Customer Reviews

The Footsteps of Anne Frank

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On a recent visit to Amsterdam I was not able, as things turned out, to revisit the Anne Frank house at 263 Prinsengracht, where she and her family hid from the Gestapo in 1943 and 1944. However it did prompt me to read this touching, dignified and informative piece of research, astonishingly only now receiving its first notice here. Ernst Schnabel had identified a total of 78 people who knew Anne Frank and first published his account of what they told him in 1959. Two of these he did not choose to try to interview, and small wonder. One he believes to have been the man who probably betrayed the Franks to the nazis, the other of whom `was indisputably one of the executioners', which I take to mean one of the guards or other staff at Belsen, where Anne Frank actually died from illness or grief or both. Of the remaining 76 he found only 42. Some had certainly died, very few from natural causes, the others were untraceable. Those interviewed naturally include Otto Frank, Anne's father and the only survivor among the family, and also Miep and Elli and others of their protectors familiar from the play and film The Diary of Anne Frank. Schnabel's purpose is to give their recollections in their own words, touching in some of the gaps in our knowledge of her from her early childhood up to her final incarceration and death. The names of contributors other than those already known are disguised, but documented in the archives of a firm of lawyers.

I would not have expected the author of such a book to be able to restrict himself literally to his stated purpose of giving us a portrait of a young girl, especially as the reminiscences are fragmentary in any case. It would not have been possible not to talk about the behaviour of the nazis and their collaborators, or about the conditions at Auschwitz and Belsen. However Schnabel's tone is a model of calm and restraint, his horror and incredulity at how any human beings could behave to other human beings in such a way all the more effective for his rejection of hyperbole and for the complete absence of sentimentality, self-pity or mawkishness. Nor does he allow himself any conventional piety along the lines of purportedly telling his story `so that nothing of the kind can happen again'. This book predates the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia and the Sudan, it is perfectly obvious that those prepared to do that kind of thing will do it anyway however much the rest of us talk about the Holocaust, and I credit him with the clearheadedness to know that. The interest of this short book is not a matter of revisiting scenes already well known, but lies in the fresh information it provides. Those of us accustomed to a dramatised scene of the Franks' arrest featuring blaring car horns, screeching brakes and the thump of a rifle-butt on the door will find a salutary corrective here, for one thing. The occupiers, Schnabel says, were practised and adept at this kind of thing by 1944, and his depiction of the sheer quietness of how it was done is something that is going to stay in my memory. The new contributions are fairly peripheral in one sense, but such a figure as Anne Frank deserves as good a biography as can be assembled, and I for one am grateful to have them.

Presumably there is not a lot more of the story to come to light. I would call this book exemplary in the way the author has gone about his task. He has been scrupulous in not prompting his witnesses, I accept absolutely the accuracy of his retelling of their accounts, and I admire his self-restraint in such additional comment as he permits himself. Whether I shall ever now revisit 263 Prinsengracht I very much doubt.