cracks knuckles
OK… time to distinguish myself as the SDMB’s resident Anne Frank expert…
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get to a TV Sunday night and couldn’t watch the first half. I thought the second half was pretty good, much better than other wishy-washy depictions of Anne’s life like “The Attic” and the movie of the “Diary”. It was a bit sentimental (they didn’t bother to show that Anne had grown tired of Peter by the time they were arrested, for example), but I realize they did have to cut some of the more interesting parts of the diary to show her life in the concentration camps afterward.
One has to bear in mind that the only accessible source for information about the Van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer is Anne’s diary. All later depictions of them are filtered through this lens and color them just as the teenaged Anne saw them.
The Van Pels family were, like the Franks, refugees from Germany, having arrived in Amsterdam in 1938. Herman Van Pels was soon recruited to help Otto Frank’s failing business Opekta, which manufactured pectin used to make jams and jellies. His father had been a butcher, and he was familiar with spices and preserving agents, and so under his guidance a new business, Pectacon (which manufactured ingredients used to make sausages), was set up in Ottos’ office building at 263 Prinsengracht. When the Franks went into hiding, Otto remembered his helpful business partner and invited him, his wife, and son to live with them in the Annex.
Hermann van Pels was often anxious and irritable, due partly to of lack of cigarettes, but mostly due to lack of purpose and usefulness. He often snapped at Anne, who he saw as spoiled and disrespectful, and who often made the situation more tense with her willful attitude. His wife Auguste was much more flamboyant and emotional than Edith Frank, and Anne was unaccustomed to the kind of tempestuous relationship she had with her husband. Anne and Auguste were often at odds, and she is mostly treated with anger in exasperation by Anne in her diary.
Fritz Pfeffer probably had it the hardest out of all the residents of the Annex. Everyone else had their family members to stick by them - Fritz’s only son was in England, and upon going into hiding he had to leave his Gentile girlfriend, Charlotte Kaletta. Fritz seems to have lived for the letters from Charlotte that Miep Gies manage to smuggle in to him, and had no patience for Anne and her childish ways. They were - unwisely - forced to share a bedroom, and Fritz quarrelled with Anne with everything imaginable - the use of their table, her bathroom schedule, her nightmares. Miep’s decision to let her dentist share a hiding place with the Franks and Van Pelses was probably not a good idea in retrospect. But if one looks beyond the portrait of Fritz painted by Anne, one sees a despairing man thrust into circumstances beyond his control. I was touched upon learning that the reason he argued with Anne over the table was so he could study Spanish - because he planned to move with Charlotte to South America after the war.
This movie came at a good time - I’m visiting Amsterdam in two weeks and I know I’ll be standing in line at 5 am, pounding on the door to get into the Anne Frank-Huis. It’s a pilgrimage I’ve wanted to make since I first fell in love with Anne’s diary in the ninth grade.