Joseph Berger wrote a piece today about Anne Frank’s surviving relatives and friends, and how, on notable anniversary dates, they are invited to talk about the young woman they knew and about their own often harrowing stories. He explains what drew him to the story.
Before I was a reporter, I worked as a teacher for four years, assigned to a junior high school in the west Bronx of the early 1970s. In an anthology that was used for the ninth-grade English classes, there was an excerpt from the 1950s play “The Diary of Anne Frank,” about how the family members and their friends in hiding celebrated Hanukkah in the so-called Secret Annex in Amsterdam. Not one of the students was Jewish, and some had never heard of Hanukkah, yet they all saw the 13-year-old girl forced to spend two years in a hideout as a soul mate, someone who like many of them found ways of eking fun and joy out of often miserable conditions.
I recognized then what a powerful story Anne’s was, and why the diary is among the 50 or so most read books in history, having sold even more than, say, “The Great Gatsby.” People respond to the tale of a young girl who could cling to a sense of native optimism despite her hardships. Of course, she could not have known what awaited her — death by typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp — a fate, that as her stepsister told me, might have dampened that optimism. But her spirit while she was alive resonates through the decades.
So when I learned that not one, but two relatives of Anne Frank — a second cousin, Monica Smith, and the posthumous stepsister, Eva Schloss, were planning to speak in New York about her at separate organization events, I thought there might be an article worth doing. My editor, Jan Benzel, was more than enthusiastic and suggested a broader approach beyond just the relative talks — an approach that might help explain the enduring charisma of that teenage girl, the tug of her story for so many millions and the practical appeal she has to so many organizations.
Both Monica Smith and Eva Schloss were happy to talk to me, and I spent than two hours with each of them — with Monica at her Upper East Side home, with Eva in the lobby of a Midtown hotel where she was staying — reminiscing about their memories of Anne and their own experiences. Like hundreds of other Holocaust survivors, their stories were also compelling and chilling, but they had survived. Anne, by her painful death and the alternately frightening and charming diary she left behind, remains the icon.