Through the years, the figure of Anne Frank has become emblematic of the horrors of the Holocaust. It is to this young girl’s diaries we turn when we need to put a human face on the unimaginable, impenetrable evil of the Nazi death machinery. Yet, somewhere in the course of becoming a representation of everything we need her to be, we’ve lost the very real human being who was Anne Frank, an adolescent girl on the verge of her adult future. Anne Frank Remembered, which just won the Oscar as the best documentary feature of 1995, reminds us that there existed a young person whose life was snuffed out. In this portrait, we discover the precocious, gregarious, insightful child that was Anne Frank and mourn the loss of this potential. No longer can we compartmentalize her as that sad but static pin-up girl of the Holocaust. After watching this movie, we know which pictures of movie stars she hung on her bedroom walls and of her yearning for greatness and immortality — a desire that led her to start rewriting her diary from the beginning for posterity. This is a flesh-and-blood child, no mere icon of victimhood. Enhancing this film portrait are the testimonies of some individuals who knew Anne Frank and her family: childhood friends, a cousin, neighbors, some survivors of the concentration camps who recall the Franks. Their recollections fill in many of the blank spots in our collective memory of Anne Frank and her brief life. Some of the film’s most moving testimony comes from Miep Gies, the woman who daily visited the family in hiding, bringing with her food and news of the outside world. Through her bravery, we derive a greater understanding of what Anne Frank’s image symbolizes to us. None of us are alone, no one is an island; and a theme that also recurs is that there is no life without hope. Little twists of faith, granules of hope: These are the things that can spell the difference between life and death. Let us not forget. Anne Frank Remembered occasionally loses its sure footing when it strays from its strict focus on one person and into more generalized images of the Holocaust. Though documentary footage from the concentration camps and the ghettoes is always a gripping sight, no matter what context we see it in, here the enormity of the atrocity tends to overwhelm our focus on this one child. Also, a couple of emotional scenes appear to be staged for the camera, adding a speciously manipulative quality the otherwise moving sentiments. Anne Frank Remembered, nevertheless, “keeps hope alive.”
This article appears in April 19 • 1996 (Cover).
