Anne Frank and Me

This week is Anne Frank’s birthday.

As I stepped off the streetcar in Amsterdam, I faced a statue of a young girl. Less than life-sized, and looking more like a Degas ballerina than the photos I had seen, it was a memorial to Anne Frank. I remember my shock as I looked at the dates inscribed below: 1929-1945. I, also, was born in 1929.

I walked around the corner and along the canal to the building where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis during World War II. Is there any one who reads this who has not also read her diary? Or seen the play or movie? While Anne was writing her diary, I sat in my great-grandmother’s rocking chair in an upstairs bedroom in Fort Worth, Texas, pouring over old issues of the National Geographic and wondering if anything would be left of Europe after World War II. How I longed to see those palaces and cathedrals!

I climbed the steep stairs. Amsterdam staircases are the steepest and narrowest of any in the world; I climbed one just like it to my hotel room. At the end of the hallway was the bookcase, set ajar to permit passage into the secret passage which led to a separate building, behind the first, where two Jewish families lived in secret, until betrayed and carried off to German concentration camps, where all but Anne’s father died.

I entered the Franks’ hideout and walked the rough boards of those bleak, empty rooms, where the pictures Anne cut from newspapers were still pasted on the walls. Anne was only 15 when she died, along with her sister, of starvation and typhoid, in a Nazi concentration camp, just two months before the war ended. All I could think was, “She was so young. She had no opportunity to have all the things that I have had: a husband, a family, a home.”

That was in 1983. I had come to Europe to see the places I dreamed about and also to escape. I was at a low point in my own life. I was 54 years old and a failure. The man, to whom I devoted my entire adult life, had married someone else and abandoned me. During my 27-year marriage, at times bad and other times good, I realized that, all in all, those were mostly happy years, especially when my children were young. And I had children, which Anne was denied.

I left the Anne Frank house in tears. I also left with a renewed feeling of gratitude for all the good things that happened to me. In 1983 I had no premonition of the life I would experience in the next 26 years: great years of living in New Mexico and a brief but supremely happy second marriage to my Polish prince. Well, he always said his ancestors were slaves of the baron in Poland, but to me he will always be royalty.

Now I am 80 years old. For me life is good. But I do not forget: Life is not so good for some 15-year-old children In Darfur and Iraq. Also in Garland, Texas, where there is poverty. Still, the U.S. is a great nation, where even the poor have television sets. Sirens in the night mean an ambulance is carrying someone to Baylor Hospital, not the police carrying off children to die in concentration camps.