The Red Diary: a cycle of poems inspired by the Diary of Anne Frank (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.

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

The Red Diary

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

by Margaret Gunning

Part two of four

To the memory of Anne Frank

                                                         THE BOOK OF PAGES

 Your hand

I open the book of pages

for the first time in thirty-five years,

and there it is, completely unexpected:

your handwriting.

Small and neat and precise,

yet vigorous and sure;

not the hand of a fragile girl.

The words are unfamiliar to me,

written in Dutch,

yet the sense of concentration, of focus

is palpable, complete.

These are words of absolute commitment,

of clear and open eyes, a steady hand –

the purest account.

Birthday

It opens with a jolly eager telling

of presents, “a darling brooch”

and “a terrific book”, Daisy Goes to the Mountains.

Your schoolmates dance around you in

a circle, and sing.

A line jumps out at me:  “I’ve never had

a real friend.”

Yet you talk about your friends

in a way that would have made them squirm:

J. R. “a detestable, sneaky, stuck-up, two-faced gossip”,

Jacque “a terrible show-off”,

(“She thinks she’s gorgeous, but she’s not”).

Hanneli, your best friend:  “she blabs whatever you tell her to her mother.”

G. Z.:  “She has a nice face, but is kind of dumb.”

Did they know they were under this microscope,

this steady dark gaze

that penetrated the vulnerable

without mercy?

You laughed, skipped and sang,

but your perception was deadly.

Oh, little girl –

Oh, little girl –

what you will live through!

Put away thoughts of Bergen-Belsen,

of the harrowing end.

Live.  Skip and dance;

skip and dance.

 Boys

Suddenly this is different:  these words

were not there when I read you in my girlhood.

“Sallie Springer has a filthy mind,

and rumour has it that he’s gone

all the way.”

At thirteen, you knew the boys were

sex-mad.

But this:  “Werner Joseph is nice,

too, but all the changes taking place lately

have made him too quiet, so he

seems boring.”

All the changes.

The changes.

I don’t have a friend

You stood apart.

The seeds were there, even as you worried

that no one would want to look at

the scribblings of a teenaged girl.

“I don’t have a friend,” you wrote,

even surrounded by giggling girls,

even though the boys were mad for you

(and I believe you!  It was all that life.

So unquenchable.

Your vibrancy.

Your passionate nature, though surely a virgin,

touching only in your mind,

that vivid, cloistered garden.)

 Hiding

You dress in as many layers as possible:

three sets of underwear, two pairs of stockings,

a dress, a skirt, a jacket. . .

it is not safe to be seen with a suitcase.

Everything is unknown; the family

tries to contain its terror.

With your usual candour, you write,

“I was suffocating, even before we left

the house,

but no one bothered to ask me how I felt.”

The place is called the Secret Annex,

a striking play on words.

Little sentences peep out,

shivering with import:

“We’ve forbidden Margot to

cough at night, even though she has

a bad cold.”

But your spirit buoys you.

It’s almost fun.

At first.

“It’s really not that bad here,” you say.

(Later on, you add this note:

“I’m terrified our hiding place

will be discovered

and that we’ll be shot.”)

You miss your cat, cry for her loss.

Then the Van Daans arrive, and you

speak of Peter, that his company won’t

amount to much. (“What a dope!”)

The secret doorway is a bookcase that swings on a hinge.

It is easy to bump your head.

What I see is the ordinariness.

The boredom and irritation

of forced proximity with dense, dull adults,

the irritation of

a smarter older sister, brilliant in her studies,

well-behaved, unlike you;

“perfection itself”.

Anne feels tired, she feels lazy,

she feels overwhelmed, yet

she is the one to unpack all the furniture

and put the place in order

while her mother and sister

sit in the corner, dazed, in shock.

That night, with her last bit of energy,

she writes.

Always, she writes.

  

Hiding (2)

Sometimes I hid, but it was different.

So different.

I will not compare.

I would hide in a closet, with an

Indian blanket over the door.

Something was not right; there was a

soreness,

a smell.

I was afraid to come out, Anne.

It was not the same.

You adored your father;

I feared mine.

There was a crack in my world,

and it split everything,

even my spirit.

The closet was my secret place.

I had my own definition of “safe”.

I did not hear guns in the distance at night,

I was not crammed into an attic, labelled Juden,

stamped, relegated, forced into seclusion.

I went about freely, I looked all right, I passed for normal.

But hear me, Anne:  I was broken.

Blood came in the night.

Fear crept into my world,

and a certain paralysis.

Some part of me did not come out.

Would not.

Dared not.

I could not show myself.

What I was, a girl, made me vulnerable.

It was not the same.

But still I had to hide myself.

  

Meditation (an interlude)

Is this presumptuous?

Dare I say this?  I feel that I know you.

Is it the candour of your voice,

the trivia, the games,

the petty arguments, squabbles with your mother,

the tales of cats

kept not for pets, but to keep down the mice and rats,

of clothing:  knitting a new white sweater

and having to ask your father permission

for even this tiny luxury,

all this, all this stuff of

sheer dailiness, the daily tread,

that makes this a living account,

fresh as the day it was born?

The thing is, you knew.

You were not a total innocent:  you knew

such a work had value,

the radio told you

that these were momentous times,

that a record must be kept.

In between the dailiness

you quote Churchill, that this is not the beginning of the end,

but perhaps the end of the beginning.

It is 1942

and you are thirteen years old.

I smile at your eagerness to be famous.

It is so unguarded,

so girlish,

and  became so powerfully true,

beyond what you could have imagined.

That hope kept you writing

when your heart was leaden with fatigue

and boredom

and confinement, when you had another headache,

when the time seemed endless,

when you were sick of all those people,

the Van Daans and their pointless squabbling,

dull old Dussel, hoarding food and luxuries,

Peter, sweet and steadfast

but unequal to your mind,

the same, always the same,

the black-papered windows

and guns in the night,

and perpetual fear.

I try to see you now:

you would have been seventy-five,

perhaps a grandmother;

Anne, I am a grandmother, I have been blessed,

I lift my grandbaby high in the air

and she squeals in delight, the future.

Yet I complain about outrageous things,

the petty complaints of a full belly

and a good husband

and grown children

and a secure bed.

Quicksilver Anne

How funny you are.

I laugh out loud at this:

“I have a terrible pain in my index finger

(on my left hand),

so I can’t do any ironing.

What luck!”

And this:  the “prospectus” for the

Secret Annex:

“A Unique Facility for the Temporary Accommodation of Jews

and Other Dispossessed Persons

Open all year round:  Located in

beautiful, quiet, wooded surroundings

in the heart of Amsterdam.”

(And this:  “Only the language of civilized

people may be spoken, thus no German.”)

How could one laugh

when the pressures of history were bearing down

like a glacier

with annihilating force.

But all this tells me

that Hitler was not winning,

that his hideous scheme

would fail.  Even so.

Six million.

At the least.

And all the others:  the souls that have no name.

The fear

How different this diary

from the one I read as a girl,

forbidden passages

restored,

how much you adored your father,

how you called him Pim,

how bitterly you clashed with your mother,

disdained your perfect sister,

spoke of the unspeakable,

the stirrings of early womanhood

strong in you,

the attraction,

the curiosity about forbidden things,

your boredom and exasperation

at the pettiness of the Van Daans,

and why must we stay with people

we don’t even like,

their endless complaining

and criticism,

bickering over a spoonful of butter, an extra slice of bread –

and your need to be better,

to master yourself,

be calmer, quieter, more mature,

but how could you be better than this,

bearing witness to the daily round,

filled with shock

at the fate of those who were not so fortunate.

This is an Anne who is angry.

This is an Anne who will not keep silent.

She will speak; she will speak.

Margot kept a diary too,

likely a milder, safer record,

or did she keep it at all,

under these impossible pressures.

I know how you needed to write.

It was your way of containing the fear,

of managing the unmanageable.

How do I say this?  Anne: I wrote.

The fears were different.

I was not safe in my home.

I did not adore my father.

I could not thrive.

It was different.  Yes.  Different,

another set of atrocities,

on an intimate scale.

I was not whole.  But I wrote,

pressing the pieces together

into the semblance of human,

when I feared I was something less,

a mere receptacle for poisons,

accumulated grief

passed down the generations

forever and ever,

into this dead end of a person, myself.

Stop the train, oh, stop the train

with your body,

try to stop the generational damage

before it annihilates your children;

stop it, stop it now,

before it is too late.

Anne, I wrote too, as a way of hanging on,

holding on to myself

in a place of silences

and secrets

and terror

and despair.

 The bells:  I

“The Westertoren bells stopped chiming,”

you write on a Thursday in 1943,

“and I’d always found them

so comforting.”

Another day, the bread ration

is cancelled.

(No bread.  No bread -)

Machine-gun fire rips open

your sleep.

Rats scurry thick in the night.

Hitler rants, struts on the radio.

You can’t go outside.  You wonder.

You wonder if your optimism is warranted,

if these forces might win.

Sometimes terror turns to laughter,

releasing some of the unbearable tension

until the next threat.

You are so aware, quivering

like a tuning fork,

so sensitive to change,

to the mammoth forces

that press down on the eight of you,

the knowledge

there may be no future.

Your beloved Pim

insists on hope,

but how much of this is for his daughters,

how much raw fear

splits his sleep?

Your mother weeps

because she cannot reach you.

You push her away.

You can be cold.

But this is a bulwark

against the tide of terror,

it’s all you have

to preserve yourself.

The food grows scarce

and poor, beans, a bit of cabbage,

crumbling old bread

not fit for a rat.

All your shoes are too small,

so you go about in stockings,

which is much quieter.

One of your helpers begins to bleed inside:   cancer.

Who will help you now?

Where will the food come from

When will you walk outside again

when

when?

You cast your imagination into the future

by some immense act of will,

and force yourself to carry on.

The writer

I can’t begin to fathom it:   how I love you.

I love how you reveal yourself,

rant, complain,

then reprimand yourself:  how fortunate we are;

how blessed.

Life and circumstance demand

you discipline yourself

daily, and hour by hour

so that terror will not win.

I see you leaning over your diary,

working at it, making it exact,

your dark head bent in concentration,

the red-covered journal

a focus, a listening ear.

You speak of Churchill, of Gandhi, of Mussolini,

towering figures,

you follow the battles day by day,

coloured pins stuck in a map

right next to the pencil marks

on the wall

marking your growth, and Margot’s growth,

so ordinary,

and all the while

changes are happening in your body,

you are becoming a woman

right there, in captivity,

hormones are coursing through your blood,

forcing the changes,

the blooming,

the desire.

You dream of babies, and of getting married one day,

then change your mind:  No.  I will be a writer.

My name will be known:  Anneliese Marie

Frank

A M. Frank

Anne Frank

A  M. Holländer

(no:  not your mother’s name - )

Or perhaps both:  a husband who understands?

I shall be a journalist.

(Novelist?)  But I must be good enough.

I must hone my craft.

Then in the next breath

you write of the antics of cats,

of beans spilling down the stairs,

of a toilet blocked with strawberry recipes,

all that you had for paper.

Yet in these details

comes the life, the veracity, the true

breath of that stifling little place,

we are there,

we share it with you,

Anne,

you open it for us,

make it bearable,

the unspeakable made real.

I love you

I love you, because you seem to understand

wounds,

hiddenness,

fear that can’t be acknowledged;

and though your terror was not my terror

I could not grow,

I was dwarfed,

struggled between rocks,

curled in on myself

in my own private annex of fear.

I was afraid of my father.

Nightly the door opened,

a flash of light,

then darkness, strangeness, I could not breathe,

something was stopping my breath,

I would never breathe again –

something unspeakable.

Yet it did not happen.

There were no six million – surely it was

all blown out of proportion,

only a few thousand

died (and they probably deserved it),

and who will believe

the unreliable memory

of a little girl?

So she climbed behind the wall of the room

and hid

until the violation was over

and she could fall back asleep again,

only a terrible taste in her mouth

to remind her of the shock,

the loathing,

the stopped lungs and silenced screams

of devastating damage.

 The bells:  II

“The Westertoren bells

have been carted off

to be melted down for the war.”

Then the radio, your precious

conduit to the outside,

the lovely old cabinet radio

is taken away.

No voices; no news; no music

to dance to, to sing to,

and your helpers scramble to find another,

much smaller, to sneak in

along with the day’s supplies.

The world tightens, contracts.

You hum to keep away fear.

There are flea bites on your ankles.

You peel potatoes

and listen to the incessant quarreling

of the grownups,

the Van Daans hissing at each other again

so pointless, so pointless

and pray that your marriage is not like that,

if you live to see it happen.