As it turned out, an essay written by the Jewish American writer Cynthia Ozick, ‘Who Owns Anne Frank?’, which originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1997, was elucidating. The new ‘definitive’ version was first published in 1995 and is significantly longer – about a third – than the one I had read. Published after the death of Anne’s father, Otto, it reinstates passages he had removed, in particular sections that related to sexuality, criticism of her mother (Edith), anti-German sentiment, and overt expressions of her Judaism. Some of these things are easier than others to reconcile as the protective acts of a grieving father. In 2001 five more pages of Anne’s writing were discovered and published. Ozick argued that Otto Frank’s censorship was one of the many instances – Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Diary of Anne Frank (1955) was another – where Anne’s journal had been appropriated to fit a narrative that was hopeful, inspirational. Ozick being Ozick did not mince words. She referred to it as ‘Evisceration … By uplift and transcendence’.

This phrase struck me so deeply that I approached Anne Frank: Parallel Stories with this question niggling at my conscience, or my kishkes, as us Eastern European Jews with sensitive gastrointestinal tracts would term it. Who was making the documentary, and for what purposes? The title gives little away. While the documentary is an Italian production, it is narrated in English by Helen Mirren, one of the finest actresses of our time. Significantly, it has been co-produced by Anne Frank Fonds, a foundation established by Otto Frank and in possession of the diary and its copyright. Other documentary material about the Frank family is plentiful, and access was given to the original diaries and the annex itself. The film is written and directed by Sabina Fedeli and Anna Migotto, award-winning journalists.

Anne Frank and her sister, Margot (photograph via Sharmill Films)

As Mirren discloses, Anne would have been ninety years old this year if she had survived. Anne’s entries reveal a voice that encompasses perspicacity, satire, ‘exuberant cheerfulness’ (as she herself termed it), despair, and fear. Throughout the film, several are read to us by Mirren. Given her age, is it a strange choice? Mirren was born in London a few months after the Bergen Belsen concentration camp was liberated, a few months after Anne perished there of typhoid. Why then didn’t the directors have a teenage girl read the entries? Besides the issue of dramatic gravitas, which Mirren brings, it goes back to that niggling question of appropriation. Fedeli and Migotto have made an astute decision; a teenage actor would attempt to identify with Anne. Instead, Mirren is able to demonstrate pathos without the audience imagining her as Anne. Rather than appropriate the voice, she reads it as readers do, keenly aware of the devastating knowledge of what is to come and, at times, seemingly overcome with emotion. While the Anne Frank House does feature in the film, the small darkened space where Mirren sits has been reconstructed to look like Anne’s room by the Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa.

The parallel lives of the title are those of five women, themselves all survivors of the Holocaust: Arianna Szörnyi (Italian), Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard (Polish/French), Helga Weiss (Czech), and sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci (Italian). It is never made explicit why these particular women have been chosen. Their testimonies hold the urgency of remaining survivors. In his fascinating work Admitting the Holocaust: Collected essays (1995), Lawrence Langer, Holocaust scholar and professor of English, expresses it thus: ‘Holocaust testimony enacts a resistance against the efforts of time to erase experience without a trace.’ That issue of ‘without a trace’ is doubly weighty given that Hitler’s master plan included the explicit desire for annihilation (‘I hope to see the very concept of Jewry completely obliterated’). Part of the overwhelming work of Holocaust recovery was, and is, reclaiming names and fates of the obliterated. The testimonies of these survivors, Anne Frank’s writing and story, the Shoah Foundation and its archives of oral testimonies, the work of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl et al., work towards reinstating these traces and making the event less obscure. Within this work there is little place for redemptive narratives. As Levi reminds us in The Drowned and the Saved (1986), ‘We are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it, or have returned mute.’

It is through the incorporation of these testimonies that the use of Anne Frank’s diary as an ‘uplift[ing]’ document is challenged. The testimonies, together with footage of arrests, deportations, killings, and concentration camps – the kind that leave their harrowing markings on the soul – enter the spaces where Anne’s testimony could not. All of these women, who were children or teenagers at the time of their arrest, are survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, some of them Bergen-Belsen, among other camps. Anne was taken to both of the former. Fanny Hochbaum, who survived the war as a young child in hiding, appears briefly in the documentary. As does the haunting figure of ninety-three-year-old Czech survivor Doris Grozdanovičová, who hobbles each week to Terezín to bear witness to the four years she survived there.

I discovered that all five of the featured women have published books of their Holocaust experiences; the most celebrated being Weiss’s Helga’s Diary: A young girl’s account of life in a concentration camp (2013), which incorporates her childhood drawings hidden in Terezín. There is a moment where Lichtsztejn-Montard – a woman whose exuberance and gestures are reminiscent of Mirka Mora, who was herself a survivor of the Pithiviers concentration camp and hid in French forests – recounts a brief encounter with Anne Frank at either Auschwitz-Birkenau or Bergen-Belsen. (Although the camp is unspecified, they were inmates at both.) Lichtsztejn-Montard performs the smile she recalls as ravissement (charming). We remember that there are no photographs of Anne after she goes into hiding. It’s a fleeting, tantalising glimpse of Anne through the face of an aged survivor. It brought to mind a fictional scene in Antonio Iturbe’s The Librarian of Auschwitz (2017) when Dita, who is based on survivor Dita Kraus, is imagined to be merely a few bunk rows away, in the same barracks at Bergen-Belsen, as a dying Anne.    

Helen Mirren in Anne Frank: Parallel Stories (photograph via Sharmill Films)

‘Evisceration’. That word pursues me. There is something I have not yet mentioned. It has been provoking a certain disquiet. When the title of the documentary appears on screen, it is as #AnneFrank: Parallel Stories. The documentary is framed and punctuated by the figure of a dark-eyed, dark-haired teenage girl – her resemblance to Anne resides purely in her colouring – who is in search of Anne. She travels from Bergen-Belsen to the Westerbork transit camp, Netherlands, via Prague and Paris, and eventually to the annex, now known as the Anne Frank House. Her voice emerges solely through her Instagram feed, @KaterinaKat, as she takes photos with an inscrutable expression. Perhaps she is overwhelmed, horrified, moved. If we don’t understand her motivation immediately, her red phone cover with the cut-out heart clarifies it. She is older than her subject; probably about twenty years old. One of her posts produces a kind of white heat in me; the kind I feel on learning that in 2017 Anne Frank’s face was appropriated by extremist Italian football fans for their anti-Semitic stickers. In a post at Bergen-Belsen, Katerina posts the asinine ‘Could we have been friends? #onyourside’. The teenager in me suppresses the desire to respond with social media’s version of an intellectual/poetic rejoinder, ‘#WTF?’ But I don’t have Instagram. And @KaterinaKat doesn’t really exist; she is a fictional character playing an Everyteen. Knowledge of this doesn’t make me want to shout, ‘Is there another side to be on?’, any less. (Obviously there is, but this isn’t another version of Romper Stomper.)

A second viewing brought new understanding. The film’s intended audience is Katerina’s age. In Reading the Holocaust (1998), Inga Clendinnen claims, ‘In the face of a catastrophe of this scale so deliberately inflicted, perplexity is an indulgence we cannot afford.’ Anne’s writings and the oral testimonies of Arianna, Sarah, Helga, Andra and Tatiana, Fanny, and Dora, work to dispel the fog of inscrutability. So too does the film’s use of historical footage, interviews with historians, visits to Shoah memorials around Europe, and discussions of survivor trauma and testimony, of second and third generation epigenetics, of post-memory, of the terrifying rise of anti-Semitism and racism. In all but the hashtag strand of Anne Frank: Parallel Stories – the Australian release has done well to drop the hashtag reference in the title – Fedeli and Migotto work against these indulgences, or reductions, or ‘eviscerations’.

Anne Frank: Parallel Stories (Sharmill Films), narrated by Helen Mirren and made in collaboration with Anne Frank Fonds, is in cinemas 17 October 2019.