You Shall Tell Your Children: Holocaust Memory in American Passover Ritual

Chapter 4: Anne Frank, Hope, and Redemption

96 Chapter 4 Anne Frank, Hope, and Redemption
I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart. —Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank’s story, truthfully told, is unredeemed and unredeemable. —Cynthia Ozick, “Who Owns Anne Frank?” What, after all, was the meaning of all this? The more I find out, the less I understand it. —Harry Mulisch, “Death and the Maiden” The previous chapters set forth three major issues surrounding Holocaust commemoration in U.S. Passover ritual. The first chapter explored difficulties that accompany the desire to transmit knowledge of the Holocaust to future generations through communal memory . The next identified impediments to honoring efforts made by victims and victim-survivors to assert their agency within a context of extreme dehumanization . Chapter three presented the critique of redemption in Holocaust studies and demonstrated how the problem is especially complicated given the strong redemptive frame of the Passover seder and haggadah. This chapter shifts to application, examining the placement of one individual’s Holocaust experience in the haggadah, with particular attention to how freedom-redemption and value-added redemption impact one another when Passover and the Holocaust are commemorated together. Each haggadah examined in this chapter commemorates the Holocaust through the famous words of Anne Frank presented in the opening epigraph: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.” Although Frank’s words contain a hopeful and optimistic message, these words, when placed Anne Frank, Hope, and Redemption 97 in the haggadah, do not simply fortify the redemptive frame or affirm the emplotment from degradation to glory. The varying effect of Frank’s words is shaped in part by where she appears within the traditional text: Is she the wise child or the simple child? Is she a voice of suffering “in every generation ,” or the companion of Elijah? Does she appear as a reminder of the degradation suffered during the Shoah or as an affirmation of hope in spite of suffering? Each site of commemoration prompts a different interpretation. Other elements of the text such as ritual instruction, midrashic commentary, and art also shape readers’ understandings. These elements can work in conjunction with the frame, or they can challenge it. Sometimes the challenge is subtle and indirect. At other times, ritual, midrash and art mount a direct, powerful, and dramatic challenge to the redemptive frame. Anne Frank is arguably the most famous victim of the Holocaust, and the words “in spite of everything . . .” have inspired people around the world, so it is not surprising to find them in many commemorations. The three haggadot examined in this chapter all use Frank’s text to honor the Jewish victims of genocide during World War II, and each text creates a different relationship between Frank’s words and the redemptive theme of the haggadah. This chapter concludes with analyses of haggadot that are representative of the range of Passover Holocaust commemorations which draw on Anne Frank’s diary. It begins, however, with an extended review of scholarship about the iconic status of Anne Frank and the popularization of her diary. The diary and later representations engage key questions for the formulation of collected Holocaust memories: What counts as knowledge of the Holocaust? How do post-Holocaust generations evaluate the assertion of subjectivity and resistance? What remains of the possibility of hope? Anne Frank’s diary and its popularization raise profound questions about knowledge, memory, agency, and redemption, all of which remain relevant as her words continue to appear in American haggadot and contribute to the shaping of contemporary Jewish memory and identity. Anne Frank and Her Diary Anne Frank received her diary as a gift from her father for her thirteenth birthday, June 12, 1942, approximately one month before her elder sister, Margot, received a summons for deportation to a Nazi work camp and the Frank family went into hiding in “the Secret Annex.” In her opening entry Frank sets forth her hope that the diary will be “a great source of comfort and support.”1 Frank’s diary becomes her friend and confidante, whom she 98 You Shall Tell Your Children addresses as “Dearest Kitty.” For more than two years, Anne recorded her thoughts, hopes, dreams, frustrations, and astute observations of the limited world around her. The diary entries written in hiding begin July 8, 1942, and...