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The Muted Memory

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The Muted Memory THEMUTEDMEMORY: THERECEPTIONOF THEDIARYOFANNEFRANK INPOLAND Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska he Diary of Anne Frank is probably the most popular text worldwide, both of documentary and literary value, in the vast and multilingual body of literature T on the Holocaust. Adapted as a play and feature film, the story became particularly well-known in the United States, where it also gave rise to a debate on 1 various representations and misrepresentations of the Holocaust. A number of critics have expressed their dismay over the Americanization of the Holocaust, of which the reception of Anne Frank's diary is a clear example. What they mean by `Americanization' in this particular case includes sentimentalization, focus on the personal story (first love, parents/daughter relations) and the erasing or downplaying of the Jewishness of the author for the sake of a universalized and artificially optimistic message.1 2 Compared with the United States and other Western countries, the book and the story behind it had a rather limited reception in Poland. In spite of the relatively small number of critical voices, a closer look at these is very telling since they reveal various attitudes towards Jews and the Holocaust in postwar Poland. For thirty-two years between the first edition (translated from German) and the next (translated from Dutch), the book was practically unavailable in Poland. It might be thought that its long absence was due to the fact that Anne Frank was a foreign author, when Poland had its own young diarists who had perished during the Holocaust, such as Dawid Rubinowicz and Dawid Siera- kowiak. However, this explanation is unconvincing because the absence of Anne Frank was caused by political and ideological factors contributing to the general erasure of the memory of the Jews in Poland (school curricula are very meaningful in this respect) and a neutralization or `Polonization' of the Holocaust, that is, emphasizing Polish suffering and erasing the distinction between the fate of Poles and Jews during the war.2 Para- doxically, it is only due to the gradual opening up to the West from the early eighties and especially since the abolition of censorship in 1989 that Polish readers and viewers have been exposed to other versions of the Holocaust, through American works such as Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, William Styron's Sophie's Choice and Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. Although usually even more dismayed than American critics by the Americanization of the Holocaust and what they perceive as an unfair treatment of Poles, Polish audiences are forced to re-examine some of their beliefs about the nature and complexity of the Holocaust. 3 As a reviewer of a recent biography by Melissa MuÈller remarked, `how one reads the story of Anne Frank says a lot about how one views European history, Jewish history and the Holocaust itself.'3 In the United States Anne Frank's diary is undoubtedly the most popular text connected with the Holocaust, so popular that it has led a number of critics [ 684 ] J. K. Roth et al. (Eds.), Remembering for the Future © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2001 The Reception of The Diary of Anne Frank in Poland 685 to voice reservations about it. They include Cynthia Ozick, who has gone so far as to state rhetorically that given the way the diary has been misinterpreted it would have been better if it had never been published.4 Alvin Rosenfeld presents the American way of reading the diary as an example of Americanization of the Holocaust. He also examines its reception in Germany and Israel and gives examples from other countries including Japan and Russia, concluding that `if one were to carry out a study of the reception of the diary in the various other countries and cultures where Anne Frank is known, one would almost certainly find still other responses to the girl and history her image reflects.'5 Peter Novick in his latest and widely discussed book, The Holocaust in American Life, devotes substantial space to the reception of the diary in America.6 Although I was born and raised in Poland, and as a teenager read dozens of books about the Second World War and the Holocaust, my first encounter with Anne Frank's diary was through the American edition in the early eighties. Earlier, although I had heard of Anne Frank, I never had a chance to read her diary or see its stage adaptation. It was not a widely accessible text in Poland, at least not in the mid-sixties or seventies. At a time when the book was gaining plenty of attention in Western Europe and the United States, Stalinist cultural policy banned most literature from the West in Poland, as much as in other countries of the Communist Bloc. Anne Frank was not a politically correct author at the time, among other things because of her middle-class origin. We should remember that at this time even Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was censored: in the Polish edition of the mid-fifties a sentence in which Alice is afraid she has turned into her less talented and much poorer friend, Mabel,7 disappears, as books for young readers at that period could not allude to inappropriately presented class divisions. Soon after the 1956 thaw, when a great deal of Western literature was translated and published, the diary of Anne Frank found its way to Polish readers. Even before the Polish edition of 1957, information about the diary and its stage adaptation could be found in Polish periodicals. The second Polish edition was published in 1960,8 but it was not reissued until the early nineties, when the unabridged translation from Dutch appeared.9 Altogether the two early editions amounted to 10,000 copies each ± which seems a sizeable quantity today when the book market in Poland is very competitive and numerous books are published but was rather modest at the time, when Polish or Soviet books with war themes were published in editions of 50±100,000 copies. One may add that generally Western books about the Holocaust had a hard time reaching Poland, since they were treated with suspicion as anti-Polish or anti-Communist `imperialist' propaganda.10 Anne Frank's diary is addressed primarily to the young reader and young readers in Poland were especially protected against a fair presentation of the Holocaust. Since Jewish history was manipulated in textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education and used all over People's Republic of Poland, this could hardly have been a recom- mended book. How was the diary received when it was first published? Reviews fall into different categories. A number of reviews comment on both the documentary and literary qualities of the book and discuss it in a clear and matter-of-fact way; others focus on the personal character of the protagonist and choose a eulogical mode. Some voices, as might be expected in a Catholic country, seek to Christianize the Jewish victim, presenting Anne Frank as a Jewish saint, but they are rare. The most curious review essay of this type was published in Homo Dei, a periodical published by the Redemptorist order. The author, JoÂzef Marian SÂwieÎcicki, states that the diary, like any great tragedy and like a number of other memoirs from concentration camps, purifies 686 The Arts and `elevates' the reader. The attitude to Anne Frank is very paternalistic. SÂwieÎcicki expresses regret that the girl bears the `Old Testament mentality' of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and does not understand the brotherly Christian imperative to forgive the sins of thy neighbour, but he admits that the girl is, as it were, on the right track, as can be seen in her attitude both to the oppressors and to her parents. Although her `Old Testament soul' has a hard time in granting forgiveness, her innate kindness helps her overcome grudges and initiate something resembling Christian self-examination. 10 In sum, her alleged predispositions to Christian religiosity are underlined. The author goes even further in adopting Anne Frank not only for Christianity in general but for Polish Catholicism in particular: `Under the influence of suffering, Jewish messianism is born in her soul, so close to ours, as if she had read the three bards [three Polish romantic poets: Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Søowacki, Zygmunt KrasinÂski]; messianism that sees in suffering a special message from God. Her desire to be immortal is first of all as in Søowacki a desire for human appreciation after death.' The reviewer goes on to say that in the last sentence of the diary ± `[I] keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if . there weren't any other people living in the world' ± Anne falls into romantic misanthropy, and comments that as an `Israelite' Anne could not understand the mystery of grace and the fact that a human being who has to rely on his or her self alone is very weak. Anne's references to God are undoubtedly genuine, but she does not understand that God should be the highest love. Nevertheless the author seems to see glimpses of such understanding and nobility in `little Anne's' heart, for examples when she expresses the wish that the whole thing would end and the imprisoned Jews did not have to risk their benefactors' lives.11 11 The antisemitic sentiments apart, this statement paradoxically resembles some for- mulations from President Reagan's address at Bergen-Belsen, where he stated that memories evoked there `take us where God intended his children to go ± toward learning, toward healing, and, above all, toward redemption.'12 12 It is curious how many literary and mythical heroines Anne Frank was compared to by Polish critics: a Jewish Antigone, the prototype of FrancËoise Sagan, a modern Juliet, Anne of Green Gables, a young Eve who creates her Adam, or Iphigenia.
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