Two Diaries of Two Young Girls: Anne Frank and Barbara Ann Hess, 1942-1943

Everyone knows the story of Anne Frank, (1929-1945) the young Jewish girl who kept a diary while hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam from her thirteenth birthday (June 12, 1942) until August 4, 1944, shortly after her 15th birthday, when she and her family were betrayed, discovered, and sent to concentration camps. Anne Frank died of a typhus epidemic that spread through Bergen-Belsen.  The camp was liberated April 12, 1945. If she had lived until her 16th birthday, she might still be living today. The Anne Frank Museum, created at the Frank family’s war-time hiding  location in Amsterdam, has an award-winning website in which you can visit the annex where Anne lived and learn much more about her life and times.

My own mother, Barbara Ann Hess Hershey Becker, was born February 27, 1927, on a farm near Lancaster, PA. She is living today! She too kept a diary during WWII. Though she was two years older than Anne Frank, her teenage diary overlaps with Anne’s because it was begun when Mother was “14 years, 3 months, 13 days” old. It ends on her sixteenth birthday, the birthday Anne never reached.

As I read the two journals, Anne’s and Barbara Ann’s, together, several amazing coincidences jump out at me. First, both diarists begin their journals on the same day–June 12–just one year apart. Anne starts her diary in 1942 Barbara Ann in 1941.

Between June 12, 1942 (when Anne begins) and Feb. 27, 1943 (when Barbara Ann’s diary ends) there are 47 entries in Anne’s diary. Some of these entries are written on the same day!

But two significant differences stand out (in addition to the slight difference in age). One is obvious–Anne is a Jew living during the Holocaust. Mother is living safely in the arms of her Mennonite family in America, but she nevertheless experiences fear about the war.

Another is less obvious. Anne hopes to reach the rest of the world with her journal. Barbara Ann warns any potential readers that her diary is her “personal property and private journal” (see warning on the cover below).

Anne Frank, sometime in 1944, hears an underground broadcast from London saying that letters and diaries will be collected and possibly published after the war. She goes back, amends her private journal and begins new entries with the intent of contributing them to the cause described on the radio. She therefore finds in her diary more than ordinary teenage solace for angst; she is also trying on the vocation of writer. Writing keeps her spirit alive.

Today it’s time for my weekly call to my mother. Her voice will seem even more precious to me after studying these two journals.

If she gives me permission to quote from her “personal property and private journal,” would you like to read some excerpts here? Would you like to see them side-by-side with Anne’s?

Another Mennonite Memoir: The Steppes are the Colour of Sepia

 My fellow memoir reader Clif let me know that the review I wrote of the following book has now been published in the Mennonite Quarterly Review. It has not been posted online yet, so here it is for those of you who are Canadian, Mennonite, or just interested in good family stories.

 

The Steppes are the Colour of Sepia: A Mennonite Memoir. By Connie T. Braun. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2008. Pp. 245. $24.95

More than any other book I have read recently, Connie T. Braun’s The Steppes are the Color of Sepia left me asking questions about the nature of memoir (note the subtitle) and its relation to two other genres it traverses—history and fiction. Braun’s book makes a major contribution to the reconstruction of repressed memory of suffering and survival among the Russian Mennonites, and, coincidentally, but less clearly so, to the burgeoning field of Mennonite memoir.

Braun tells the story of three generations of Mennonites in Russia who struggled for survival on the vast prairies of the Ukraine and Siberia: her grandparents, Jakob and Maria Letkemann; her parents, Peter and Erna Letkemann; and herself. She divides the book into three parts: an introduction called “Promised Land” and Parts I and II titled “Russia: A Pastor’s Record of Repression” and “World War II: A Boy’s Recollection of Survival.” These parts correspond roughly to reconstruction of her grandfather’s memories of Russia and her father’s memories of WWII. Interspersed throughout the book are very helpful maps and evocative photos, both of which the author uses effectively to help establish another of the book’s subjects: place. A trip with her parents and family to Russia and Ukraine in 2005 allowed her to suffuse the book with a poet’s appreciation for landscape, fecundity, and a “promised land” mythology, even as the same setting evoked her father’s memories of cruelties endured under two of the twentieth century’s harshest dictators—Hitler and Stalin.

Braun brings three extraordinary gifts to this tale. The first is passion and love of language. Her preface begins with a description of rivers where her father’s memories flow:  “ along the river bank now and then are stretches of sugar-white beaches, various hollows where willow trees cast deep blue shade over fishing holes, and, further along, near the old quarry, high rocky ledges from where boys whoop as they slice, like blades of pocket-knives, through air and water” (ix). The second is a thorough comprehension of the relevant works of Russian and Canadian Mennonite history combined with literary and philosophical texts on the nature of memory itself (see her fine essay “Silence, Memory and Imagination as Story: Canadian Mennonite Life Writing” at http://www.mennonitewriting.org/journal/1/3/silence-memory-and-imagination-story/ for evidence of the scholarship that underlies her book.) The third strength lies in conscientious detective work—uncovering deeply repressed and thus scantly recorded memories. She wants the truth, she deeply respects the documents and recorded history she uses, and when she imagines, as she often does, she “shows the work,” to use Julia Kasdorf’s apt phrase.[i]  We trust this author’s voice, both for the narrative she constructs and the silences that remain within it.

As a descendent of Swiss-German Mennonites, I eagerly read this story for both its similarity and difference to my own. One thing that struck me is how inadequate our labels are for various kinds of Mennonites living in Canada and the United States today. Braun says in her preface that although her progenitors lived in Russia for a century, “we are not Russian and not Ukrainian. We are descendents of a migratory people, the Mennonites. We are survivors of dictatorship and war, and are now a Canadian family” (x).

The fields of Mennonite history and literature, at their best, illustrate the power of what Braun calls “peoplehood” to transcend the boundaries of time and space.  They accomplish this feat well when they are the most particular. Braun never conflates the story of her family with that of the Amish or Mennonites in Pennsylvania or Indiana, for example,[ii] but she tells it in such a way that any descendent of the Anabaptists can recognize age-old issues—separation from the world, pacifism, family, community.

The kind of suffering detailed in this book is alien to many Mennonites who, after escaping persecution in Europe, found land and freedom and have never lived under dictatorship. One of the questions history asks of us is, “Do I have the courage of my ancestors not to take up the sword, or not to recant my faith under the threat of death or imprisonment?” The complicated answers to these questions from those who lived with them under communism and national socialism in Russia and survived to tell the story are important contributions to twenty-first century Mennonite identity—not just in Canada and the U.S. but also in places where Mennonites have suffered more recently—Indonesia and Ethiopia, for example.

The book might have benefited from stronger editing. Even though the author’s lyric prose captivates many times, occasional lapses occur. Sometimes the meaning is unclear [“At times, these distinctions of tense become blurred, but essential truths are sharpened” (xiii)]. Sometimes purple prose combined with conjecture seems jarring: “Was this pregnancy a whisper of hope to Jakob and Maria in the depths of winter’s hush?” (56). An occasional cliché — “new life emerges from brokenness and ashes” —in a dramatic place—the end of the preface (xiii) —blunts the effect of a poetic description in the previous sentence.

These are small matters. But I am left with one larger regret. Ironically, it is the same regret the author has in relation to her grandfather’s telling of his tale in writing:  “Unfortunately, Jakob did not reveal much of his interior life” (xi). I wanted more of the interior life of the author.  We catch glimpses of her riding her bicycle in the suburbs. We can tell that she has scholarly training. But how have these stories affected her life? Her presence is strongly felt, but more in her imagination concerning the silences of others than in the impact of their stories on her.  I expected more of Connie Braun’s story. Her mother Erna and grandmother Maria’s voices were effaced by circumstance. Connie’s should ring out. Readers don’t even know if she is writing from the perspective of someone who claims the name Mennonite for herself. The author description uses the phrase “of Mennonite heritage,” which suggests, but does not confirm, that her location now is not inside a Mennonite community. She has a right to this story whether or not she claims the faith as her own, but she should claim her location now. Memoir promises insight and intimacy. It stirs curiosity in the reader that cannot be satisfied by biography of ancestry alone.

Finally, we know from a few details in the story (her father’s Italian leather shoes, allusions to business success in Canada) that his life and his family’s life changed drastically after immigration. The story of a “Mennonite memoir” should not end, like an old high school text history text, with WWII, but should, at least in epilogue form, “show the work” that takes the present into the past as well as bringing the past into the present.

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[i] “I love the essays that “show their work,” in the words of my eighth-grade algebra teacher, the process more interesting than a flawless scholarly product” (xii), Julia Spicher Kasdorf, “Preface to the 2009 edition,” the body and the book: Writing from a Mennonite Life: Essays and Poems,UniversityPark: Penn State University Press, 2009.

[ii] Keeping the categories of different narratives and nationalities clear while also showing what all Mennonites have in common is a complicated task. Braun’s diligent treatment of this subject stands in contrast to the recent humorous memoir of  Rhoda Janzen. See my review of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2009/11/mennonite-in-a-little-black-dress-an-old-mennonite-review/

Boy, Did I Love Lucy: A Mini-Memoir

If a genie had appeared to me when I was ten and offered me anything my heart desired, the answer would have poured out of me.

Some girls want ponies. Some want Barbies. Some are generous enough to think of others first, asking for world peace or food for the hungry. Others go straight for a million dollars. I would not have asked for any of those.

The thing I longed for was magic. All the other kids seemed to have it. At the first recess of the day lots of conversations began with “Did you see. . . .?”  And everyone else jumped in to share their impressions of what they saw the night before.

Lunch boxes, pencil cases, coloring books, cereal boxes, not to mention toy pistols, cowboy hats, holsters, dolls, and trucks–all these essential items of a child going to public school in the 1950′s–carried pictures of The Lone Ranger, Tonto, Annie Oakley, Dragnet, Gunsmoke, I Love Lucy. The coolest kids always had a new item to show off or a new story to tell from last night’s broadcasts. They even acted out the Alpo commercials at recess! They all had television at home.

Television. I wanted one so much I dreamed we had one in the cellar. When I woke up, I bolted out of bed and down to flights of wooden stairs, hoping that the vivid picture of a square wooden box with a grey-glass screen in front and rabbit ears on top was real. I traveled through all three levels of the dark, damp cellar, from concrete floor to hand-dug one, each level proving less and less likely material for a dream-come-true. I slowly came back upstairs to the kitchen and joined the family for breakfast, never telling anyone about my burst bubble.

My grandpa was a widowerer who lived alone–with a television in the living room! My brother and I begged to go to his house. When my parents took the train to Madison Square Garden to hear Billy Graham, we got to go to Grandpa’s house and watched the Lone Ranger. Oh bliss! We may have watched the Graham crusade also, but if we did, I don’t remember it nearly as well as that opening sequence with the William Tell Overture.

Not having a tv set was so much of a social handicap that I temporarily turned into a female peeping Tom. We had four near-by neighbors.  Two were Mennonite and, like us, had no television. Two were not. I found myself looking for excuses to go to their houses. I watched The Mouseketeers  at the George household, and by a stroke of amazing luck, I was sitting in the Wideman livingroom when this show was broadcast, perhaps the most famous “I Love Lucy” episode of all time. Oh how we laughed.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw0D-Rv_vro&hl=en&fs=1&]

Later in life, as I discovered friends who talked more about books, music, and film than about television, I looked back on my deprivation with something akin to gratitude. I spent long hours reading, enjoying the outdoors, playing with friends and family, and trying out my imagination.

All that longing found an object eventually. And even when I was a television-starved ten-year-old, God answered my prayers with the opportunity to see one really great show–Lucy stomping the grapes!

What role has television played in your life?  Do you watch more or less than you did as a child?

My First Rock Concert: A Mini-Memoir

Rock music is like a foreign language to me even though I graduated from high school in 1966 and college in 1970.

Like many explanations of my most anomalous behaviors, this one goes back to being Mennonite. And a little geeky (meaning bookish–not a math whiz!) on top of that.

I like to joke that I sang alto to the Beatles. And the Mamas and the Papas. And Simon and Garfunkel and Joan Baez and John Prine and even Janis Joplin. That’s about as much 60′s music as I remember. And after the 70′s I hardly paid attention at all to pop and rock.

I’ve been spending a portion of my late 50′s and early 60′s “making up for the sobriety of my youth,” to quote Jenny Joseph’s “When I Am an Old Woman.” Stuart and I took dance classes for two years, trying to find a little rhythm and erase some memories of sitting on the sidelines in gym class as our classmates do-si-doed with their partners.

So, when I learned that Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and John Mellencamp were doing a 4th of July concert in South Bend this year, I had to act. We were among the 10,000 who purchased tickets.

My FaceBook friends have asked me, “how was it”?

I wish I could give you details on who was “covering” which songs and how they differed from 100 other versions in 100 other settings. Sorry. Can’t do it.

I noticed that the short review in the South Bend Tribune included no musical information either. But you can see some pictures and even catch a little video here.

What I enjoyed most was inching my way toward the stage, feeling the beat grab my heart and almost rip it out of my chest, and snagging a few pictures. Here’s one of Bob Dylan:

When Dylan sang one of the few songs I recognized, “Just Like a Woman” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” it was thrilling to sway along with the crowd. For once, I let myself feel like a member of my own generation enjoying music that will last for many more.

It rained most of the evening, but not enough to really dampen spirits. There was both a festive and a nostalgic atmosphere.  Yes, children were turning cartwheels, and yes there were college students, but the average age was probably 45-55, and many hoary heads and a few canes and wheelchairs were interspersed among the crowd.

Like the corn growing a few miles from the stadium, the boomers were aging almost visibly in a setting like this one. Their younger selves hung over the stadium like a cloud. Mellencamp’s new songs are all about death, and Michael Jackson had just died. The country itself no longer seems young.

Those were some of my thoughts. Willie Nelson came on last, and he was the singer whose songs Stuart and I knew best, dating from our grad school days in Austin.  His command of the stage at age 76 served as an antidote to the lingering air of sadness Bob Dylan always invokes in me.

Willie’s songs are old-fashioned narratives. He sang variations close enough to the recorded classics to be recognized but new enough to keep life interesting on the lonesome road again.

We headed home, holding hands, as fireworks burst in the air. Two aging boomers who weren’t at Woodstock, literally or figuratively, not ashamed to seek out their first rock concert.  Even if they did not know the words.

An Op Ed–Memoir Style–About Socialism

I was hoping that Newsweek would want to take this article for “My Turn,” but since the election is tomorrow and the time will have passed for the relevance of this essay, I offer it here to you.  What good is a blog if you can’t self-publish?

I love when old categories are rearranged as a new paradigm emerges.  I think we are in the midst of experiencing such a transformation in our political and social life in this country.  What do you think?

Socialism or Family Values?

By Shirley H. Showalter

I know a thing or two about family values, thrift, and faith. I grew up Mennonite in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the 1950’s.

Here are some lessons I learned from my parents: Grant everyone equal dignity. The wealthiest and poorest members of the congregation are equal in the sight of God. The most seemingly impoverished person might be the richest in wisdom and love.

Here are more lessons: If people are hurting, come to their aid. When death occurs, be there – and take a cake, flowers from the garden, or a card. After a medical emergency, take up a collection. A disaster? Send a team of carpenters, painters, and cooks. Give away clothing your children have outgrown. Turn rags into rugs. Use the butter wrapper to grease the cookie sheet. When you move out of a house, whether you rented or owned it, shine the windows, the walls and the floors and leave a blessing for the next occupant. Help each other. Love each other.

My mother used to require us five siblings to sing a song when there was friction or fretting or complaining: “When your work is my work and our work is God’s work, when we all work together, how happy we’ll be.” I hated that song and would groan every time she started it. But usually by the second verse, I would join in, perhaps with some mocking extra treble. But my mother knew what she was doing. The principles she trilled into me in youth have not departed from me.

I am reminded of these values during the election campaign, especially since socialism has become the focus. Joe the Plumber objected to Barack Obama’s economic plan because Obama proposes to increase taxes on those who make more than $250,000 a year. The phrase “spreading the wealth” has brought out a refrain of “socialism!” Sarah Palin has taken to calling her opponent “Obama the Wealth Spreader.”

The idea for graduated tax rates was implemented during the Woodrow Wilson administration when the income tax was first introduced in 1913 through the sixteenth amendment to the Constitution. Most people were unaffected by the first taxes imposed, and the rates were seven times higher at the top than they were at the bottom. Since then, the principle of a graduated, or progressive, income tax has been a staple of American tax policy. Yes, such a tax does “spread the wealth,” redistributing income from the highest income earners to the lowest through social programs. But this redistribution into social programs is a relatively small part of the federal budget, much of which goes to the military.

I encourage Americans of all political persuasions to look past inaccurate labels like socialism and ask the following questions about all candidate. Does this candidate play well with others? Does he or she have a compassionate heart and a clear mind? Does the candidate know how to put a whole team together, roll up his or her sleeves, and get the work done? Could this potential leader be trusted with the lives of fellow citizens?

One of my colleagues has a phrase that helps me when I disagree with someone–“assume integrity.” I want to assume, despite the shrill tone, attack ads and robocalls of the last weeks of this campaign, that America is longing for basic decency and community spirit. We are the kind of people who created public libraries, a national park system, and a national capital full of museums totally supported by tax dollars. Locally, we unite to help each other when someone’s house burns down, another needs dialysis, or children show up in school hatless and coatless during the winter.

Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, Sr. have both said they are willing to pay more taxes and support a heavier tax burden on the very rich. The coming Social Security crisis could be averted if those earning more than $102,000 (the current ceiling) would be taxed on their total earned income. And capital gains taxes are only 15 percent, lower than they have been in previous administrations. They could be increased too.

If Warren Buffet can sing “when we all work together,” so can I. I’m no billionaire, but I could end up paying more taxes if all of the above increases take place. I was socialized to call this community, and I think our country craves it. Help each other. Love each other.