“I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”
These words were written in a red-checkered autograph book — a diary — by a young girl on June 12, 1942 in German-occupied Holland. And thus began Anne Frank’s — and, later, the world’s — tryst with her diary. Much of the tumultuous events in her brief life are now known, but they merit yet another visitation. Less than a month after Anne began penning her thoughts, her most private views and desires, to “Dear Kitty” — the diary, it is speculated, was named after one of Anne’s friends — the Frank family was forced to go into hiding in sealed-off rooms in a building in Amsterdam: the diary documents, in poignant detail, the days of their concealment. Only six weeks before the Allies breached the Belgian-Dutch border, their refuge was discovered by the police and Anne, her family and their friends were deported to German concentration camps. Anne died at the Bergen-Belsen horror chamber weeks before it was liberated by the Allies.
Her diary, though, survived and, ironically, prospered. First published in June 1947, it went on to be translated into more than 70 languages. Its translation into English, in particular, lent it global recognition.
So much so that the diary of Anne Frank has, arguably, eclipsed other War diaries, some of which were written by boys and girls of her age.
Consider the case of the diary written by Miriam Wattenberg. Of Polish-Jewish ancestry, Miriam was born in 1924 and began writing her diary at the age of 15, in October 1939. This was around the time German forces had savaged Poland and the Wattenbergs were forced to flee to Warsaw’s dreaded ghetto. Three years later, just before the Warsaw Jews were deported en masse to the extermination hell called Treblinka, Miriam and her family were detained at the Pawiak prison. Fortuitously, the German authorities allowed them to migrate to the United States of America: Miriam’s mother was an American citizen. Miriam’s diary is considered to be one of the most important historical and searing accounts of life in the Warsaw ghetto.
Does the world know that there was a Russian Anne Frank and her diary as well?
As a teenager, Lena Mukhina had recorded the siege of Leningrad in her diary. The entries, from May 1941 to May 1942, provide a chilling account of what war chroniclers consider to be one of the longest and bloodiest sieges that had cost the lives of 1.1 million soldiers. What is notable is how Lena, notwithstanding her desperate circumstances, depicts the crests and the troughs of the battles raging around her. Lena’s diary reveals the state of Russian unpreparedness after the Nazis attacked the erstwhile Soviet Union: “To tell the truth, neither we nor any of the people in our block of flats are ready to deal with an attack: We don’t know where to find a medical aid centre, a decontamination site, an air-raid shelter; we don’t know where there are any air defence units or how we are supposed to react to bombing raids and firebombing.” Her cynicism after the fall of Kiev — today, the site of Russian aggression against Ukraine — is palpable: “I am still alive and able to write in my diary. I’m no longer convinced at all that Leningrad won’t be abandoned. So much has been said, we’ve heard so many fine words and speeches: Kiev and Leningrad are impregnable fortresses!!!.” She is unsparing about the Nazis; but Stalin gets a piece of her mind too: in January, she writes: “We are dying like flies here because of the hunger, but yesterday Stalin gave another dinner in Moscow in honour of Eden [British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden]. This is outrageous.” Also compelling are her snippets on life at war in Leningrad, with hunger, death, devastation and despair as her only companions. Lena, unlike Anne, did escape the enemy and Leningrad; she was evacuated over Lake Ladoga. However, her liberation brought an end to her diary-writing.
A glance at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia segment, a comprehensive online repository on this dark chapter in human history, would reveal that there were many other young chroniclers of the War such as Anne. In fact, their preponderance has enabled the Holocaust Encyclopedia to divide these numerous, but relatively unknown, voices of the conflict and extermination into such categories as refugee diarists (Lilly Cohn, Werner Angress, Peter Feigl and others); chroniclers who, like Anne, wrote about their experiences from secret hideouts (Clara Kramer, Leo Silberman, Anita Meyer and others); as well as the diary-keepers from the ghettos and camps (Yitskhok Rudashevski, Tamara Lazerson and Paul Weiner among others). The jottings by young hands into these blood diaries did not cease with the end of the Second World War. The tradition survived with, interestingly, war and journaling changing their respective shapes. The US’s invasion of Iraq, for instance, was documented in detail by a number of young bloggers, including a girl who went by the alias, Riverbend.
The importance of these pages on war is immeasurable. Historians, sociologists, peace activists, statesmen, artists, psychologists, journalists, to name a few, have been able to learn about and, equally, unlearn the truths and the lies concerning events that changed the course of human history. In fact, some of these young diarists were aware of the value of their journals not only as testimonials of their tumultuous times and lives but also as registers of collaboration and complicity. Anne, it is said, rewrote a version of her diary for the sake of preservation after hearing a broadcast made on London radio in which the exiled Dutch minister for education, art, and science asked for the preservation of documents — diaries, letters, and such everyday material — to create an archive for posterity that would serve as a testament to the sufferings of the people under Nazi rule.
These archives have certainly succeeded in aiding the historiography of that conflict. But are they not more than that? The diaries of the children of war are meant to serve as evidence of a collective moral failure, as a deterrent against the repetition of such monumental follies. On re-reading some of these diaries today when the global powers are witnessing — are complicit in — two deadly wars, one in Europe and the other in Palestine, one wonders whether — nay, is certain that — the post-War world order has failed these courageous children of war.
Sitting amidst the rubble that was once Gaza, a young Palestinian is perhaps making a note of this failure for future readers in his/her battered notebook.
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in
