We meet a man, Peter Pepper, the son of the dentist at the annex whom Anne, in the diary, scorned by calling him Mr. Dussel (meaning "imbecile" in German). Mr. Pepper, who was sent to England for safety at the age of 11, defends his father while gently excusing Anne's harshness. He is then brought face to face with his father's savior, the Dutchwoman Ms. Gies, in the very rooms in which his father hid with the Franks. He clasps his hands to his mouth, on the verge of weeping.
Then there are those accounts of the Franks' final days, which take on new force. In Auschwitz, we learn from Sal de Liema that Otto Frank would "survive mentally" by singing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with him and trying to recall the paintings of van Gogh and Rembrandt. Otto Frank asked Mr. de Liema to call him Papa Frank, not because Mr. de Liema needed a father but because Frank needed "somebody to be a papa for."
The movie reminds us that fate can be repetitive in its cruelty. The Franks were on the last train to Auschwitz from Westerbork before the war came to an end. Had Anne not had scabies, she and her mother and her sister might have survived by being shipped to a labor camp. Had she been able to hold on a few more weeks, she would have been free. "If she had known her father was alive," says Ms. Goslar, she might have been able to stay alive herself.
Detail, chance, personality: these are what we come across again and again in the diary as in the film. Anne's literary mind relished the closely observed event and the carefully analyzed emotion. Anne's God is in the details.
The problem is that Anne's reputation is not. The details of Anne's tragedy become less important the more that lessons are pulled from them; this is one area in which the film almost falters, insisting that this tale is not "just" a Holocaust story but a warning to all who would "discriminate on the basis of color, culture or creed."
This desire to generalize from Anne's experience has been an issue ever since the diary was published. In part, the diary has become a classic because in Anne's situation, and in her voice, readers find themselves. But from the very beginning, it was Otto Frank's goal that the diary shed its particularity and become a call for universal tolerance. In fact, in his first edition of Anne's diary, he deleted details that made Anne's references to her Jewishness seem too pronounced. It was a lesson that may have been taught in the annex as well, where Anne read Goethe and Schiller, Greek myths and the New Testament, and the residents celebrated Christmas along with Hanukkah.
Moreover, as the scholarly edition of the diaries points out, when Frank worked with a translator to prepare a German edition of the Dutch-language diary, he even approved alterations that minimized Anne's descriptions of hostility "between Germans and Jews" because, he said, "we had many good friends among the Germans." Anne mentions a rule that in the annex everyone had "to speak softly at all times, in any civilized language, therefore not in German," which becomes, in the authorized German translation, "all civilized languages, but softly!!!"
This was the aspect of Otto Frank's presentation of the diary and the play based upon it that riled the writer Meyer Levin, leading to a lifetime obsession with the diary's Jewish character. His preoccupation verged on the maniacal but was based, in part, on the evidence: the diary was given a spin to make its particularity seem less important, highlighting an idealism that could never have survived the camps.
This was the film director's declared goal as well, as stated in the production notes: "Otto was adamant that Anne's diary had a universal message," Mr. Blair said. "He felt that it should not just be specific to the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. There are many who feel that the Holocaust was a uniquely Jewish experience and that Anne's story should be about the genocide of the Jews specifically. I don't agree. I have firmly hooked my flag to Otto's universalist message."
That is why "Anne Frank Remembered" begins by saying it is not "just" a Holocaust story.
This is an attitude that also appears in the latest official Anne Frank literature, a study guide prepared by the Anne Frank Center U.S.A. for the new edition of the diary. The guide is so preoccupied with the universalist message that it is willing to turn what Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the historian, called Hitler's "war against the Jews" into one skirmish among many. The Nazis, according to the study guide, "rounded up and deported massive numbers of prisoners, putting them into hundreds of new camps filled with political opponents, resistance fighters, Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and other victims of the Nazi policies."
Fortunately, despite the assertions of the film's narration, and despite the diary's traditional packaging, neither the diary nor the film ends up being merely universal. Nor do they ever reduce the Franks' fate to a matter of "discrimination." The detail is too overpowering, the observation too clear. It is out of those details that we learn to make distinctions and generalizations; it is through the minutiae of life that we learn the generalities, which is what Anne is realizing at the moment the diary entries break off.
"I see the eight of us in the annex as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounding by menacing black clouds," Anne writes just months before her capture. "The perfectly round spot on which we're standing is still safe, but the clouds are moving in on us, and the ring between us and the approaching danger is being pulled tighter and tighter. . . . I can only cry out and implore, 'Oh, ring, ring, open wide and let us out!' "
IT WAS NOT TO BE. Instead, the film gives us another image, described by Janny Brandes, who encountered Anne just days before her death in March 1945: Anne -- the chatterbox, the diarist, the satirist, the scrupulous observer and ruthless analyst of character -- stumbling, naked, in the freezing cold of that final winter in Bergen-Belsen. She had stripped all lice-ridden clothes from her body and was barely wrapped in a gray blanket, sobbing, crying for help. She was all bone and tears and wide-eyed starvation, begging for clothes before she returned to the typhus-ridden body of her sister, Margot, who lay near death.
Brandes gave her the few rags she could spare. Then, out of sight of any witnesses, the menacing black clouds closed in and the ring drew tight. Anne Frank returned to Margot, and surrendered, weeping in solitude near her sister's icy body.
Photos: In "Anne Frank Remembered," a fragment of film reveals a faceat a window in 1941. (pg. 1); Otto Frank and his daughters Margot and young Anne--The film, like her diary, is a chronicle of the ordinary turned extraordinary. (pg. 23); The window in the attic where Anne Frank looked out at the stars--The Anne Frank House made the rooms available to the director. (Sony Pictures Classics) (pg. 24)