The Diary of Anne Frank: a cycle of narrative poems (part four of four)

The Red Diary

A cycle of narrative poems inspired by the diary of Anne Frank 

by Margaret Gunning

Part four of four

To the memory of Anne Frank

Happy

Tears:  sometimes

it is too much for you,

you fold up and sob,

trying to keep it quiet,

contained:  but your grief will split you

if you don’t give it room,

so you draw up your knees

and convulse silently

in the stale attic room

in the dark.

Yet, you write of being happy;

I believe it.

In the midst of all,

in raw raging hell,

in boredom, in despair, in fury with the adults,

in all this, a shy happiness blooms inside,

delicate as white petals,

protected,

held inside your heart

like a sweet secret:

you are happy as only the doomed can be happy,

this day sufficient,

this moment of precious silence,

this sense of God stealing near. . .

warm against your skin,

tender presence, stirring,

life itself,

insistent,

miraculous,

conquering all

by a single intake of breath:

the act of breathing,

beating,

being.

 Not my diary

Then:  a break-in, burglars rattling

suspiciously downstairs, police on the trail,

and a frozen night of terror,

eight hearts pounding. . . all of you

lying on the floor, afraid to move,

a wastepaper basket for a toilet,

and whispers:  hide the radio!

What’s the use?  If they find us,

we’ll have no need for it.

Hide the diary.

No!  burn it –

not my diary!

(“If my diary goes,

I go too!”)

What shall we say to the Gestapo?

Impossible conversations.

Rehearsing for doom.

A raw smell of sweat, of feces.

One night spent crammed together

in a stinking airless room,

bodies churning with fright.

When the threat passes,

suddenly you’re older, years older,

forced through another grinder,

and you write, like one who has lived through

a thousand years of torment,

“We’re Jews in chains,

chained to one spot,

without any rights,

but with a thousand obligations.”

But like the psalmist

who howls in loneliness and anguish,

you still say, “God has never

deserted our people.”

In the midst of all,

you stand; you stand.

“If God lets me live,” you declare

with the faith of a thousand generations,

“I’ll make my voice heard.”

 Doubt

And yet.

In the next breath, the doubt:

you wonder if anyone will ever want

to look at “this drivel”:  your rapt, fascinating

account

turns to dust before your eyes.

Now I know you are a writer,

twisting, impaled on doubt

that never ends,

pressing on in the face of it,

surely the ultimate task.

 Peter

They call it knutscherei:

stolen kisses, closeness, body heat

your heart swaying,

Father worrying, yes, worrying

that you could get pregnant,

all that time spent there in the attic, alone together –

and then what would you do;

but fear and shyness

keep you from venturing further

than a chaste kiss, a caress,

yet this glancing touch

makes your legs turn to water,

you want to surrender,

to press for more,

but jump back from the might of it:

forces unknown,

hungers

stirred, but never satisfied,

wild forces

repressed,

mysteries never probed –

Peter, whom you never would have

given the time of day

if your world had been normal,

now becomes your prince,

your heart’s companion,

your only.

Each day (an interlude)

We are given, each day

only enough to get through;

never more.

We may call this

manna

in the wilderness of our own lives,

with nothing left to gather

at the end of the day,

and only trust

to help us open our eyes again,

face the howling uncertainty

once more.

If the world should end today,

if this should be our last, our final day,

we would not know it;

the unknowing

is a blessing of sorts,

the thing that helped me go to school each day,

keep the secret confined

within my small body,

only revealed after decades

of numbness

and oblivion,

a strange, raw flower

blooming like the spread of blood

in water,

a blossom of despair, of damage

swelling purple like a contusion,

a truth,

surging upward like a germinating seed,

mysterious,

inexorable –

but because true, then unstoppable,

even a gift of sorts,

a reanimating of that which had died,

a return to a wholeness I had never known,

a birth into completeness.

I was given back my life;

yours was taken.

The loss is a slap,

or worse, an amputation –

I want you back,

these words are not enough,

this account is not enough,

we need you here –

I know how the story ends

and hate the ending,

hate this waste, this waste

magnified six million times

until it is beyond

what I can even imagine.

 Afraid

“I’m afraid of myself,” you write,

afraid of what wells up inside you:

you speak of your period,

red hope spreading

from your place of secrets;

you know there is a connection

between this bright bloom

and your passion in the attic:

Father looks concerned, he wants to protect you,

knowing your loneliness,

your fear:  you write,

always in hope,

“I feel liberation drawing near.”

You write:  “Why should I despair?”
There are only three months left

until they take you:  but you do not know that,

or you could not live.

 Stop

Stop the train:  the end of this

I cannot bear;

stop –

 The Annex

Twenty-five months;

a protected time,

suffocating,

hard:  but nothing to what will come;

the cattle car, the uniform

the shouted orders,

Auschwitz:  but never tell me,

for I cannot bear it –

not my Anne,

not this one, but: yes, they all, all –

 Final passage

Sixty years ago, this week. . .

a weariness,

a sense of being overwhelmed,

yet I must read on,

finish it, my heart split

with the effort,

yet how dare I grieve,

how dare I – so far from this,

so safe –

In the midst of all,

not knowing how close you are

to the end of the story,

you study the classics:  “Orpheus, Jason

and Hercules

all waiting to be untangled,

since their various deeds are running

crisscross through my mind

like multicoloured threads in a dress.”

You clothe yourself with knowledge,

still and focused

in your attic room,

deadly calm,

your studies a form of sanity,

of steering –

You dream of a book of your own,

The Secret Annex,

perhaps a novel

based on your time of hiding.

The chestnut tree

outside your window

bursts into bloom, it is May,

the world insists on continuing,

your father receives

three eggs for his birthday,

and you write,

“unless you’re a Nazi,

you don’t know what’s going to happen to you

from one day to the next.”

You see the abyss between

daily pleasure

and perpetual terror:  “that gap,

that enormous gap,

is always there.”

Sometimes you hope for the end,

no matter how terrible,

just to resolve the grinding anxiety;

you wait,

you wait,

the radio your hope,

D-Day, the invasion,

Churchill’s voice,

and everyone glancing at each other,

wondering how to feel,

what to allow,

heads bent, intent,

everyone sweating

in the airless room:  when, when –

and somewhere, in all this

your girlhood has been lost,

stolen by fear

and crowding,

stolen forever:  my heart pounds,

I feel sick,

I want to run,

I want to put the book away,

but it insists, it insists,

listen to me, it says across the gap

of sixty years,

listen to how it was with us,

to how it was –

 Good at heart

Then comes the statement the world remembers,

“I still believe,

in spite of everything,

that people are truly good at heart.”

And a full stop:

ANNE’S DIARY ENDS HERE.

But not the story; not the story.

One day in August, the door bursts open,

and it is over.

Requiem

Mr. Van Daan:  gassed to death in Auschwitz.

Mrs. Van Daan:  dead; date and place, unknown.

Peter:  died in Mauthausen (Austria), three days before liberation.

Dussel:  died in Neuengamme.

Mother:  died from starvation in Auschwitz-Birkenau,

all her bread hoarded for her girls.

The sisters:  taken to Bergen-Belsen

where they sickened and died,

their young bodies

dumped in a mass grave.

A few weeks later the troops arrived.

 The survivor

Pim lived on,

lived to be immensely old,

lived with his memories,

the diary his legacy, his hope;

he married a woman

who came through Auschwitz,

and perhaps

they did not need to talk,

perhaps

the number on the forearm

was enough.

 Miep

An old, old woman is left,

the keeper of the diary,

the one who snatched it from oblivion

in a moment of prescience.

I realize, with shock

that she is still alive,

though nearing a hundred.

Is it difficult to die

when you hold so many secrets?

When Miep speaks,

the world listens.

What she has waited to say

is just as true,

sixty years on.

“Most of humanity

did not even want to know what was happening.”

She speaks simply.

Slowly.

Choosing her words.

No wasting.

An ordinary woman

in an impossible time,

she did what was necessary,

daily,

daily,

for more than two years.

When she speaks, the connection is completed,

the little girl in the closet,

cowering,

the woman afraid to admit

she has suffered

because so many millions suffered more;

it all comes clear in a single, simple statement:

“Anne stands for the absolute innocence

of all victims.”

 To come through

Absolute innocence:

my eyes are opened.

Take away the differences; there are none.

This is what it is to be human:  to be held captive

against your will,

to be persecuted,

hunted down,

violated,

vulnerable; this is what it is

to endure,

to hold on

to integrity,

to hope,

to stay human

through atrocity,

to remain merciful when punished without mercy,

to “be”, to carry on,

to remarry,

to have another child,

to tell the story

over and over

in simple words, direct and compelling,

leaving out no detail

for it all counts toward glory,

to open our eyes

each day

in an ultimate act of courage

to the same light,

yes, the same light she knew

through the merest crack

in the blackout curtain,

hope spearing through the shade,

illuminating:

and this is the lesson,

daily,

daily,

pledged beyond reason

to a future that may never be,

for this is all we have,

and all we require:

the need to breathe

in an airless room,

the need to imagine and plan

beyond a suffocating confinement,

the need to see past the day of despair,

to live beyond,

to pick up the bleeding threads

and make a life,

to lift up our hands

in supplication

and praise

and gratitude

for what is left,

for the valour

and the honour

and the stubbornness

and the grace

to come through.