Lola Lafon: "If Anne Frank had survived, she would have told about the camps, and I'm not sure she would have had the same success..."

After

dedicated to Nadia Comaneci, and

on Patricia Hearst, Lola Lafon signs a third “biographical novel” with the very beautiful

To write it, she stayed one night in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam – in the famous Annex where the family hid for two years before being denounced and deported.

Otto Frank, the only survivor of the camps, turned it into a museum while devoting himself to his daughter's

, which is today one of the best-selling books in the world.

To discover

• Suri Cruise: Hollywood's spoiled little girl, or the story of a child demonized by the media

Read also“Forcément sublime”: in 2022, Marguerite Duras more present than ever

If the author of

(Éd. Actes Sud) has gone from novel to story, she was keen to take an interest in an adolescent icon whose word is disguised and ultimately denied – a murdered young girl whom we love so much that we come to stifle his words.

Coming and going in this empty Annex, populated by ghosts and traces, Lola Lafon gives substance to the absent and questions herself in a language of powerful sobriety about the rewriting of Anne Frank in times when antivax demonstrators do not hesitate not to wear the yellow star...

In video, Sandrine Kiberlain: "Why anti-Semitism still exists"

Miss Figaro.

–

– I wanted to write about Jewishness and I took the opportunity;

a medal representing Anne Frank offered by my grandmother also played a role.

It probably doesn't have much value, but I really care about it and I hoped that the director of the museum, who had seen a lot of objects bearing the effigy of Anne Frank, could tell me more about it;

but he had never seen anything like it.

If my mother gave me the

the figure of Anne Frank was therefore transmitted to me by my grandmother when I was 14 years old.

At that time, I left it lying around, I forgot it as I forgot my Jewish identity, which was a burden for me, a heavy story that I wanted to erase.

It went through the desire to be integrated and through a militant commitment that made me interested in all the other dramas in the world, but not in this one, especially not.

And then there were the attacks, with the taking of hostages at the Hyper Cacher.

We have witnessed an exponential rise in anti-Semitism, and I found myself cornered.

Either I turned my back on this story and I buried the whole family with it, or I was forced to seize it.

And since I've never talked about it before, I'm a little

Full screen

Anne Frank at school, 1941. Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

An intimate link is therefore woven with the figure of Anne Frank?

My grandparents carried the story of a dream France, welcoming and above all protective.

I realized that they had never told me about the Vél'd'Hiv' roundup!

They perpetuated the Hollywood narrative of a fake France, and as I walked into the Annex, I began to unravel some threads.

What is the story we are told in a family?

And what is the social echo of this – because it was not my grandparents alone who kept silent… Their daughter, my mother, was a hidden child, who understood without understanding what was happening – she was 4 year.

There is therefore a family link to this story, but this is not what is at the heart of my story, which is

“Anne wanted to be read, not venerated,” one of your interlocutors, Laureen Nussbaum, told you very early on.

Why do you think this is essential?

I didn't know that Anne Frank had been an author, that she had reworked her diary with a view to publishing it.

It was Laureen Nussbaum who taught me, who knew the Frank sisters before the Annex, and who was a friend of Margot.

She was the first to study

as a literary work.

I also didn't know that Hollywood had rewritten the story of Anne Frank so much and that this is the one we know.

It is convenient to venerate Anne Frank because she serves as an expiatory object.

Once we have read it, we think we have read the history of the Holocaust, whereas this is false since she was a victim and therefore cannot tell it to us.

It is this figure of "saint" - we come back to the medal - which allows us to say to ourselves: "It's good, I've read, I know."

However, many people do not know where she died.

They know she died in a concentration camp, but her end hasn't been documented at all like

she did not arouse the same fervor at all: there was no trace of her time in Bergen-Belsen before 1989… If she had survived – like Philip Roth's fictional Anne Frank in

she would have told about the camps, and I'm not sure she would have had the same success.

is one of the best-selling books in the world – more so than

by Primo Levi.

Why ?

Because it does not tell the Holocaust.

Full screen

Lola Lafon's new book.

Press office

Your book,

I really like meeting people to feed my biographical novels, but I don't usually stage them.

Here, the Anne Frank House is empty, the Annex is empty, and it is a void that was wanted by Otto Frank.

Because it allows us to feel that we are in the house of people who are no longer there.

There is only that to think about: they are no longer there.

By spending the night there, you feel terribly that you will have to confront this reality for hours on end.

To counterbalance that, I had the very stubborn presence in the writing of Laureen Nussbaum.

We talked about words, construction and the way Anne Frank worked.

I keep a diary myself and have wondered about the difference between a diary and a story.

One of the most important is

is that from the moment Anne Frank rewrites her text, she thinks of us, readers.

We are therefore there when she describes the Annex in the second version, because she describes a setting that she situates and contextualizes historically.

You also recount your meeting with Rosetta, one of the survivors of Bergen-Belsen?

Yes, Rosetta who said to me: “Even if I described the living conditions to you in Bergen-Belsen, you could not imagine.”

She was right, and yet we have to do it.

I think we have to keep trying.

You can't just tell yourself you can't imagine – which I did for years.

Today, I think it's true, that our mind blocks because we haven't experienced it, and yet we have to persist in imagining.

Is it for this reason that you insisted on going beyond the

Yes.

I found myself confronted with the dilemma of all writers when it comes to writing about a genocide: what do we have the right to do or not?

A lyrical writing with adjectives was unthinkable because obscene.

The only thing that remains on the pages devoted to the deaths of Anne and Margot, therefore, are the facts.

I restore 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 a lot.

Here we have the bodies of the Annex.

I never imagined that its inhabitants could not speak, walk or go to the bathroom for most of the day.

I also wondered a lot about this body of

teenager who can't get some fresh air, this body never exposed, this diminished body.

We are not in a Hollywood film: Anne Frank died of typhus, and those who met her say that we no longer recognized her, that she had lost all her hair, that she was emaciated.

And that we have to read.

You have to write it down.

I think it was the writer Maurice Blanchot who wondered if a story whose end we didn't know was still a story.

We have a duty to tell the end of this story, because we know it.

she had lost all her hair, that she was emaciated.

And that we have to read.

You have to write it down.

I think it was the writer Maurice Blanchot who wondered if a story whose end we didn't know was still a story.

We have a duty to tell the end of this story, because we know it.

she had lost all her hair, that she was emaciated.

And that we have to read.

You have to write it down.

I think it was the writer Maurice Blanchot who wondered if a story whose end we didn't know was still a story.

We have a duty to tell the end of this story, because we know it.

We have a duty to say my end to this story, because we know it

Lola Lafon

Especially since anti-Semitism seems to be experiencing a strong resurgence…

It was a shock for me to see the reappearance during the pandemic of a very old conspiracy linking Jews to the disease, with the idea that they were deliberately spreading the virus. … Then, the summer I left for this book, we saw the antivax protesters wearing the yellow star.

Something that seemed inconceivable to my grandparents, who were convinced that we were protected, that it was over, etc., came back.

A speech has become commonplace.

When the director of the museum told me that, the day before my arrival, there were demonstrations in Amsterdam with people holding up the portrait of Anne Frank and claiming: "We are all Anne Frank", he seemed necessary to repeat that no,

You also reveal that the Jewishness of Anne Frank was erased for a time?

His story was deemed too Jewish and too sad by the producers of the Broadway play adapting

We are in the 1950s and nobody wants to hear this story.

We are therefore going to make it that of adolescence and the fight against “adversity”, as the back cover of the time asserts.

A

even writes that it's good, because we leave the show "without hatred vis-à-vis Nazism"!

We are in denial, and we therefore remove from the text the mention of Hanukkah or those that Anne makes to her religion.

Similarly, a preface by Eleanor Roosevelt affirms, no doubt with the best intentions in the world, that Anne Frank "worked for peace", when she did not work for peace at all: she was hiding so as not to die… The Paris International Festival, for its part, refused to invite the play so as not to compromise good relations with Germany.

Even truncated, his speech remains embarrassing.

This teenager is irreverent: she says what she sees.

But we don't read what she says.

From this text that has become iconic,

we remember phases like "I still believe in the innate goodness of men", ignoring the fact that Anne Frank evokes the horror of the war just before.

Basically, we all want her to tell us: “It’s good.

I suffered for you.

You have nothing more to reproach yourself for."

But in the words of psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim: "If all men are good, there is no more Auschwitz."