anne Frank survived the war, and became a world famous writer.  Annelies ends with her staring into the mirror of her Greenwich Village apartment, applying makeup as she muses about Tikkun Olam.

“Tikkun olam, Rabbi Souza had told her. Her duty to repair the world.

How? By living. By putting words on paper.

She steals another breath. She steals another breath as she counts another brushstroke, just as she counts another heartbeat, alone with herself, a survivor, a beating pulse, a living inheritor of all that has passed, advancing into an unfixed future, the chatterbox, the bundle of contradictions, Anne favored by God, surrounded by the hope of the dead.”