he is perhaps Hitler's best-known victim," be-
gins the voice-over for Jon Blair's moving and
meticulously researched new documentary,
Anne Frank Remembered, running at the De-
troit Film Theatre March 29-31. It's an ironic statement
for a film that reveals so much that the world has not
known about the young Jewish woman who died, at the
age of 15, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in
Germany.
A British filmmaker whose documentary of Oskar
Schindler won that country's Academy Award equiva-
lent, Blair recounts Anne's life from beginning to end,
through interviews with her closest childhood friends
and those who were with her in the final days of her life.
His camera traces the ordeal of the German-Jewish
Frank family with historical footage and detailed re-cre-
ations of what their Amsterdam hiding space would have
looked like. Blair's is the first documentary made in co-
operation with the Anne Frank House in that city —
which opened its archives, resources and the annex it-
self to the filmmaker. The results are as illuminating as
they are horrifying.
History has tended to position Anne as an icon more-
so than a person —Anne Frank: The Diary of Young Girl
has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide since
1947; the play based on her two years in hiding won a
Pulitzer Prize; the 1959 film is a staple of school curric-
ula. Blair, who grew up in South Africa, delves beneath
that veneer of saintliness.
"I had seen the movie and I'd read the Diary as a child,
and I think my perception was like everyone else's," says
Blair. In making the documentary, "I didn't want to
alter (her status as an icon), I just wanted to demysti-
fy her. I think in order to identify with her and to see
her extraordinary qualities, you have to see her ordi-
nary qualities."
Anne was her father's daughter, a slightly spoiled
child who grew into a sassy, self-confident free spirit.

''' ' - e;;;U t • •

"God knows everything; Anna knows everything bet-
ter," Hanneli Goslar, Anne's best friend, recalls her own
mother saying of the rambunctious Anne. Goslar (then
nicknamed Lies) and Jacqueline van Maarsen remem-
ber Anne entertaining the neighborhood kids by pulling
her shoulder out of its socket, putting on plays, and ex-
pressing the normal pre-teen interest in boys and her
pre-pubescent body.
In 1933, with Germany under Nazi control, Otto Frank
moved his family from Frankfurt to Amsterdam, where
he set up a business selling pectin. Blair depicts their
new neighborhood as a friendly, close-knit group of main-
ly Jewish refugees.
By 1940, Holland too had been conquered by Hitler,
and Otto began preparing a secret hiding place for the
family. On Aug. 5, 1942, Anne's older sister, Margot, re-
ceived an order to report to a German labor camp, and
the next day the Franks disappeared.
Only a few weeks before, on her 13th birthday, Anne
had received her diary. "I hope," she wrote, "I shall be
able to confide in you completely, as I have never been
able to do in anyone before, and I hope you will be a great
support and comfort to me."
Some of Blair's best footage captures, in haunting de-
tail, the three-floor secret annex where the Franks lived
for two years with the van Pels family —Hermann, Au-
guste and their son Peter — and Fritz Pfeffer, a 54-year-
old dentist who joined the group in the winter of 1942.
Through high-tech photography, furnished rooms —
complete with bedspreads, desks and the diary — fade
to empty chambers with only echoes of the lives that
once inhabited them.
Here is where Miep Gies' role begins. Perhaps the
most integral player in Blair's work, Gies, an employee
of Otto Frank's, supplied the family with food and in-
formation on a daily basis. She was their lifeline, and
her own story is perhaps as compelling.
Gies leads Blair's camera on an intimate journey
through the rooms of the annex, point-
ing out the corner in which Anne's moth-
er would confide to Gies her debilitating
anxieties, the wall on which Anne hung
her prized collection of film-star and roy-
al-family photographs, the kitchen in
which the eight laughed, fought and
struggled to remain hopeful.
One of the film's most moving
scenes comes during the face-to-face
meeting between Gies and Fritz Pf-
effer's son Peter, who finds himself
emotionally overwhelmed upon tak-
ing the hand of his father's protec-
tor. Gies, for her part, remains a
stoic heroine throughout the doc-
umentary. As far as she's con-
cerned, she did what she had to.

Opposite page:
Far left: The film Anne Frank Remembered
contains the only known home-movie
footage of Anne, never-before-seen
photos, previously undiscovered family
letters and personal testimonies that
recount the life and legacy of Anne Frank.

Left: Otto Frank was liberated from
Auschwitz Jan. 27, 1945. His daughters
Margot, left, and Anne died in Bergen-
Belsen in early 1945, within days of each
other. Otto Frank's journey to find his
daughters ended in late July 1945 when he
received notification of the death of his
daughters.

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This page:
Right: Otto Frank spent one year preparing
and stocking the annex that would become
the Franks' hiding place. Anne pasted
photos of movie stars and the young
Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret on her
new bedroom wall.

On Aug. 4, 1944, the hiding place was discovered and
four days later the Franks, van Pels and Pfeffer were
sent by train to Westerbork, a transit camp in northern
Holland. Here Blair employs his own footage taken
through the windows of a German steam engine and on-
location interviews of those who traveled with the fam-
ily to Westerbork and then on to Auschwitz.
The camera pans the gates of the death camp at night,
and, inside one of the blocks, survivor Sal de Lierna
recalls how he and Otto Frank maintained their sanity
by humming Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and dis-
cussing the work of van Gogh.
Margot and Anne were separated from their mother
in October 1944 and sent to Bergen-Belsen, a disease-
ridden concentration camp, where Anne was to meet
with her best friend Lies for the final time. Goslar re-
counts hearing Anne's voice through a guarded barbed
wire fence and the next evening tossing her a packet
of clothing, which fell into another woman's arms. Stand-
ing in a cold field, Goslar describes her friend's eyes as
"very big." Anne, like her sister Margot, was just weeks
from death.
Blair continues Anne's story through Otto, the only
member of the Frank family to survive the death camps.
After receiving news of his daughters' fates, Otto made
the publication of his Anne's diary — and the universal
message he insisted it sends about discrimination — his
life's work.
Blair, for one, finds Otto's approach to the Diary ap-
propriate. "I hope that by illuminating every bit of the
story of one life in microscopic detail, people will think
of all those millions of people whose stories will never
be told," says the filmmaker, whose own experience with
apartheid forced him to develop what he describes as
"an early sensitivity to victimization."
"At the same time," Blair continues, "this is not just
a tale of those who died in the Holocaust ... but it is also
about the victims of discrimination wherever and when-
ever that occurs worldwide." 0

ponsored by The Jewish News, Anne Frank
Remembered will be presented at the Detroit Film The-
atm at 7 and 9:30 p.m. Frida3r- Saturday, March 29-30,
and at 4 and 7 p.m. Sunday,March 31. Tickets are
$5.50. The DIA is at 5200Wooward Ave., Detroit. Call
(313) 833-2323.

