The Red Diary: a cycle of poems inspired by the Diary of Anne Frank (part one of four)

The Red Diary

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

Part one of four

                                                            To the memory of Anne Frank

I remember my affliction and my wandering,

the bitterness and the gall.

I well remember them,

and my soul is downcast within me.

Yet this I call to mind

and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord’s great love we are

not consumed,

for his compassions never fail.

They are new every morning;

great is your faithfulness.

                                                                    - Lamentations 3: 19 - 23

                                                        INTRODUCTION

      Very early on a summer morning, I had a long and strange dream about Anne Frank.

     This came after what seemed like an eternity of dryness and lack of inspiration in my work, when the ground was so parched the flakes of earth curled under the sun.  In the dream, I was incarcerated in a Nazi prison camp.  I was very earnestly trying to put together a book of my own, a sort of diary, only it was being compiled according to a rigid set of specifications, many of which made no sense.  I was (as it were) only following orders.

     In this dream, I had a certain awareness that I would soon be executed, though I was not sure what I had done to deserve it.  This caused me more resignation than fear.  Then I was looking through the original of Anne Frank’s diary, only the pages were made of a very sheer, fragile, almost iridescent glass, and were full of photographs and ghostly, glowing images.  There were no words.  I said to someone beside me (perhaps a fellow prisoner), “This life means something, no matter how short.  It stands for something, and it will be remembered.  It is a lesson.”

     Then I was actually standing in the presence of Anne Frank, small and dark and intense, exactly as she appeared in her famous photographs.  Without speaking the words aloud, I asked her, “You know how this ends, don’t you?”  She knew, and I knew that she knew, even though she did not say a word.

     There was an extraordinary feeling of touching her essence, as if there were no real border between us, even though in this dream I was not myself, but a soldier, a man.  The rest of the symbolism and puzzles of this dream remain a mystery, some riddle my psyche would rather I not resolve.

      At about the same time, something unexpected happened: I began to see a lot of newspaper and magazine articles about Anne Frank, as the world marked the 60^th anniversary of the discovery of her hiding place in Amsterdam.  She would have been 75 years old at the time I was writing, probably a mother and a grandmother, and it is impossible for me to believe that her remarkable writing would have stopped in her youth.  This sense of anniversary and of what might have been made the writing experience especially poignant for me.

     The strange vision I experienced on that summer morning was so vivid it affected me almost like an electric shock, forcing me to take a look at the extremes of human valour, humble self-revelation, sacrifice, art. . . all the things I admire and crave, yet fear that I lack.   My immediate reaction was feeling that I was not worthy to write about this, that I had no claim on Anne Frank or anything she stood for; I am not a Jew, I don’t remember the war, and at the time of the dream, I had not read Anne’s diary for some thirty-five years, so my memories were hazy at best.

     But something compelling was set in motion by this dream, and I did begin to write, even in the face of my doubt and fear.  The dream also compelled me to re-read the diary, this time in the “definitive edition” of 1995, which includes a wealth of material not present in the carefully edited version I had read as a girl.  It seems that the world is now ready to encounter a more human Anne, sometimes angry and critical (especially towards her mother), and always true to her name in her frankness about sexuality, spirituality and all the abiding mysteries of life.

     Daily I would read a section of the diary, no more than twenty pages at a time, as more than that would have been overwhelming.   Daily I struggled to respond in poetry to this astonishing document, so well written that it would be the envy of any mature professional writer.  At the same time, I was reading biographical material from other sources to fill in the background.  I also discovered the superb Oscar-winning documentary film Anne Frank Remembered, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in this compelling subject.

     Through writing this long poem, I began to re-experience traumatic events in my own early life, and I had a decision to make as to whether to include them in the work.  In the final analysis, I felt I had little choice, as the material kept presenting itself, more and more insistently.  It was a creative risk I had to take, in spite of my continued struggle with an unresolveable dilemma: how dare I claim to have suffered in the face of the horrendous abyss of the Holocaust? 

     Though I did not completely lay this internal battle to rest, I did continue with my poetic response to Anne’s diary until it was completed to the best of my ability. Though much of the original dream remains a mystery to me, I believe it was a gift of sorts, as well as a creative spur. I was being asked, even invited, to take a deeper look at something powerful, something ultimate, perhaps even transformative.  In the face of my own doubt and fear, I had to follow this bright red thread wherever it would lead me.

  

                                                       DREAM OF ANNE FRANK

Dream

when I opened your book of pages

a glass butterfly with manifold wings

I knew I had no pages

except according to directions

that made no sense:  I was only following orders!

but you were there, a slip of a girl

a slice of pure meaning

pure illumination

and sacrifice

and I wondered how I dared to look – knew

I was not worthy to look,

but had to look – could not avert my eyes,

as you could not avert your

steady brown gaze, those eyes that saw

to the core of so many things.

I was some sort of broken soldier

imprisoned,

except I was on the wrong side,

always in the wrong. . .  and commanded

to make a book that had no meaning,

according to illogic’s rules.

And I obeyed.

I always followed orders,

so that my book had no meaning

and no sense.

Your book shone like

gold teeth, like eyeglasses

in a heap,

frail hoarded visions,

all the images

of the millions

who can no longer see.

How could you know at fourteen

what we lose when we age, the clarity

that saw through surface grumpiness,

bad smells, bad temper

to shining selves in a war for integrity.

Shut away, you blossomed.

Impossible.  Impossible that you could

bring forth such clarity, such an account:

you were only telling what you saw,

but you said everything, held nothing back.

Such hard truth.  Such audacity.

Destroyed:  yes, snuffed out

by other humans; will my mind ever

comprehend the reeling contradiction?

Is this why I despise myself?

What sort of Nazi am I, that tramples the

butterfly,

that pulls out gold teeth by the roots?

 

 Forgiveness

 Is forgiveness impossible

in being on the wrong side?

Can I shut up the yammering Hitler in my

head?

My dreams are grimy newsreels

of pompous oppression

and silently shrieking crowds

that fall into lockstep,

the fresh-faced, wholesome youth

who gaze up smiling

at the face of their saviour.

Anne floats above all.  Freed.

Not held to this earth,

this place of pain.

But we needed her.  We needed her to stay.

Her vacancy is like the cavity of a

pulled tooth.

We will miss her forever.

My heart slowly turns

inside-out

and I am eviscerated,

my body an empty cavity

through which a raw wind blows.

I am not a Jew

 But I never knew her.

She was never mine.

What claim do I have on her?

I am not a Jew.

On the wrong side.  The other.

Not the one who saved.

Not the one who redeemed.

I would not hide a Jew.

I would not risk that shadow in my house.

My heart skulked, scurried like rats.

My neighbor left a loaf of bread on the doorstep

daily until the famine was over.

I kept the bread for myself:  shooting Jewish dogs

in the head.

My soul writhes.

There was no other.

I was the Jew.But I could not see.

 Anne

You appeared to me

quite early in the morning,

and for all the world

it was as if I was looking at you

straight and clear

as you were in life,

small and dark and neat,

graceful as a young tree,

with a charming smile and a dimple,

lively eyes

and a brain like chain-lightning.

Such small frail shoulders to support

so many millions,

the fragments of hope,

just enough,

just enough to carry on.

For these words, these words,

I will live another day,

I will not end this,

twist though my heart might

in anguish,

all meaning flown away.

One small pure flame of integrity

will sustain my life, will carry me through

the long

and impossible night.

 Forced bloom

 You said so much

about life in captivity.

You said so much about proximity

forced by circumstance

(cruel, unusual)

and forces of history

meted out in matchsticks, daily bread

and bickering over the least of things.

Bread, and soldiers

and marching steps

and radio broadcasts that crackled with static

and import

you must have known where you were

in history

even as young as you were,

that someone had to do it,

to bear witness to the dailiness, the strain,

the tiny flashes

of inextinguishable joy.

What gave you such steadiness?  I quail before you.

My head spins in astonishment.

Life had not taught you that you couldn’t;

and so you could, and did.

Barely in your teens, your gift was full-blown;

you knew you were doing the work.

And what is more, you had the valour

and the persistence

to keep getting up in the morning

to face all those people

who got on your nerves

who barely comprehended you

(even if they loved you),

who could not tell you anything,

offer any hope, any sense of a way,

a way back to life in full.

The overpowering tectonic forces of history

molded you, matured you

before your time,

forced like a rare orchid

into rich bloom

in a stifling corner.

A certain fearlessness

sustained you,

though the grownups must have been

paralyzed with anxiety,

barely able to sleep or work or make love

in the shadow of unspeakable fear.

Was it your youth, your spirit,

was your courage so much greater,

or did your daily words, your task,

put the heart in you

while the others sank

in anguish and despair?           

                         

                                                                  THE DIARY 

It is a holy document.

One would expect a grand binding

of leather and gold,

or parchment paper with gilt edges,

but instead it’s a jolly little thing,

gaily covered in red-and-green plaid

with a lock and key for privacy.

An ordinary girl’s diary, a birthday

present, a potential, a book of pages,

and for you, with such a gift,

a companion.

Kitty, you called it, and it looks like a Kitty

in a bright stylish coat,

fun and flirtatious,

tossing her dark hair, light and careless of heart.

And the early entries

are all about bicycle rides,

and boys,

and testing out your power

as a woman,

though even in this time of freedom,

you felt the menace closing in.

Jews must wear a yellow star,

must badge themselves

with this symbol so strangely beautiful,

two triangles, a double trine of fire,

a requirement, a signal, a delineation,

a branding of otherness,

of look, look, I am a Jew, I cannot hide

what I am,

I must wear it all the time on my breast

right next to my heart

so the enemy can watch me,

can keep his eyes on me,

and use my own symbol of power

and covenant

against me.

Jews must wear a yellow star,

Jews cannot go out at night,

Jews cannot visit with Christians,

Jews must not go to the market

in the day time. . .

and on and on, the restrictions,

the confinements,

closing in like a hand.

Inside this bright plaid coat

fear lurks,

death lurks

yet walks with light step, defiant.

Like klezmer music,

a light spirit is ultimate resistance,

a refusal to be bowed.

And so you sat and wrote:  Dear Kitty.

And this girlish, kittenish companion

caught all your thoughts, received your days.

She sat and listened.

She was fascinated with you.

You focused down, you became absorbed,

and you wrote what you saw.

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.

  

You say vagina, and I say va-WHAT?

I didn't write the intriguing article below - it was written by Martha Kempner for an interesting site called RH Reality Check (RH standing for reproductive health). No discussion of reproductive health would be complete without a mention of education. This  makes the article's revelation even more shocking: Anne Frank's immortal diary is being criticized and considered "inappropriate" for adolescents, not for its stark description of life under Nazi oppression but because Frank includes an accurate description of her developing adolescent genitals. This kind of insane prudery is both headspinningly ignorant and groaningly typical in a culture that really hates women's pussies. 

I'm sorry, but it does. Hates them. Women (myself included) have been boondoggled into thinking they're abnormal, weird, bad-smelling, and shouldn't have anything "down there" but a neat slit or, like a Barbie doll, nothing. We should not swell or protrude or bush out in any way. If anything does, shave it, trim it, even cut it off (and labioplasty, incorrectly referred to by plastic surgeons as "vaginal surgery", is now becoming frighteningly common as young women seek the "perfect slit", free of mess, fuss or feeling).

---

Barbie - You Bitch!
Conforming to Sociocultural Ideals of the Perfect Vagina
A Public Health Issue

If this reminds you queasily of a slightly less-drastic form of female circumcision, then - you'd be right. That is exactly what it is. Cutting off parts of ourselves because they're seen as ugly, abnormal and (worse than that) sexually taboo is nothing more than socially-sanctioned mutilation. 

What else? Though we've supposedly outgrown the Freudian dinosaur belief in the "vaginal orgasm", "vagina" has taken over as the descriptive term for everything below the belt, obscuring and even denying the locus of sexual response and enjoyment for almost all women. The vulva. The pussy. The (if you don't mind the term) cunt.

If you don't like cunt, and some don't because it's also used as a nasty name for someone we don't like, then just come up with some other term such as muff (female masturbation is sometimes called "buffin' the muffin") or jellyroll, which was blues singer Bessie Smith's favorite euphemism. As with Mae West and her infamous "is that a gun in your pocket" line, the censors didn't even know what it meant.

Not so incidentally, vulva has a very different sound and feel to it, a different texture than the clinical-sounding vagina. It's voluptuous, is what it is. It sounds like Volvo, a luxury car. It has curves and folds. Vagina always reminds me of Regina, and I sure don't want to go there.

I think people are uncomfortable with the word vulva because it sounds dusky and erotic.  I think people are uncomfortable with the IDEA of vulva because it's so much simpler for women just to have a neat little hole.

The vulva is external, and yet at the same time fairly well-hidden, like a rabbit in the bush.
Female masturbation can also be called "petting the bunny", and we know what bunnies are like: not the Playboy type, but the sort that spring around in the lush woods, coupling joyously whenever the urge strikes. Once they get started, there's just no stopping them.

Take that, you Michigan mother!

Half the People in the World Have a Vulva—Can We Please Get Over Our Fear of the Word?

by Martha Kempner, RH Reality Check

A Michigan mother has become the latest person to complain that a blunt, accurate account of female genitalia—one that uses descriptive words and proper names—is too explicit for school. It’s an argument that we’ve heard many times recently about textbooks, sex education lectures, and even political speeches, but this one is a little surprising. This time the source of the “pornographic” material is the classic book about the Holocaust, The Diary of Anne Frank. Are we really so obsessed with women’s body parts that one paragraph about them is enough to cause a panic even when it’s in a book about far more serious issues?

The book, as most people know, features the first-hand account of a young Jewish woman who was forced to hide in an attic with her family and others during World War II. A new, less edited version of the book has been released. It includes passages in which Anne explores her own body. In the passage in question, Frank writes:

Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn’t realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn’t see them. What’s even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris…When you’re standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you’re standing, so you can’t see what’s inside. They separate when you sit down and they’re very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there’s a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That’s the clitoris.

The Michigan mother complained that this was far too graphic—in fact pornographic—and completely inappropriate for school. In an interview with the local Fox affiliate, she explained that her daughter brought this too her attention: “I thought it was because she was concerned about the depressing aspects surrounding Anne Frank and all that, and she said no it was because they were talking graphically about Anne Frank’s genitalia.”

Although it is 2013, and about half of the world’s population is female, our body parts seem to cause constant kerfuffles. Recently I wrote about a biology teacher in Idaho who is under investigation in part for using the word vagina during his lecture on human reproduction. (As I said at the time, I’m really not sure how one could give a lecture on human reproduction without using the word vagina, given how many roles it plays.) Last year, I wrote about a report on sex education in New York state and was particularly horrified to learn that one textbook used in New York and other states defines the vagina as the “organ that receives sperm during reproduction.” 


This description is inaccurate (it’s not an organ) and offensive (a part of the female body should not be defined exclusively in terms of what it does for men). And who can forget last summer when state Rep. Lisa Brown (D-West Bloomfield) was banned from speaking on the Michigan house floor because she used the word vagina in a speech against an anti-abortion bill.

Things get worse the more specific you get. The word vagina is often used to describe everything between a woman’s legs, because, despite the controversies surrounding the word, it’s considered more socially appropriate than accurate terms like vulva, labia, or clitoris. (Emphasis mine. This whole issue exposes the hypocrisy of supposed "openness" when referring to women's genitals: now it's almost OK to say "vagina", but the word is constantly being misused to stand in for all the sexually-responsive parts of a woman's body. The culture seems to prefer the less-threatening concept of an uncomplicated, functional tunnel.)

What struck me most about Frank’s description is just how accurate it is. Though she starts by laughing at her past ignorance, the passage provides a spot-on description of where everything is and what it looks like. She also knows all of the correct terminology (though obviously the book has been translated from the original Dutch). Frank was clearly a great writer, and her parents seem to have educated her well about her own body.

Unfortunately, many women growing up some 70 years later do not have this kind of education, at that, in my opinion, is what’s behind our obsession with female genitals. As Frank said, these parts are hidden between a woman’s legs. This makes them very different than penises and testicles, which are more visible and recognizable to most. If we don’t look at these parts and we don’t talk about them in any detail—or worse, if we insist on using nondescript or cutesy terms like “down there” and “vajayjay”—two things happen: ears perk up when you say vagina, and panic ensues if you even whisper the word clitoris.


My first reaction upon hearing this mother’s complaint was about perspective and priorities. The book starts conversations about a disgraceful chapter in human history. Kids ask questions about anti-Semitism, concentration camps, gas chambers, and the complete and utter disregard for humanity. On a personal level, they likely think about how they would react if their freedom was taken away and they had to live in hiding. How shallow do you have to be to be more worried about how they’ll react not to this horror and misery but to a description of some body parts?

In one way, the Michigan mother is right: Kids do not need to know about Anne Frank’s genitals to learn about the Holocaust, and they will likely focus disproportionately on this passage because they are in seventh grade and because they’re not hearing about this anywhere else. That said, had the passage been in any other book, be it a novel or a biology textbook, it likely never would have made it into a school in the first place.


The solution is not to ban this new version of Anne Frank’s diary. The solution is to make vulvas about as mysterious as elbows. No, I’m not suggesting that we walk around pantsless with legs splayed. I’m simply proposing that we do what we do with all other body parts: Call it by its proper name, define it clearly and accurately in school, and stop freaking out.


Half the people in the world have a vulva. Can we please get over the word already?

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