Annelies полностью

The story I tell in Annelies, though, is not history; it is a piece of fiction based on my research and my understanding of Anne’s diary. The prewar section of the novel is a fictionalization of actual events, although the timeline has been slightly adapted to accommodate the drama and the dialogue of the characters largely imagined. Anne’s parents were in fact already planning to go into hiding in the annex behind Otto Frank’s business when the process was accelerated by Margot’s unexpected call-up into the German labor service.

Anne Frank’s experiences in the concentration camps of Westerbork, Birkenau, and Belsen are also imagined, but based on survivor accounts of conditions in the camps and on the accounts of people who had contact with Anne and Margot in those places. For instance, the scene in which Anne meets her friend Hanneli at the barbed-wire fence in Bergen-Belsen is based on an actual meeting often described by Hannah Pick-Goslar, who survived Belsen and lives today in Israel.

The story of my character Anne returning to postwar Amsterdam is of course completely imagined. According to the testimony of survivors, Margot Frank died of typhus inside Belsen in February or March of 1945. It’s said that she rolled off the pallet where she was lying, and the shock of the fall killed her. Anne Frank died a few days later, and their bodies were taken to mass graves.

In reality, of the eight residents of the House Behind, only Pim—Anne’s father, Otto Frank—returned. I have based my character Pim on my reading of Anne’s diary, on my research, on interviews of Otto, and on my dramatic imagination. Miep, too, is based on a real person—the indomitable Miep Gies, the woman who actually saved Anne Frank’s writing from the floor of the hiding place on the day of the family’s arrest by the Gestapo. My characters of Bep, Kugler, Kleiman, and Jan are all based to some degree on the Dutch individuals who supported the Franks in hiding. So are Anne’s friend Hanneli and the others hiding out in the House Behind; Anne’s mother, Edith; Augusta and Hermann van Pels; their son, Peter; and Mr. Pfeffer. My characterizations of them are dramatic constructions based on my reading of the diary, related books, documentaries, and my own imagination.

The important characters who are entirely fictional are the Dutch boy Raaf, the bookshop proprietor Mr. Nussbaum, and Anne’s stepmother, Dassah. Anne’s father, Otto, was indeed remarried in the 1950s to a quite wonderful and generous woman who was also a survivor. So the character of Anne’s stepmother, who for dramatic purposes is portrayed with a darker side, is purely a product of my creativity and is in no way based on any actual person. All such completely fictional characters were developed to fulfill the dramatic requirements of the plot, though I did my best to make them realistic within the historical context.

I believe in the importance of historical accuracy in fiction and have endeavored to create a postwar world in which Anne might have lived, one that is anchored in fact. At times, as I’ve mentioned, I took the names of actual people whom Anne Frank knew and assigned them to fictional characters instead of simply creating characters completely from whole cloth. But I did so only when excluding them from the story would be too significant an omission. In creating these characters (including the character of Anne herself), I tried to synthesize the results of my research with the portrayals of people in Anne’s writings.

I also took care not to draw conclusions about the question of the Frank family’s betrayal, to which history still lacks definitive closure. During my research for this book, I was surprised by how many theories are still being generated. The question of who betrayed Anne Frank seems to be one surrounded by a multitude of conjectures but with no real answer. As the author of the novel, I try not to come down on the side of any one particular speculation but simply present different possibilities. The only character who overtly declares her belief concerning the identity of the betrayer is the character Bep in her scene with Anne atop the Empire State Building. Here Bep expresses her conviction that it was her sister (Nelli) who betrayed the Franks to the Gestapo. This is based on a theory advanced by a book coauthored by the son of the actual Elisabeth “Bep” Voskuijl, published in the Netherlands in 2015 and entitled Silence No More. The book is premised on the testimony of Diny Voskuijl, another of Bep’s sisters, and Bep’s wartime fiancé, Bertus Hulsman. It’s the conclusion of the book’s authors that Nelly Voskuijl was a Nazi collaborator during much of the German occupation of the Netherlands and that it was she who was likely the culprit. But even in this case, I try to make it clear that this is what my character believes, not an endorsement of the theory’s validity.