Amanda and Anne

Our daughter Amanda came from Germany last week to visit and to celebrate her 22nd birthday with us. We had a real Dutch birthday celebration, which included our Dutch friends congratulating Gretchen and me on our daughter’s birthday. We don’t do that in the US, and we are poorer for it. It makes you think about your role in your child’s life. I started thinking about what we’d contributed beyond biology to her. What had we done as parents that helped make Amanda such a remarkable young woman? She’s twenty-two and living on her third continent, working for the German church, searching for grad schools, and is very much intent on making a difference with her life.

We are blessed to have two great children who are contributing in positive ways to the world around them. I use the word “blessed” very intentionally, because it seems to me that Amanda and Jesse are people who have temperaments, skills and abilities far beyond anything positive Gretchen and I ever gave to them. We are blessed. But having said that, I have been thinking about one positive thing we did with our kids that we can take some credit for.

We read to them. Both of us loved to read to them and both kids loved to be read to. We read long after most parents probably quit reading to their children – I think we read to them until they were leaving elementary school and maybe even into junior high. I have very vivid memories of Jesse as a boy laughing his head off to “The Wind and the Willows;” of crying with Amanda when we reached the end of “Charlotte’s Web;” and both of them really enjoying “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “The Lord of the Rings.” We loved “The Trumpet of the Swan” and “A Little Princess” and “The Secret Garden.” We tended to go for the classics, and Amanda and I remember reading “The Diary of Anne Frank” together when Amanda was about nine or ten years old.

She’s asked me since why I chose to read a book with such a dark theme to her when she was so young. I don’t have a great answer for that. I just felt she was old enough to learn some of the horrible truth about what it means to be human. Beyond that I am not sure.

Last Wednesday, I had a meeting in Amsterdam and Amanda and Gretchen rode along. We all headed to the Anne Frank house afterwards. It seemed an appropriate thing to do with my daughter, since I’d introduced her to Anne Frank so many years ago. This was my second time through the house, and both times when I’ve visited the overwhelming thought I’ve had is “this really happened – it isn’t just some story from a book or movie – and it really happened right here, not so long ago.” The house is dark, somber, and sad, with the blackout paper still covering the windows and the rooms all bare because Otto Frank wanted the world to see what the Nazis left behind.

Anne Frank has become one of the most well-known faces of the Holocaust. At one point in the tour there are some words on a wall from a Holocaust survivor who says, “One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.”

So when my daughter was a young girl, I chose to expose her to another girl, to introduce the whole subject of the Holocaust to her.

There is a film clip playing in one of the rooms of Otto Frank talking many years later about returning from Auschwitz(he was the only one of the eight people hiding in the secret annex to survive) and the shock he had when first reading his daughter’s diary. He knew she kept her diary, but didn’t know the depth of feeling she had about so many different things. He had felt close to her, but after reading the diary he said that he reached the conclusion that most parents really don’t know their children.

Fathers and daughters. Great and complicated stuff. A Jewish father tries to hide his family during the war. His bookish daughter keeps a diary. I am sure Otto Frank never imagined that he would spend the rest of his life as the steward of his lost family’s memory, and particularly as the steward of his youngest daughter’s memory, simply because she wrote down what was happening. I’m sure he never imagined the house they hid in would become a museum visited by millions. Almost 65 years after they were captured, and 29 years after Otto Frank’s death, one Christian father from the United States and his daughter joined the millions to walk through these bare rooms and feel the weight of the Frank family’s suffering.