As children, some had harrowing wartime experiences that resembled those of Anne Frank. Others, inspired by her story of hiding from the Nazis in an annex above her father's Amsterdam office for two years, have written poetry or conducted research that can be considered part of her legacy.
This month and next, five Cornell faculty members -- including a Nobel laureate -- will speak at the Tompkins County Museum in conjunction with "The Anne Frank Story," a touring exhibit that opens Oct. 19 and has been extended through Nov. 30. Prepared by the Anne Frank Center USA, of New York City, the Ithaca exhibit also will include talks by Holocaust survivors and scholars from the greater Ithaca community.
The Tompkins County Museum (formerly in the Clinton House) is located at 401 East State Street. Exhibit hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Wednesday evenings; doors open at 7. The exhibit is free and open to the public; guided tours are available for $2 on Saturdays at 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.
The exhibit officially opens Saturday, Oct. 19, at 8 p.m. with New York State Assemblyman Martin Luster, John Park, chairman of the Anne Frank Center, and Harvey Fireside, a visiting fellow with Cornell's Institute for European Studies.
Fireside, who at 67 was born the same year as Frank, fled from Vienna to Switzerland after his father's shop was raided by Nazi storm troopers during the rampage of Nov. 9, 1938, that came to be known as Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass). Fireside and his father made it to the United States in 1940.
"Before leaving Vienna," Fireside recalled, "I was interviewed for Kindertransports; I could very well have ended up in Holland, next door to Anne Frank. Being turned down for it seemed like a crushing rejection at the time, but it probably saved my life -- very few of the Jews in Holland survived."
Fireside believes the expanded version of Frank's diary that was released last year has greater resonance for young people, because it includes restored passages about sexuality, romance and Anne's quibbles with her mother that Anne's father had deleted from the original text.
"In the first version," Fireside said, "it was very hard to identify with her; you felt she was just too good to be true. Now, we see that she was a real, live teen-ager. This [edition] is a wonderful revival of the true Anne Frank -- not the romanticized, canonized Anne Frank."
Despite her untimely death from typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15, Fireside said, Anne Frank's story can be viewed as uplifting.
"I think she had faith that there would some day be a world that would learn from her diary, that would be free of cruelty," he said. "I think it is in the spirit of Anne Frank to do something that will help heal the world." For Fireside, that spirit is kept alive through his work with the Bosnia Student Project, which brings refugee students to Cornell and other local colleges, and with the Border Fund, which helps Central American refugees find safe haven in the American Southwest.
Another child, another attic
On Sunday, Oct. 20, at 2 p.m., Roald Hoffmann, the Frank H.T. Rhodes
Professor in Humane Letters and professor of
chemistry, will read some poems, not yet
published, based on his own experience hiding in a schoolhouse attic in German-occupied
Poland for 15 months from the ages of 5 1/2 to 7.
"Games in the Attic" recounts how an atlas provided hours of diversion and education in the attic where he, his mother, two uncles and an aunt were hidden by a Ukrainian schoolteacher from January 1943 to June 1944.
Hoffmann, who received the 1981 Nobel Prize in chemistry, learned to read from his mother in that cramped attic, where a brick removed from the wall allowed the only source of light. Today, his mother still lives in New York City; she rarely discusses that harrowing period. As for her son, "It is only recently that I have been able to write about these memories," Hoffmann said.
In his presentation Hoffmann also will read "June 1943," which tells of his father, Hilel Safran, who was shot that month by the Nazis when they discovered he was organizing a breakout from a labor camp. Safran was retrieving weapons from Jewish resisters hiding in the forest and smuggling them into the camp; his story is one of the few such breakout attempts to be documented, his son said.
Like Fireside, Hoffmann believes there are positive messages to be found in stories like his and Anne Frank's.
"Yes, most of the Ukrainians behaved badly, and gave up the Jews," he said, "but also, there was a man who hid us. We learned that years later, after his neighbors found that he was hiding Jews, they beat him and shot him in the knee -- so pervasive was anti-semitism in the community. It is so important to remember the individuality of human beings; one of the bad effects of the demonization of Nazism is that it rubs out distinctions that existed among the people who lived under it."
Of Anne Frank's diary, he said, "What we have is a complicated picture; of course it is the story of the terrible things that happened during the war. But it is also a testimony to the power of life and survival and to a most certain humanity in the face of all that despair."
Order from chaos
On Wednesday, Oct. 23, at 8 p.m., Edgar Rosenberg '49, a professor of English and comparative literature, will participate in a panel of Holocaust survivors.
At the age of 13 he saw his home in Fürth, Bavaria, raided during Kristallnacht; the Nazis arrested his parents for several terrifying hours early the following morning. Connections ultimately allowed the family to leave for Haiti and to emigrate to the United States in 1940.
Of Anne Frank, Rosenberg said, "The girl was an absolute genius of a writer; no person of 13 or 14 could write this way." He can particularly relate to the passages of the diary that reveal Anne's fascination with birthdays, anniversaries and holidays, he said.
"She was trying to create a sense of order when there was nothing but disorder around her," Rosenberg said. "I had exactly the same experience; when my parents were hauled off on "Crystal Morning," I sat in my father's library and made detailed lists of useless scraps of information from his volumes on ancient history."
Rosenberg will also give a talk at the museum on Saturday, Nov. 23, at 2 p.m., titled "Anne Frank at 70: The Real Anne and the Popular Anne."
Sunday, Oct. 27, also at 2 p.m., Frank's diary will be described from a social historical perspective in a presentation titled "The Voices of Jewish Girls in Adolescent Diaries of the 1920s and 1950s: The Curious Legacy of Anne Frank," by historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg, professor of human development and family studies. Brumberg, who has been conducting research on adolescent girls' diaries for nearly two decades, will discuss the evolution of diary writing by Jewish American girls and how they reacted to Anne Frank's diary when it was first published in America in 1952.
And on Saturday, Nov. 2, at 8 p.m., award-winning poet A.R. Ammons, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry, will read from some of his works, along with Ithaca College writers Edward Hower and Judith Levey-Kurlander.
For more information about "The Anne Frank Story" call the Tompkins County Museum at 273-8284 or visit the Anne Frank Center USA's site on the World Wide Web at http://www.annefrank.com.
-- Harvey Fireside, Oct. 19, 8 p.m.
-- Roald Hoffmann, Oct. 20, 2 p.m.
-- Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Oct. 27, 2 p.m.
-- A.R. Ammons, Nov. 2, 8 p.m.
-- Edgar Rosenberg, Nov. 23, 2 p.m.
In addition to the Anne Frank exhibit, Ithacans can attend screenings of Anne Frank Remembered Oct. 26 and 27 at Cornell Cinema.