“We need not just history lessons, but the lessons of history”

Otto Frank, The Anne Frank House and Memory of the Holocaust

We need not just history lessons, Otto Frank insisted, but the lessons of history. History lessons can be distant, far away, analyzed intellectually without emotion from a neutral stance. But the lessons of history are for today: they are moral, meaningful, and they inform how we conduct ourselves now. They are urgent, and they are in constant dialogue with the present. Memory and history are distinct, but must remain tethered closely together, or drift into the menace of mythology. If textbooks are the primary tools of history lessons, stories are the tools of memory, and Anne’s story has become a cornerstone for the world’s shared memory of the Holocaust.

Otto Frank, who as an officer of the German empire’s army endured the trials of the First World War, was perhaps the best equipped of the eight people in hiding in Amsterdam to deal with the stresses and deprivations of the

Secret Annex, the 450 sq. ft. space where the Franks, van Pels, and dentist Fritz Pfeffer spent more than two years eluding the Nazi grasp. He quieted the uproars, tamped down the conflicts and served as a peacemaker as the eight people in hiding grappled with fear, uncertainty, stress, hunger, boredom, stillness, silence, and the dim light of rooms with blacked-out windows.

Otto lost everyone to the Holocaust, but amidst his traumatic losses, he received his daughter’s diary, a profound gift to memory. Anne herself wrote about how improbable it was that a child author writer might achieve an audience, but the extraordinary resonance of her words produced one of the world’s most read non-fiction books, now available in 73 different languages, and read in communities as diverse as the indigenous Maori of New Zealand the secret girls’ book clubs in Kabul, Afghanistan, while the Taliban bans them from schools.

The Diary’s power to engage and resonate all over the globe defies simple explanation; there is childhood innocence, the reflections of a gifted writer, the juxtaposition of the mundane details of daily life in hiding against the backdrop of the cataclysmic conflict in Europe, and the power of getting to know the personal experiences of an individual so intimately. She achieves a remarkable feat of feeling relatable even as she grapples with such unique and unprecedented circumstances, in a wholly atypical context: as she put it, “The Annex is an ideal place to hide in. It may be damp and lopsided, but there’s probably not a more comfortable hiding place in all of Amsterdam. No, in all of Holland.”

If the Diary was the first gift to memory, the Anne Frank House itself was the second. The global interest in Anne Frank provided the support necessary to save the Anne Frank House when a corporation came to Amsterdam after the war to build a factory, intending to level the entire block to do so. Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote the introduction to the Diary when it was published in the United States, called upon her wealthy and powerful connections of the mid-1950s — including Senator John F. Kennedy — to help raise the funds to preserve the Anne Frank House; it was saved from demolition, and the Anne Frank House was formally established as the “Anne Frank Stichting [Foundation].”

Otto understood that memory was not just about the past, and that resulted in two powerful decisions. First, the Anne Frank House is today an empty space. The Nazis not only attempted to murder every Jewish human being in Europe, they wanted to steal all of their property. When tips were called in about people in hiding, the police called a moving company they had contracted with to pull up behind them and haul away all of their property. When Otto returned from Auschwitz, everything had been removed from the hiding place. He insisted it stay that way. The emptiness of the space reflected the loss he felt, the absence of the seven human beings he had spent two years in hiding with.

Yet Otto also insisted that the space be not just a mausoleum, a place to remember the dead, but a living educational institution, and dedicated to combatting prejudice and discrimination and to bringing young people together, one where young people’s voices are empowered, and through dialogue they learn from one another. In this fashion, the Anne Frank House educators have been active in 89 countries, reaching millions of people.

Memory includes what happens passively in our individual minds. But Otto appreciated that memory is also active, and shared, and that when we act today on the lessons of the past, then remembrance has truly become part of our culture. ■