“We know Anne Frank as a young woman who wrote her diary. We made her an icon. But Frank was a writer, I wanted to pay homage to her extraordinary work.”
Lola Lafon is a writer and singer of French-Russian-Polish origin. In her latest book, “When will you listen to this song”, published in Italy by Einaudi last January 23rd, draws an unprecedented portrait of the life and work of Anne Frank, after having spent an entire night in the Secret Annex where the young German Jew remained hidden, together with her family, from 5 July 1942, until 4 August 1945, when she was discovered and deported first to the Auschwitz concentration camp, then to Bergen-Belsen. She died there of typhus together with her sister Margot. In 2021, a French publishing house proposed to Lafon that she go to a museum one night and she immediately chose to go to the one dedicated to Frank. Wandering from one room to another of the Secret Annex, Lafon recounts Anne’s daily life, her liveliness, her will to live, her great skills as a writer. But Lafon also retraces her personal life, investigates her family, who experienced the Shoah and emigration, because they were Ashkenazi Jews, who then emigrated to France. She tries to understand the reasons that led her there. “I wanted to take the reader with me into Anne Frank’s refuge, I wanted to make him go through it, but I also wanted to take him into all the questions I asked myself while I was going through that space” she tells Huffpost.
Lola Lafon, you write in the book that Anne Frank “is the only Jewish girl to be loved with such passion”. Why do you think?
It’s a big question, I don’t have an answer. I’m afraid we’ve made an icon of him and we’re loyal to that icon. When we make a person an icon, we tend to somehow simplify that person, make an image of them, and not really analyze what the person said. In the case of “The Diary of Anne Frank” this is exactly what happens, because everyone knows the famous photo on the cover, but we forget that Anne wrote very political things, carried out an analysis of the war, spoke about the her sexuality. Anne is much more complex and deeper, much less soft than she appears in that photo. This way of communicating it instead makes it simpler, easier. I believe that she is also loved so much because she is dead, we see her almost as if she were a saint. I was very struck by the fact that, when her diary was transformed into a play, many details were eliminated, making the work much softer, more regular.
What did you discover about Anne by spending the night in the Secret Annex?
I discovered that I didn’t know and it’s thanks to Laureen Nussbaum (American scholar and writer of German origin that Lafon talks about in the book – ed.), one of the last people alive to have known the Frank family and a scholar of the Diary as a literary work, if I was able to understand the importance of the work. And that’s the point. We know Anne Frank as a young woman who wrote her Dario. In reality, what we don’t know is that she was a writer, she rewrote her diary to make it fiction, she wanted to publish it. This young woman’s work as a writer has gone unnoticed in history. I wanted to pay homage to her work.
You define Anne Frank’s work as “prodigious”…
It is an incomplete work, we don’t know what it would have become, because unfortunately Anne died, she didn’t have time to write anything else. I think it is spectacular because, if you compare the first version to the second version, the one rewritten by her, you realize her savoir faire as a writer, there is a lot of intelligence in those pages. She is able to contextualize for the reader, she alternates the pace of what she tells. It’s always said that writers have to travel, discover new things and people and then bring them back to the page. You wrote the diary during a two-year imprisonment, you wrote this diary without seeing the sun, you will no longer see that sun, or rather you will no longer see anything. She, like all the members of her family, could not walk, could not speak, so as not to make noise and therefore be discovered. Anne did nothing but write and read all day. Her whole life is concentrated in writing, all her movements are contained in writing. This I find prodigious.
How does it differ from other works that tell the story of the Shoah?
It is a work that is still very widespread among young people, who are amazed by it because the text is very strong. Anne manages to make her experience a universal experience. It is an important testimony. It is not Primo Levi’s story, which tells of the concentration camp, that can tell us what and where he lived. She tells what she sees, the rise of something. In her text we see signs of fascism and anti-Semitism. She witnesses all this and at the same time she sees his strong desire for survival.
Why did he immediately choose to spend the night in Anne’s Secret Annex?
It was my first choice. I believe that there is a moment in the life of all people and of those who write when we want to confront a certain emptiness that is within us. A moment in which we want to try to answer questions that we have not been able to resolve. There is a moment when we realize that we are ready to do it. I am referring to the fact that the issues of the Shoah, anti-Semitism and migration are part of my family. But I realized that I had never actually faced them. When I was in the Secret Annex I had the impression that it was the moment to experience this void, to enter it.
Why did she run away from her family history?
The history of one’s family is sometimes heavy, when I was a teenager I never said I was Jewish, I wanted to reinvent myself. And I believe that we can reinvent ourselves, but we cannot escape the cultural context from which we come. We cannot escape the people who were there before us. Furthermore, we live in a time when in Europe there is a wave of the far right, a growth of racism. I can’t separate the writing of the book from the environment, from the world we live in.
In the book she writes that she has never “watched documentaries on the Holocaust, nor read books on the subject” and that some films on the Holocaust “made her vomit”. Why?
At that point I admit I exaggerated. I saw documentaries on the Shoah. But it is true that over the years I have been unable to see them, because it was too familiar a story, I heard so many of those anecdotes in my family that I preferred silence. Silence is characteristic of all families who have experienced a genocide. They don’t tell because they don’t have the words to tell, they can’t tell what they experienced. There is the desire to distance ourselves from a story that has been lived when in a family there are people who have died but of whom there is no trace, there is no tomb to commemorate them. My family history is a history of European Ashkenazi immigrants. My grandfather left from Russia, my grandmother left from Poland. Both believed, upon arriving in France, that they would find the homeland of human rights. But then they found themselves facing another persecution. My mother, when she was very little, was hidden by her parents and grew up surrounded by threats because she was Jewish. So I asked myself: “how can I create something alive, something that isn’t dead, starting from all this material?” I thought I could do that through writing.
So do you feel a task as the third generation after the Shoah?
Yes, the third generation has things to say, to pass on. Some people of my generation are starting to ask themselves questions about how they can convey certain stories, about how silence creates devastation.
But are we able to imagine?
Nobody can understand a genocide. I don’t think we can realize this in our imagination. When I was in Amsterdam I met a woman who survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Rosetta, known as Ted, and she told me: “You will never be able to imagine what I went through”. That’s the point. We can’t imagine, I I can’t imagine, but we have to keep trying to imagine.
What did you feel after the October 7 attack on Israel?
I find this question strange because it presupposes, in a certain sense, that I have a position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But I answer you. I felt horror. Yes, that’s the exact term, I was horrified.
One last curiosity. Why did you choose “When will you listen to this song” as the title of your book? Because she only mentions it in the last chapter…
Because in the end I told myself that I wanted to tell the story of this young man who dies in another genocide. A man who is completely anonymous. This boy left me many letters, and the way he writes at the end makes him similar to Anne Frank. The two are the same age and die in a genocide, but leave traces. He wrote me this phrase: “When will you listen to this song”, which is a testament. She turns to us in the same way, because she wants her Diary to be published. Well, in this sense they are united.
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