Anne Frank’s diary introduced me to reality
/The Boston Globe
Beverly Beckham
I am about to begin my Anne Frank journal. My friend Maureen bought it for me last year when she and her husband visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The journal is red and plain, embossed with a shiny outline of the narrow building where Anne Frank hid for 761 days. Its blank pages are lined. It has a pocket in the back, which holds a 4x7-inch black-and-white photo of its young author. It will be my 40th journal. I should have more but I didn’t start keeping them until I was 46.
And yet, Anne Frank is the reason I began to write at all. I was 13 when I first read her diary. Until then, what I knew about World War II was what my mother told me, that my father had fought in it but I was not supposed to talk about it. And what I culled from black and white movies, “Pride of the Marines,” “Mrs. Miniver,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which I watched on Sunday afternoons with my mother on a small black-and-white console TV that was the centerpiece of our parlor.
Anne Frank’s diary introduced me to reality.
How could I have been so ignorant? It was 1960. How could someone 13 years old and in eighth grade be unaware of the world?
I was an only child. I believed in Peter Pan. I wished on first stars. I searched for the pot of gold at the end of every rainbow. I didn’t have siblings to set me straight. There was no internet and no television stations dedicated to the news. As an eighth-grader, I wasn’t allowed to take out books from the adult section of Randolph’s Turner Free Library. I grew up on myths and fairy tales and teenage romance novels, not nonfiction.
Plus, I went to Catholic school where I learned not world history, but church history. I learned about saints and martyrs and lepers and Father Damien. I learned that to be blessed with the stigmata, to bleed from your palms and your feet and your side the way Christ bled from his, was a sign of God’s love. I used to pray for the stigmata.
What I didn’t know, what I hadn’t yet learned, is that there is so much suffering in the world that no one has to pray for it. It’s there for the taking. This is how Anne Frank’s diary opened my eyes. She was a young girl my age, living her life with her friends in a fairy tale country, who could easily have been me because wasn’t I living my life with my friends in a fairy tale country, too? Maybe she chased rainbows to their end? And then, just like that, she had her life taken away from her. Because? Because why? Because she was Jewish? I will never understand.
I knew all about the boy who saved his whole town by using his finger to plug a hole in a dike. I’d read “Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates” a half-dozen times. But I had never read one word about World War II so I didn’t know there were people like Anne Frank all over Europe who were forced to hide in an attic, in a room, in a barn, in a closet, who had to be quiet, to walk on tiptoe, to not flush, to not sneeze, to not go outdoors and feel the sun or the wind or the rain. Who did everything to stay alive. But died, anyway.
In her diary, Anne wrote about her life in hiding. She observed, she pondered, she wished, she imagined and, it was a diary after all, she complained. But she was philosophical, too, and so positive, so certain that in time, good would defeat evil.
But it didn’t. And it hasn’t. And here we are again.
“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart,” Anne wrote in her diary. These are the words for which she is most famous. The words that are supposed to give us all hope.
But are people really good at heart?
“You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear —
You’ve got to be carefully taught!”
Oscar Hammerstein wrote these lyrics 75 years ago for the Broadway play “South Pacific.” He believed them. And maybe when I first heard them I believed them, too. But I don’t know anymore.
There’s a miniseries on Netflix right now of Anthony Doeer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “All the Light We Cannot See.” The show explores right and wrong in a world at war. It also shows how hate is nuanced and how hate is learned.
I haven’t seen the show yet. I read the book nine years ago and it has stayed with me. But as powerful as shows are and as accurate as words can be, they will not change the world.
So, what will change it? We have to change it. But how?
