Dear Anne Frank

By Nancy Davidoff Kelton

Anne Frank’s face leaped out at me from an aqua banner when I first saw it over the entrance of the Center for Jewish History on January 27 at this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It choked me up. I was heading to my apartment building across the street. I live on the second floor facing out. My living room is closer than my neighbor’s, closer than anyone’s to the Center’s entrance and to Anne Frank’s photo. There is a second identical banner behind it. I stared at them with a lump in my throat.

Each day a line of ticket holders forms at the entrance every 45 minutes for the Anne Frank Exhibition. Sometimes when I am looking out, several people in line are looking at me. We wave.

My husband, Jonathan, and I saw the Exhibition on March 18. Wow!

I had been to the Annex in Amsterdam 57 years earlier, read Anne Frank’s diary, and at age seven I saw the play, The Diary of Anne Frank, at the Cort Theater, now The James Earl Jones Theater, with Susan Strasberg as Anne and Joseph Schildkraut as Otto, her father. My parents, sister, and I had driven from Buffalo, our hometown. It was my first Broadway play.

No middle aisle existed. I sat between my parents and sister. After the standing ovation, my parents walked up one aisle, and my sister the other. Joseph Schildkraut stood alone on stage holding up a book. A few other audience members and I remained. The story and the theater hooked me.

My parents took me to Broadway and Off-Broadway shows at least once a year and to whatever was playing in Buffalo and Toronto until I was 20 when I transferred to New York University. I still live in New York. I see shows with Jonathan, friends, and alone, often more than once.

The first half of the Anne Frank Exhibition at the Center captures what the Germans were doing, their coming to the Netherlands, the rise of the Nazi regime, how the Jews lived, the restrictions on them, the Frank family move from Frankfort to Amsterdam, and their move to the Annex where they were joined by Mr. and Mrs. van Daan, their son, Peter, and a dentist, Dussel.

As a longtime writing instructor and writer, I remind my students and myself to show, not tell. The furnished Annex could not be more engaging. More poignant. More personal. I was right there. In the bedroom Anne and Dussel share there is a desk and chair. They argue over who sits there and when. It is where Anne writes in her diary. To Kitty.

My very old paperback of the diary is too ripped to read now. I bought a hardback copy in the Center bookstore. Except for what Anne shares about the Nazis and her fears, her writing about her relationship with her mother, her whole family and the others in hiding—Peter, oh Peter— is very relatable.

The last half of the Exhibition are accounts of the people in hiding, those who brought them food, and those who worked for Otto Frank. We see pages of Anne’s handwriting and a replica of her red and white checked diary. We read about the Jewish people who are captured by the Nazis.

Between reading the diary again, attending the Exhibition, looking out my window at the lines of attendees, and many additional banners of Anne on my block and the next–New York City added seven to the two already there–and remembering the 1955 play with Joseph Schildkraut holding up a book, I feel as if I am living in the Annex, best friends with the truth-telling Anne Frank, pained, inspired, grateful, and awed by her words. I feel blessed I am surrounded by the banners and that due to a demand to see the Exhibition, it has been extended to October 31.

The guard at the entrance with whom I spoke upon leaving said Anne Frank was the only child who wrote a book about the Holocaust.

“She was a writer,” I said.

And so much more.

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Nancy Davidoff Kelton is an author who also teaches writing at The New School, Hunter, and NYU.