Lola Lafon. “If Anne Frank had lived, she would have told about the camps, and I’m not sure she would have had the same success…”

after The Little Communist Who Never Smiled dedicated to Nadia Komaneci and Mercy, Mary, Patty, On Patricia Hearst, Lola Lafon signs third ‘biographical novel’ with the very beautiful When you listen to this song. To write it, he stayed overnight at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the famous annex where the family hid for two years before being condemned and deported. Otto Frank, the only survivor of the camps, turned it into a museum, dedicating himself to it Book of his daughter, which is one of the best-selling works in the world today.

If the author turn around (Éd. Actes Sud) moved from the novel to the short story, he wanted to focus on the icon of the teenager, whose words are veiled and ultimately denied; the murdered young woman whom we love so much that we begin to choke on her words. Coming and going in this empty annex inhabited by ghosts and traces, Lola Lafon gives content to postcards and asks herself in powerfully sober language the rewriting of Anne Frank in a time when anti-vax protesters do not hesitate not to wear the yellow star. …

Sandrine Kiberlain in the video. “Why Anti-Semitism Still Exists”

Miss Figaro. – Why did you choose the Anne Frank Museum as a place to spend the night?
Lola Lafon. – I wanted to write about Judaism and took the opportunity. the Anne Frank medal offered by my grandmother also played a role. It probably doesn’t have much value, but I really thought about it and was hoping that the director of the museum, who has seen many objects with the Anne Frank image, could tell me more about it; but he had never seen anything like it. If my mother took me Book, Therefore, the character of Anne Frank was passed down to me by my grandmother when I was 14 years old. Then I left it lying, I forgot, as I had forgotten my Jewish identity, which was a burden for me, a heavy history that I wanted to erase. It went through a desire to integrate and a militant commitment that made me interested in every other drama in the world, but not this one, especially not. And then there were the attacks, taking hostages in Hyper Cacher. We witnessed an exponential rise in anti-Semitism and I was cornered. Either I turned my back on this story and buried the whole family with it, or I had to take it away. And since I’ve never talked about it before, I feel like I’m coming out.

Thus, an intimate connection is woven with the character of Anne Frank.
My grandparents carried the story of a dream France that welcomed and above all protected. I realized they never told me about the Vél’d’Hiv’ summary. They perpetuated the Hollywood story of fake France, and when I got into the Annex, I started to unravel some threads. What story does the family tell us? And what social reaction is this, because only my grandparents were not silent… Their daughter, my mother, was a disguised child who understood what was happening, she was 4 years old. So there is a family connection to this story, but this is not what is at the heart of my story, which questions the teenage icon in the first place.

“Anna wanted to be read, not respected,” one of your interlocutors, Lauryn Nussbaum, told you early on. Why do you think this is important?
I didn’t know that Anne Frank was an author, that she edited her diary for publication. It was Laurie Nussbaum who taught me, who knew the Frank sisters before the Annex, and who was a friend of Margot’s. He was the first to learn The newspaper as a literary work. I also didn’t know that Hollywood had rewritten Anne Frank’s story so much and that this is what we know. It is fitting to honor Anne Frank because she serves as a redemptive object. When we read it, we think we have read the story of the Holocaust, when it is false, because he was a victim and therefore cannot tell it to us. It is this image of the “saint” that we return to the medal that allows us to say: “It’s good, I read it, I know it.” However, many do not know where he died. They know he died in a concentration camp, but his end has not been documented at all the newspaper he had not awakened at all the same zeal; until 1989 there was no trace of her time in Bergen-Belsen… If she had survived, like Philip Roth’s fictional Anne Frank. The Shadow Writer – he would tell about the camps and I’m not sure he would have had the same success. The newspaper is one of the world’s best-selling books with more than If a man By Primo Levi. Why? Because it doesn’t tell about the Holocaust.

Your book, when you listen to this songattaches great importance to witnesses…
I love meeting people to feed my biographical novels, but I don’t usually direct them. Here, the Anne Frank House is empty, the Annex is empty, and it’s an emptiness that Otto Frank wanted. Because it allows us to feel that we are in the home of people who are no longer there. There is only one thing to think about: they are gone. Spending the night there, you feel terribly that you will have to face this reality for hours. To counterbalance that, I had a very persistent presence in Lauryn Nussbaum’s writing. We talked about words, construction and the work of Anne Frank. I keep a journal myself and have thought about the difference between a journal and a story. One of the most important is that from the moment Anne Frank rewrites her text, she thinks about us, the readers. Therefore, we are there when he describes the Appendix in the second version as he describes a setting that he places and contextualizes historically.

You also talk about meeting Rosetta, one of the Bergen-Belsen survivors.
Yes, Rosetta, who told me. “Even if I were to describe to you the living conditions in Bergen-Belsen, you would have no idea.” He was right, but we have to do it. I guess we have to keep trying. You can’t just tell yourself you can’t imagine, which I did for years. Today, I think it is true that our minds are blocked because we have not experienced it, and yet we must persist in imagining.

Is this why you wanted to go beyond it? Bookand talk about his death.
Yes! I found myself faced with the dilemma of all writers writing about the genocide: what do we have the right to do or not do? To wax lyrical with adjectives was inappropriate because it was obscene. The only thing that remains in the pages devoted to the death of Anna and Margot, therefore, are the facts. I relive their journey as I read it, heard it in the testimonies. How many people return, how many people go from Westerbork to Auschwitz, from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen. I have always approached writing through the body. Here we have the App bodies. I never imagined that its inhabitants could not talk, walk or go to the toilet for most of the day. I also thought a lot about this teenage girl’s body that can’t get air, this body that’s never revealed, this shrunken body. We are not in a Hollywood movie. Anne Frank died of typhus, and those who met her say that we no longer recognize her, that she lost all her hair, that she is thin. And that we should read. You have to write it down. I think it was the writer Maurice Blanchot who wondered if a story we didn’t know the ending was still a story. We have to tell the end of this story because we know it.

We have to tell my end of this story because we know it

Lola Lafon

Especially since anti-Semitism seems to be experiencing a strong resurgence…
It was shocking to me to see a very old conspiracy theory resurface during the pandemic, linking Jews to the disease, with the idea that they were deliberately spreading the virus… Then, the summer I left for this book, there were anti-vax protesters. saw the yellow star in training. Something that seemed unimaginable to my grandparents, who were convinced that we were protected, over, etc., came back. The speech has become commonplace. When the director of the museum told me that the day before my arrival there were demonstrations in Amsterdam where people held up the portrait of Anne Frank and claimed: “We are all Anne Franks,” she seemed to need to reiterate that no, not everyone is Anne Frank…

You also discover that Anne Frank’s Jewishness has been erased for a while.
Her story was deemed too Jewish and too sad by the producers of the Broadway play adaptation. Newspaper! It’s the 1950s and no one wants to hear this story. So we’re going to make it about adolescence and the fight against “misfortune,” as the back cover of Time claims. critic of New York Times even writes that it’s good because we leave the show “without Nazi hate”! We deny, and therefore remove from the text, any references to Hanukkah or the references Anna makes to her religion. Similarly, Eleanor Roosevelt’s foreword asserts, no doubt with the best intentions in the world, that Anne Frank “worked for peace,” when she did not work for peace at all; he was hiding so as not to die… The festival, in turn, refused to invite the play to compromise good relations with Germany. Even cut off, his speech remains shameful. This teenager is disrespectful. he says what he sees. But we don’t read what he says. From this iconic text, we recall stages such as “I still believe in the innate goodness of men,” ignoring the fact that Anne Frank evokes the horror of war right up front. Basically, we all want him to tell us. “It `s good: I suffered for you. You have nothing more to blame yourself for.” But according to psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim. “If all people are good, Auschwitz is no more.”