Lola Lafon on Anne Frank - Oxford Prospect Arts

Lola Lafon's latest novel, entitled When You Listen to This Song, centres on her thoughts when spending a night in the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. In a single room of this house the Frank family hid for several years until caught by the Nazis and sent to Bergen-Belsen. Only one returned. Lafon says that she wanted to have this experience because although many of her own family, who were Romanian-Jewish, were wiped out in the Holocaust, she did not really know very much about Anne Frank.

She has certainly changed that now, and studied Anne's short tragic life closely, investigating the various manuscripts and editions of her diary. She discovered that although Anne died aged only 16, she was a conscious writer who re-wrote her original diary in the hope of publication. She actually suppressed some things such as references to her sexual feelings, and this reticence was not imposed by her father Otto nor by any publisher.

The most startling thing I learned from this talk was that the much- quoted sentence from Anne's diary, "In spite of everything I still believe that people are good at heart," has been misleadingly curtailed and often taken out of context. In the original manuscript, Anne went on to say that wars would not happen if the majority of people did not have some evil and destructive urges that made them follow certain leaders. It is really a much more complex and mature reflection.

The mysterious title of Lafon's book refers to a child friend she met in Paris. He was a Cambodian boy, who after returning to Cambodia with his family, perished in the Kmer Rouge massacres, another more recent Holocaust. The memory of this boy returned to her mind vividly during her night in the Anne Frank house, a grim reminder that holocausts have not ceased.

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