Frank memories

In the Academy Award-nominated documentary Anne Frank Remembered, we see, perhaps for the first time, the real girl, the whole girl, whose two years of hiding with her family from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic are known to the world through her diary. We have always known her thoughts and hopes and disappointments. Now director Jon Blair has given us an introduction to the girl herself, with her charms and faults, in the story of her tragically short life. And somehow, through fleshing out the portrait of this one small girl suffering as millions did, Blair makes her story at once much more personal and vastly universal.

The Franks had been a wealthy family in Germany, sending their son Otto abroad to study and work (a classmate got him a job at Macy's in New York) before he returned to Frankfurt to marry Edith and start a family. On June 12, 1929, Anne, Otto and Edith's second daughter, was born, but just two years later the family had to leave their apartment (the landlord was a Nazi), and in 1933, after the family bank failed and Hitler assumed greater power, the Franks fled to Amsterdam. By the time Anne was 13, even Amsterdam was no longer a safe haven; her family, along with another, moved into a tiny attic over Otto Frank's business and Anne began to write.

Much controversy has surrounded the diary since its initial publication. Otto Frank had insisted the Jewishness be toned down in the early editions because of his belief, and one he felt Anne shared, that their suffering was universal and if presented as such would touch and enlighten more people. Later, anti-Semitic revisionists who would have us believe the Holocaust never took place decried the diary as a hoax. In a recent scholarly edition of the diary, researchers take pains to prove that the diary is in fact genuine and was written by Anne herself.

Jon Blair, a native of South Africa and a filmmaker and playwright whose work often explores the injustice done in the name of hate and the unique spirits that overcome it (the documentary Schindler) or die trying (the play The Biko Inquest), hopes to show the insanity of racism and anti-Semitism and all forms of discrimination. In the production notes he remarks: "From my own lifetime I've seen genocide, and I've seen what happens when nations turn against themselves, and I have firmly hooked my flag to Otto's universalist message. He wanted to perpetuate her writings for those reasons, and I'm more than comfortable, happy in fact, to be a small part of that."

The remembrance of Anne Frank is effected through the use of on-camera interviews with a rich source of persons who knew Anne and her family, from the time of her birth to just a few days before her death at Bergen-Belsen. Chief among these is Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who cared for the Franks and the others in hiding and was their only contact with the world outside the darkened windows. Laureen Nussbaum, Hanneli Gosler, and Jaqueline van Maarsen, best friends of Anne and her sister Margot during their school days in Amsterdam, let us see Anne as a feisty, opinionated free spirit who was to find in writing a way of escaping her tiny, shut-in world. Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper, a survivor of the camp where Anne, Margot, and their mother lost their lives, vividly recalls the last time she saw Anne, just days before she died.

Each person is brought to the actual scene of his or her part in the story -- Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Westerbork. Peter Pepper, the son of Dr. Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist friend of Miep's and one of Anne's attic mates, is introduced by the filmmakers to Miep in the rooms where his father hid before being taken, along with the others, to die in the camps. It is an emotional scene as Peter thanks Miep for her selfless aid to his father and the others, and defends his father from Anne's diary entries lambasting the dentist's rigidity and detailing their fights and disagreements. Peter died of cancer just two months after meeting Miep.

The attic itself, today the Anne Frank House Museum, is filmed with the rooms furnished as they were during the Franks' two years there, but transparently, and the signs of a living home fade and reappear like ghosts as Kenneth Branagh narrates or Glenn Close reads from Anne's diary. At the close of each passage we are left with the bare rooms, void of all life save for a few remaining postcards of movie stars that Anne had pinned to her wall.

Anne herself appears in the only moving image of her known to exist. It is Amsterdam, June 1941, a year before she would get the diary as a 13th-birthday present (just three weeks later they had to go into hiding). On this day there is not yet fear. A wedding party has emerged from a building to enter a waiting car. A photographer filming the occasion pans up to the neighbors leaning out of windows for a glimpse and a wave. There is Anne, smiling, then turning inside, as if to invite someone to share her experience. We've been sharing it now for 50 years, and it's just become more intimate.