‘Anne Frank Remembered’: Beautiful and Illuminating

A documentarian with less courage than Jon Blair might well have ended “Anne Frank Remembered” with the Nazi raid in August 1944 of the famous secret annex in Amsterdam where Otto Frank had hidden his wife and two daughters plus four others for two years.

But the London-based Blair, who made the award-winning “Schindler” a decade ago, takes us right up to the end in Bergen-Belsen, where Anne and her older sister Margot died in late February or early March 1945 in a typhoid epidemic. Made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Anne, the Holocaust’s most famous victim, this remarkable Oscar-nominated documentary, at once beautiful and profoundly tragic, honors the memory of the brilliant, talented teenager whose diary has been translated into 54 languages and sold 25 million copies, giving hope to countless people, including Nelson Mandela.

Just when you might well have thought that pretty much all had been said and done about Anne Frank, this film makes us realize how much there still is to know about her and her times. Indeed, Blair’s most important accomplishment is to remind us that what happened to Anne and 10 million other Holocaust victims is really not so long ago by giving her story an intense immediacy. He does this by taking the documentarian’s two classic resources, interviews and archival footage, and integrating them with style, imagination and great sensitivity. “Anne Frank Remembered” is an elegantly structured work, with striking imagery and a stately pace, that boasts one of Carl Davis’ most eloquent scores.

In a very real sense, “Anne Frank Remembered” has been made in the nick of time. Although Anne herself would be 66 now, hardly ancient, a number of those who knew her well, in addition to her contemporaries, are considerably older than she. Absolutely crucial is Miep Gies, one of the four employees in Otto Frank’s pectin company who cared for the Franks in hiding; it was Gies who saved Anne’s diary and turned it over to her father once it was established that Anne had died. It had been Gies who tried desperately to convince Frank that he must take his family to America, but Frank could not bring himself to believe that the Germans would invade the Netherlands.

Because Frank had business connections in the Netherlands, he chose to emigrate there rather than to Switzerland, where part of his family, including his mother and his only surviving relative, a nephew, fled from Frankfurt in the summer of 1933. The Franks had been wealthy, and in Amsterdam they moved into a handsome, modern apartment complex where a number of other sophisticated German-Jewish families lived. Anne Frank is remembered by her friends as a vibrant girl, sometimes mischievous, and especially adored by her indulgent father.

Blair gives us the impression that the secret annex, where the family retreated when Margot received an order to report to a German labor camp in July 1942, was always vulnerable. It was located in an upper floor in a building behind Frank’s offices in central Amsterdam, and its entrance was hidden by a bookcase. An anonymous phone call to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam doomed the Franks, Otto’s business associate Hermann van Pels, his wife and son Peter and Gies’ dentist, Fritz Pfeffer.

Blair had the good fortune to obtain a documentary on the Westerbrook transit camp in Northern Holland--it was commissioned by its commandant to show his Nazi superiors how efficient he was in running it. He was even more fortunate to locate several people who were there with the Franks and who were shipped off with them to Auschwitz in cattle cars, the last such journey, in September 1944.

Dutch Resistance fighter Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper was not only at Bergen-Belsen, seeing the Frank sisters only days before they died, but also was the person who had to confirm their death to their father upon his return to Amsterdam, hoping that Anne and Margot were still alive. (He already knew that his wife had perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945.)

The fate of Anne, who died only a month before the camp was liberated, is one in which irony is cruelly compounded over and over. If only Anne hadn’t had scabies, she could have gone to a labor camp with other Dutch women that had a high survival rate; her mother and sister chose to stay behind with her. If only the sisters hadn’t had bunks nearest the always opening and closing barracks door in the dead of winter. If only Anne had known her beloved father was still alive....

Otto Frank lived until 1980, and in an interview late in his life he remarked that he hadn’t really known his daughter until he read her diary, which was a gift on her 13th birthday on June 12, 1942. In publishing his daughter’s diary, he fulfilled her famous wish: “I want to go on living even after my death.”

* MPAA rating: PG, for emotional thematic elements and depictions of the Holocaust. Times guidelines. The film is too harrowing for preteens.

‘Anne Frank Remembered’

A Sony Pictures Classics release of a Jon Blair Film Co. production in cooperation with the Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, and in association with the BBC and the Disney Channel. Writer-producer-director Jon Blair. Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd. Editor Karin Steininger. Music Carl Davis. Art director Rein van der Pol. Research Rian Verhoewen. Stills research Yt Stoker. Narrator Kenneth Branagh. Excerpts from “The Diary of Anne Frank” read by Glenn Close. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

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