"Friends Will Volunteer! And Bullies Disappear!": Redemptive Narratives in Children's Holocaust Literature

• In Event: Questioning Redemptive Narratives in Artistic Productions of the Holocaust

Abstract

On September 23, 1943, dozens of inmates in Theresienstadt, the Nazi transit camp, ghetto, and labour camp, participated in bringing the children’s opera, BRUNDIBAR to life. They ultimately performed the opera 55 times before Theresienstadt was liberated in May 1945. Most participants, adults and children alike, did not survive the war. In the years following its production in the brutal conditions of Theresienstadt, BRUNDIBAR has taken on an almost mythic quality. This is partly because it was originally performed by innocent children who were persecuted, imprisoned, and ultimately murdered during the Holocaust. However, the redemptive narratives constructed around the opera are symptomatic of wider trends in children’s Holocaust literature and representation.

My paper seeks answers to several interrelated questions that BRUNDIBAR poses: when children are the intended audience, should Holocaust literature be sanitized or simplified? Are triumphant narratives of success necessary in children’s Holocaust literature? If not, what are the alternatives? In order to address these questions, I look at the most well-known and arguably most influential example of children’s Holocaust literature, Anne Frank’s diary. Through a close examination of Frank’s literary and rhetorical devices, my paper demonstrates the nuances and wide-ranging experimentation of Frank’s actual writings in contrast to the heavily-edited, generalized version that came to be known by the public. Frank was a meticulous editor of her own work and engaged in many imaginative strategies to grapple with her desire to become a writer, her nascent sexuality, clashes with family members, and the contemporaneous persecution, oppression, and systematic murder of her fellow European Jews. The now famous quotation, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” has defined and categorized Anne Frank over the course of the last seventy years, but does not represent the depth and complexity of the teenage writer struggling to understand herself, her loved ones, and the devastating and trying events occurring around her. My paper concludes by examining Frank’s legacy in the field of children’s Holocaust literature, demonstrating the difficulty of avoiding redemptive narratives in stories for young people.

Author

• Joanna Krongold, University of Toronto