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
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,
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
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.
