Yesterday was International Holocaust Day.
And for what appears to be the first time, there were subtle reminders and hints here and there about its approach. There was the feminist-angled article about Melania Trump deciding to forgo Davos and go alone to the Holocaust Center. There was this thing on Facebook where Yad Vashem invited its Facebook community to join their IRemember wall where your profile would be linked to the name of a Holocaust victim from their Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names and then posted on the wall.
I had my name linked to one of the names in the Database.
And for what appears to be the first time, there were subtle reminders and hints here and there about its approach. There was the feminist-angled article about Melania Trump deciding to forgo Davos and go alone to the Holocaust Center. There was this thing on Facebook where Yad Vashem invited its Facebook community to join their IRemember wall where your profile would be linked to the name of a Holocaust victim from their Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names and then posted on the wall.
I had my name linked to one of the names in the Database.
See, the Holocaust has always held a bit of fascination to me. Those close to me would disagree. They'd say that far from being just 'a bit', this is one of my favorite topics, of which my ear will perk up every time someone mentions anything about it. Well, they wouldn't be quite wrong either... given that I've gleaned as much resources as I can offline and online, that I mark Schindler's List and The Pianist as two of my favorite movies, and that any random resource about The Holocaust that pops up still grabs my ear.
I was thirteen when I came by my first resource about The Holocaust..
That was the year I chanced upojn an excerpt, a short paragraph really, of Anne Frank's diary in my English textbook of which someone from the Curriculum Planning Division had included.
That one paragraph, written in the childlike, lively voice of Anne herself, and which later I would find out to be the very first entry that she wrote in her new diary- was what hooked me in. I can't explain why, but I dearly wanted to find out more about this young Jewish girl who started this diary in 1942 when she was thirteen, and who had to go into hiding from the Nazis. I wanted to know what life was like for her in 1942 Holland, what she did, what her school was like, what her life was like, what her friends were like, was she the same as me, was she any different...
In short, I wanted to know her.
In short, I wanted to know her.
Over the years I've come to know her a bit better.
I've read through her diary four, five times, and each time I feel like I'm getting to know her a little bit more. The first part interests me the most, what with her anecdotes and mention of her school and friends and parties. Throughout the diary, her honesty, her innermost thoughts, her humor, her own story, it all resonates with me. And though I've read more resources about The Holocaust since then- Elie Wiesel's Night, and Day. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas. Schindler's Ark- even the Holocaust Cybrary- nothing means more to me than The Diary of a Young Girl.
What does it for me, I think, is the personal voice that her diary was written in, the voice of a regular child, a young girl immortalized through her writings, immortalized through years and time.
I've read through her diary four, five times, and each time I feel like I'm getting to know her a little bit more. The first part interests me the most, what with her anecdotes and mention of her school and friends and parties. Throughout the diary, her honesty, her innermost thoughts, her humor, her own story, it all resonates with me. And though I've read more resources about The Holocaust since then- Elie Wiesel's Night, and Day. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas. Schindler's Ark- even the Holocaust Cybrary- nothing means more to me than The Diary of a Young Girl.
What does it for me, I think, is the personal voice that her diary was written in, the voice of a regular child, a young girl immortalized through her writings, immortalized through years and time.
That's just what it is.
A voice.
A voice that cuts through the millions and resounds with a voice of hope. A voice that speaks of life as it is for her, not of a reollection, not with a purpose, not with the same spirit as one would do a memoir. This diary stands in a category in which it is not a book of fiction, neither is it a memoir.
Instead it is the voice of a thirteen year old girl who turned fourteen and went into her fifteenth year. It is the voice of a girl who lived in Amsterdam and had birthday parties and had friends and visited friends' homes and who then later had to go into hiding into The Annexe with her mother and father and sister and who because of that, lost all her friends and lost her regular way of life and had to make do with new routines of living whilst all the time having to behave like they weren't there at all.
Instead it is the voice of a thirteen year old girl who turned fourteen and went into her fifteenth year. It is the voice of a girl who lived in Amsterdam and had birthday parties and had friends and visited friends' homes and who then later had to go into hiding into The Annexe with her mother and father and sister and who because of that, lost all her friends and lost her regular way of life and had to make do with new routines of living whilst all the time having to behave like they weren't there at all.
She never wrote her diary reliving through events that happened in the ghetto or the camp. She never wrote her diary 'looking back'. Her original manuscript was not written with the intention of remembering the six million that perished. How was she to know the number? How was she to foresee that she, tragically, would become one of them? Her diary, therefore, is not a memoir of a singular event in which she wrote it whilst recollecting through events of day by day. Instead, it is a real-time account, written as it happened 'this afternoon, this morning, yesterday, the day before.' And she wrote it as it was, incidents big and small, reactions big and small, perspectives and perceptions, everything.
It wasn't written with the indisputed knowledge that her loved ones had died. It wasn't written with the memory of the tragedy and the trauma that unfolded before her eyes. It was written in a way that as ordinary people, living ordinary lives with needs and wants and dreams and emotions and dreams and hope, would have written, as if the war, and the very real terror that they were in were just another inconvenience which they had to cope with in the day by day.
That alone, I think, has made her diary a voice of hope in what we now know as a terrible, terrible time. That alone, knowing what we know today, reminds us that in a time of Chelmno and Westerbork and Auschwitz and Birkenau II and Bergen-Belsen, there were people, victims themselves, who lived, knowing that there were terrible things going on out there, and yet could not do anything about, but to try and live and survive and hope.
She captured what living in The Annexe was all about. She captured events as they happened, day by day. She captured what hiding from the Germans meant- what they ate, what they could not eat, how they used the toilet, how they washed, how they had to keep the windows shut and the curtains sealed, how they had to tiptoe and could only get a break mid day when the workers went home for lunch, how life for them really began in the evenings when all the workers had gone home, how they had to deal with tight spaces and interactions with her fellow dwellers.
She captured her dreams of what she would do after the war, her own feelings about what was going on, about the news on the radio, about everything that she saw and heard that was going around her and she captured what she was feeling right now about her mother and father and Margot and Peter and everyone else.
There is humor here and there, and which makes her diary a clincher, a spark that distinguishes it from everything else. There cannot be humor in Night. There cannot be humor in a memoir. But because she had hope, and because she wrote her diary with the sense of hope and future, we have her wit and her humor. Amidst everything that was going on, oh my goodness me, there was actually humor!
There is humor here and there, and which makes her diary a clincher, a spark that distinguishes it from everything else. There cannot be humor in Night. There cannot be humor in a memoir. But because she had hope, and because she wrote her diary with the sense of hope and future, we have her wit and her humor. Amidst everything that was going on, oh my goodness me, there was actually humor!
As it is, we not only have her vivid account, we not only have her story, we not only have her perspective of a typical teenager in the 1940s towards her family members (little has changed, I should say), but through her diary, begun in 1942 and abruptly cut off in the August of 1944, we have the life of one fifteen year old with the name of Anne Frank, who died in Bergen Belsen, put in blessed memory.