By Joel H. Cohen
(Photo: Wikipedia)
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Curiously, what finally undammed my tears were the faded photographs of movie stars, under glass, on the bedroom wall.
More than anything else, it was the sight of them that tore me emotionally, more than the solemn walk up the steep staircase and through the revolving bookcases that all too briefly had been a lifesaving barricade . . . more than the mournful hush that enveloped us, tourists on holiday, as the significance of the house we were visiting sank in … more than the Resistance museums throughout Europe … more, even, than hearing from a concentration camp survivor in an Amsterdam synagogue, “we’ve never recovered from the catastrophe. Two generations were destroyed.”
My eyes misted at all of these, but what got to my gut and soul was seeing Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland and the rest on the wall of the Anne Frank House, the ordinariness of that gallery of stars emphasizing the fact that the gifted, doomed child who had hidden there was otherwise so much like the rest of us as young teen-agers … these icons of make-believe pounding home the bigger, bitter reality that refuses to go away.
A WORLD APART
Guilt of survivorship a half-century later?. Quite possibly. But why Anne Frank, above all? Why should a man relate so closely to a girl he never met? Is it because she was so much like the rest of us or our children, and therefore so easy to identify with and mourn? Is it because we know her as a person, not a number, and while she symbolizes 6 million, the child who perished needlessly was someone real and unique?
Or, for me, was it primarily because of the coincidence of two Jewish kids born 18 days and an ocean apart? And, that, but for the grace of geography, our fates might have been reversed?
Not that the “why-not-me” guilt was ever so deep that I would have chosen to change places. No, I prefer to think we both lived here instead of there. If she had, we might have been neighbors, friends, classmates. Who knows? At the risk of trivializing her memory, I wonder if we might even have gone to the prom together.
At some point, Anne would have known that, before I was a teen-ager, my bedroom wall was adorned with photos too, not of movie stars but ballplayers out of Sunday rotogravure sections, and pennants from United States cities given to me by relatives as souvenirs.
Had she grown up here, the girl with the big, dark eyes, the eternal optimism and the exceptional gift of communicating and confiding, probably would have been given a Sweet 16 party. Perhaps I would have been invited. She might have been invited to my Bar Mitzvah in May 1942, though I don’t remember having girls other than cousins at the synagogue or at the open house at my grandmother’s that followed. As gifts, I got war bonds and fountain pens and, ugh, a dictionary.
When, on June 12, 1942, Anne became 13, she was given a diary as a birthday present. She started writing in it two days later. On June 20, 1942, she wrote, in part:
“After May 1940, good times rapidly fled; first the war, then the capitulation, followed by the arrival of the Germans, which is when the suffering of us Jews really began.”
She went on to tell of the numerous anti-Jewish decrees that ensued — from having to wear an identifying star to handing in their bicycles, and being banned from trains, non-Jewish stores, cinemas, visiting Christian friends and even sitting in their gardens after curfew time.
“But life went on, in spite of it all,” she wrote. “Jopie used to say to me, ‘I’m scared to do anything because it may be forbidden.’”
Here in New York, we had no such constraints. On July 6, 1942, with gift money I’d received for my Bar Mitzvah, I took my father and uncle to the Polo Grounds, treating them to $3.30 lower-stand seats to the baseball All-Star Game (won by the American League, 3-1). But we also made sacrifices. In deference to the war, the game started at 5:30 p.m., and the ballpark’s lights had to be off by midnight, so as not to illuminate a target for enemy planes.
Two nights later as I was babbling to anyone in earshot about one of the highlights of my life, the Frank family went into hiding, sentenced to silence. On July 8, Anne noted in her diary: “Jews in hiding who were found out or betrayed were sent to a concentration camp immediately, and the penalty for helping people was death.”And, on July 11, 1942, she wrote: “Our little room perhaps looked very bare at first with nothing on the walls; but thanks to Daddy who had brought my film star collection and picture post cards beforehand and with the aid of pastepot and brush, I have transformed the walls into one gigantic picture.”
And then: “I can’t tell you how oppressive it is never to be able to go outdoors, I am afraid we shall be discovered and be shot. That is not exactly a pleasant prospect.”
GLUED TO THE RADIO
On Staten Island, meanwhile, we bade sad but proud goodbyes to neighborhood teen-agers off to war, several of them to die in action. At home on Sunday nights we stayed glued to the radio and Gabriel Heatter, praying he would have “good news tonight.”
On the home front, we did what we could for the war effort. Our fathers, too old for active military service, served as Air Raid wardens, and we youngsters did our share by reminding the wardens of the weekly meetings. Among those we summoned was a kindly seeming German man who occupied an attic apartment on our hilly street.
IDENTIFYING STARS
While Anne Frank daydreamed about Hollywood and freedom, we went to the movies where the usual fare was war films and Movietone News. At one matinee, Movietone reported that the FBI had arrested several purported Nazi spies, among them our kindly neighbor. He’d been using his vantage point to spy on troopships leaving for Europe from Staten Island, and transmitting his reports to Nazi superiors on a secret radio. That was our one brush with Nazis.
On June 6, 1944, D-Day and the hope it generated is reflected in Anne’s diary entry: “Great commotion in the Secret Annex. Would the long-awaited liberation that has been talked of so much, but which still seems too wonderful, too much like a fairy tale, ever come true? Could we be granted victory this year, 1944? We don’t know yet, but hope is revived within us; it gives us fresh courage, and makes us strong again. Since we must put up bravely with all the fears, privations and sufferings, the great thing now is to remain calm and steadfast.”
‘OPEN UP’
Alas, two months later, on Aug. 4, 1944, a truck pulled up outside the house on the Prinsengracht canal in Amsterdam and police headed directly for the bookcase on the third floor that concealed the Annex. Aroused and horrified by the banging and shouts of “Open up,” the Frank family and their relatives and friends were powerless to resist. (Among papers thrown carelessly on the ground was Anne’s diary.)
The Annex residents were sent to Westerbork, a Holland camp where thousands of Jews were held prior to transport to forced labor or extermination camps. Anne and the others were then loaded on cattle cars for a three-day journey to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. The group was broken up, and Anne and her sister Margot sent to Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus in March 1945.
At the time of her death, Anne was 15. So she never had a Sweet Sixteen party . . . or a prom, or experienced such traditional, and taken-for-granted rites of passage as engagement or wedding.
Among the survivors Anne left (as we all are) is one mourner who marked his birthday on May 25, 18 days before Anne would have celebrated hers. So many imponderables that won’t go away. Perhaps foremost: Why would ‘they’ want to hurt a kid like that? Why anyone, but especially a kid so unique and yet so much like the rest of us?
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Cohen is an author and freelance writer who lives on New York City’s Staten Island. This article appeared previously in the Staten Island Advance and the Jewish Week and is reprinted with permission. Comments intended for publication in the space below MUST be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the United States.)