When good men do nothing

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

The Red Diary

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

by Margaret Gunning

Part three of four

To the memory of Anne Frank

Winter

Another turn of the seasons:  it can’t be,

but the ordeal is not yet over,

not even half.  You write

that you take ten drops of valerian

to fight the anxiety and depression,

the sense of no hope

that oppresses your soul.

“The atmosphere is stifling, sluggish,

leaden.”  You feel weighed down.

“Sometimes I think God is trying to test me,”

you write, and who could blame you;

you move towards darkness,

and we know the end of the story,

though you are oblivious:

I know,

and want to weep.

 Suffering

I know nothing of this level of pain.

Just opening your diary

is an effort, to bring myself

to the pages,

their import immense,

too crushing for a girl,

any girl,

even you.

Had you made it to England,

to America,

we never would have heard of you,

and you might be alive today,

a mother,

a grandmother, perhaps:

known for something else,

some other work,

or maybe not,

your life longer, but so much more ordinary.

The medal

 I see a film about a Nazi doctor

who cut off the heads of children,

put brains in jars,

won a medal for his work,

then retired in comfort,

never paying for his crime,

because,

because,

they looked away – all, all,

all looked away;

my mother didn’t come, she didn’t come

when I was ripped,

I know how this can happen,

I bear the scars,

there is a tear, I carry it still

in my body’s darkest place,

a place where flesh split:

but I dared not cry out.

The oblivion is like a drug,

it seeps down the generations,

and children are attacked;

in the film, the survivors

made me weep,

trembling with rage

that this doctor, this doctor –

should win a medal,

should carry on his “work”, should lie

that he remembered nothing;

my mother’s face, blank and null,

it mocks me,

she was supposed to love me,

I was split,

I was split,

I could not help myself

or get away:  but it did not happen.

There are two stories always,

double-faced,

one side

smiling and null,

the government hanging a medal

around the Nazi doctor’s neck

while everyone is smiling, smiling:

brains in jars,

emaciation,

horror,

death:  awards

to the guilty,

suffering to the innocent:  Anne!

In some ways,

you were fortunate to die.

 Alone

“I have an intense need to be alone.”

And you are.

But not in the way you need.

You live inside yourself.  Like all outsiders,

you observe.

Your insight is devastating:  “Father’s not in love.”

You see the lack of love

in your mother’s coldness to you,

and it’s deadly, the way you cut to the truth.

You scare me.  Your writings are disturbing,

they are far more than an account of the war,

they are a merciless assessment,

an evaluation

in which everyone is found wanting.

Then you go to your little corner

and bend your dark head

over movie magazines

smuggled in by Miep,

and daydream about Peter,

and new clothes

and the future. . .

an ordinary, brown-eyed girl.

Sinking

I am sinking

in this material:  every day
I am swallowed,

yet compelled.

I must go in.

I breathe the air of the Annex, thick with anxiety

and the smell of cats.

How much food is left?

How many cans of milk; how many pounds of rice?

Will the Germans blow up the dikes?

Will we drown?

Don’t go in there.  I hear my mother’s voice.

I hear it, urgent.

I hear it in my mind.

I always went in. I could not help myself.

I entered a hell of my own making.

Scenes were scalded into memory.

Horror is a kind of flashbulb,

ensuring a permanent image,

an imprint

on the flesh.

I stand in the Annex; I cannot breathe.

The air is absolutely still,

packed with hostility, with

unexpressed venom,

vibrating with arrested sexual energy,

reverberating

like a distant roll

of what might be thunder,

unless organized into gunfire,

man-made menace

never silent,

never still.

Listen

Listen:  I will attest to the fact

that a little girl suffered,

she could not breathe,

her breath was stopped

by an unspeakable act:

no one would believe the things that were done,

and so it did not happen.

Truth can be undone.

Do you think I do not know this?

Hate, and its first cousin, fear

rip the skeins, unweave

the fabric of what is real:  my flesh

is not enough,

a healed tear

in my body,

 a memory is not enough,

it’s false, it’s implanted:

Listen to the girl.

She knows what she is talking about.

The diary is forged, a fabrication,

the whole thing was exaggerated,

not that many Jews died,

we all know what they’re like,

they dramatize,

they blow things out of proportion:

when I was small,

my breath was stopped

by an unspeakable act.

It went so far down my throat

that I was silenced

for fifty years.

The truth twists my head around

and I fervently wish these memories were false;

I wish those times of dissolution

never happened,

the shock wards,

the detox,

the grinding hell of therapy –

but for some,

truth will never come out,

too impacted by fear,

too heinous to be real,

and so it isn’t,

truth is booted in the face

and shoved in a back ward

lobotomized,

brain circuits cut

to stop the telling.

Tell:  Anne.

Tell.

Tell the story, in your own words

again and again;

tell your most ordinary day,

smiling under the heel of oppression.

I need every word,
I grasp at it, desperate

for such skeins of truth, woven

into the clothing

of reality.

 Don’t think I’m in love

Tears leave dark spots

on the red of your apron.

You wonder if Peter even likes you,

you agonize,

you yearn,

for what, you do not know.

You wonder if anyone loves you,

or if anyone can see you

at all.

Yet you pray, and thank God

for the small irreplaceable gift

of each day,

the immutable fact of Creation,

and all that you

hold in your heart.

In this, you are happy.

It is as if the forces of the War

(the masses of grief, the megatons

of despair)

have compressed you into a gemstone,

made shining amber

from the bleedings of a wounded tree,

the running sap

of sorrow.

Fiery as cognac

warm as your eyes,

it reflects your radiance

and holds your heat.

Tuesday, March 14, 1944

“The food is wretched,” you write,

“and so are we.”

You’re down to rotting potatoes,

pickled kale that has spoiled,

no bread, no milk, no oil –

tell me, do you ever get frightened?

Do you ever fear your helpers will get caught

and there will be no food left

at all?

Miep gets sick; a hole in the safety net.

Terror crowds in from the outside.

It is constant, unrelenting.

You keep your balance by writing:

a death-defying act.

Slowly,

you and Peter become closer,

you speak of sex, while still not touching:

you wonder if you are in love,

what love feels like

or if he cares for you at all

beyond comradeship,

the two of you thrown together

by random circumstance.

You long for more than conversation

but can barely comprehend the feeling,

where it is coming from,

some ancient instinct,

the secret internal workings of hormones,

one drop, then two

coursing in your blood,

nature’s imperative to mate

set alight in your thin fourteen-year-old body.

Like all of us, you are whole,

you have a clitoris, and a womb,

and blood courses through you,

and you ache to touch him, hold him

smell his secret smells,

be one flesh,

yet you know there is danger,

that such congress is forbidden,

a leap into the overwhelming world of

sensation

and response,

the oldest response in the world:

a paroxysm of pleasure,

new for each person,

a spasm of amazement

that life can feel this good

in captivity,

that God does not forget,

that there is compensation for the pain

and misery

of this endless confinement:

the shining joy, the giddiness

of being lifted off your feet

with desire, pulled out of yourself

and every nerve ending

atingle with pleasure

and readiness, for what you do not know,

yet your body knows:  girlish,

yet womanly

and ready or not, these feelings are here,

here in the stuffy attic room

so powerful you forget your growling stomach,

your disgust at the bathroom smells,

the stale perspiration

of constant subdued panic,

the tedium of each day

repeating seven hundred and fifty times

until you believe it will never end.

We know what happens; you don’t,

and this faint hope keeps you alive

when loneliness threatens to devour you,

when the future goes dark,

when your parents become unbearably critical

(and just imagine their anxiety

for your safety):  You have this diary,

these words, this process

sacred,

daily,

your sanity

in a world unmade by fear.

The thing is, Hitler did not win –

we know, because your words survived

beyond yourself,

the frail vessel

that held your essence

dying of despair, yet your words, your words

preserved

for the eyes and minds of the yet unborn

who would draw hope from you

in a million different places.

 By then

By then, at fourteen

when I first read you,

I was a veteran

of hiding,

I knew how to elude the danger,

except that it pressed in on me,

constant,

constant,

and I skipped and smiled like any girl,

and hid my fears,

and absorbed the terror

by day

and by night

and lived on,

amazed at your words:

wondering how anyone

could survive

such a war,

such a war.

 Inside

You write of your inner parts

with surprising frankness:

marvelling that a man could fit inside,

or a baby come out.

There is no one there to tell you anything,

so you work it out for yourself:

this is what I look like,

this is what I see;

this, here, this sensitive place,

this is called a clitoris,

though my mother will not speak of it,

pretending ignorance.

Your body, too, is fair territory

for your limitless curiosity,

your probing intelligence,

your intense need to know.

You realize that every part has a function,

that there is design in your deepest being,

that womanhood, all mysterious,

is nevertheless knowable,

as knowable as God,

that desire is rolling forward

over the barriers

and flooding you,

that your little talks with Peter

are becoming more intimate:  how the air

vibrates with promise,

heavy with the unknown,

a tension you can nearly see.

 The diary

You know much, but not everything:

the voice on the radio

speaks of the value of war diaries,

and everyone looks at you:  Oh, Anne,

you’ll be famous some day,

and secretly you are pleased.

With the sheer nerve of youth,

the optimism, the resilience,

you just assume you will live to see it,

to savour it;

you rewrite your passages, refine them,

ever the writer,

so at home with your gift:  how I envy you.

You report, with the assurance

of a war correspondent,

“Hungary has been occupied

by German troops.

There are still a million Jews

living there; they too are doomed.”

They too?

Does it slip through, then, a deeper awareness

that threads through your courage,

your bright red valour,

does a darker thread permeate the fabric,

does a cold old hand grasp your shoulder

in the night:  we too are doomed?

How do you live with doom,

how do you hold it away from you

so you can breathe, eat, smile,

and continue to write, and write;

what must it take

just to live another day

of the hundreds, and hundreds

pressed behind  the walls

of the factory,

shut into fifty square metres

of stuffy space, blackout curtains

sealing out the day,

doom trembling

around the edges of consciousness

like a subtle earth tremor,

leaving cracks in the foundation,

weakening your resolve.

Daily you rise, and live.

Mr. Van Daan’s birthday

does not go unnoticed:  there is always a cake

made with bad flour and no butter,

and a few small presents,

a tin of sardines, a luxury,

a tiny serving of coffee,

a few tulips from outside:  oh,

outside. . . the smell of flowers

intoxicates you,

and you yearn, and yearn,

but keep yourself in hand,

believing you will live,

and knowing you will die.