Looking for Anne & Finding Meyer
A Follow-Up

Tereska Torrès, the actual author of Anne Frank’s diary? (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

2,086 words

For [the Polish Jews], there is only one solution to the Jewish question in the world, and that is their own country. They don’t want a host country, however good it may be. They want to be a normal nation among the others, because up to now the world has not understood that there is “neither Greek nor Jew,” but only human beings, all equal in their misfortunes, their weaknesses, and greatnesses, all capable of the same horror as of the same heroic deeds, because up to now the world has entrenched itself behind numerous groups, which are becoming more and more numerous, each one enclosing itself twice over, living in mistrust and doubt against its neighbor. Because there are countries, all enemies, building armies and imposing tariffs, they want them, the Jews, to have a country, too, to be “like the others,” in the hope that the day will come when it will no longer be necessary to entrench themselves behind a border and when all states will be united states. — Tereska Torrès[1]

(Cue New World Order theme music.)

I really don’t know why I am doing this to myself (and to you). There must be a certain addictive quality to it. At any rate, since writing my three–part essay on Meyer Levin and his alleged authorship of Anne Frank’s diary, I’ve continued to look into a few things that came up during the research. So just for the sake of completeness, here’s a bit more on the horror show that is Levin and his circle.

The Kibbutz Buchenwald diary

As mentioned in my earlier essay, revisionists such as Ikuo Suzuki have noted that Meyer Levin was involved in another diary project at about the same time that Anne Frank’s diary was first published, and they have speculated that this, too, might have been a fabrication by Levin. As far as I have been able to determine, this speculation is incorrect. The original diary that Meyer Levin published as Kibbutz Buchenwald did and still does exist. The reason why Levin’s story didn’t fit the facts is simply that he mixed up some names.

According to Levin, he was first shown the diary at Afikim and subsequently translated parts of it for publication in English. When he later returned to the newly-established State of Israel, he met up with “young Gottlieb,” one of the main diarists, at kibbutz Nitzanim. This, as I pointed out, made no sense in the context of Nitzanim’s history. So I turned to the book Kibbutz Buchenwald: Survivors and Pioneers by Judith Tydor Baumel, and it had (almost) all the relevant information. As it turned out, the name Levin was looking for was “Netzarim,” which was shortened to “Netzer,” and which in turn was expanded to Netzer Sereni. I’d be confused, too.

The story went thusly: Kibbutz Buchenwald was established as a training farm for Jewish emigrants to Palestine. This is a bit misleading, however. The kibbutz was not situated anywhere near Buchenwald; it just took its name from the former Buchenwald prisoners who founded it. And “training farm” isn’t exactly what you might think it is. Yes, it was a farm, and yes, it was meant to serve as a training ground for the future emigrants. But that does not mean that the Buchenwalders actually did any farm work. Some of them did; others just “trained” in order to live together as a group. Who did all the necessary work, then, you might ask? Surprise, surprise: the Buchenwalders hired some local — i.e. German — farmhands. Do you see a familiar pattern emerging?

Interestingly, the Buchenwalders were not a coherent group in terms of religion and politics. Communists and atheists lived side-by-side with ultra-orthodox Jews; some observed the Sabbath, others made the Sunday their weekly holiday. While tensions inevitably arose because of this, the kibbutzim were determined to stick together and make their unusual community work, even though the various kibbutz organizations in Palestine, entrenched in their own respective way of life, were already trying to break up the experiment they considered “impossible.” See a pattern yet?

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After a few months, Kibbutz Buchenwald’s founding members emigrated legally to Palestine, while new members took their place in Germany. They first went to the detainee camp at Atlit. From there they moved to the kibbutz of Afikim, where Meyer Levin got access to the diary. The Buchenwalders formed their own kibbutz within the kibbutz — that is, they kept separate from the Afikim settlers, even though they lived and worked on their land. You do see a pattern, don’t you?

This, naturally, was not a sustainable solution. The Buchenwalders brought their own psychological baggage with them, namely their concentration camp experience, which the Palestinian Jews were understanding of and patient with, but could not relate to. Add to that the fact that said organizations now worked actively to absorb the various groups of Kibbutz Buchenwald, and it comes as no surprise that this unique community didn’t last. The group’s orthodox elements moved on to orthodox kibbutzim. The more secular members whom Levin was involved with went to Nachalat Yehudah (today a part of Rishon LeZion), and eventually took over the nearby Schiffon farm, which became Kibbutz Netzarim, and is where Levin met “young Gottlieb” (probably Avraham Gottlieb, who changed his last name to Ahuvia) again. The Buchenwald diary is kept in the Netzer Sereni archive.

The strange thing is that Judith Tydor Baumel never mentions Meyer Levin at all in her book. Of course he never played a major role in the history of the kibbutz, but he was the first to publish excerpts from the diary in English. Shouldn’t that merit at least one line? I can practically hear Levin ranting about getting sidelined yet again!

Tereska Torrès

The Russian soldiers look at us with a friendly expression. They are standing outside in the rain, but they don’t mind at all. One of them asks us, “What nationality are you?” “French.” And he? “French.” And he? “American.” And he? “Polish.” – “Ah!” says the soldier. I ask him with a laugh, “And you, tovarisch, what are you?” He answers without blinking, “I’m an internationalist.” We all like that very much and say, “That’s good.”[2]

Various people have been suspected of being the actual author of Anne Frank’s diary, and I added Meyer Levin’s wife Tereska Torrès to the list. I am still not convinced that Anne Frank didn’t write her own diary — but if we go with that thesis, my money would now be firmly on Torrès.

As mentioned in my previous essay, Tereska Torrès wrote a diary during the war (Une Française libre). So far it has only been published in French, which I don’t speak. But she wrote another diary during the filming of The Illegals, and this one has been translated into German. Being at the center of “Holocaust education” for the past 80 years has to have some advantages, at least. Unerschrocken (or Unafraid, after the English name of the ship that the illegal immigrants, as well as Meyer Levin’s cast and crew, used to get to Palestine) is an interesting document about the illegal emigration of European Jews to Palestine in 1947.

Torrès was 26 years old at the time and, unlike Levin, not a Zionist, although you would never believe it when you read her diary. Many years later, when Torrès had decided to allow the publication of her diary, she added a disclaimer, explaining that at the time of writing she neither had a good understanding of the problems in the Middle East nor of the consequences that the founding of the State of Israel would have. She claimed to have been influenced by the Zionists she met during the filming of The Illegals. Fair enough. She might have added that, while her tale of the gas chambers at Dachau was technically correct (“I saw with my own eyes [I add this because I recently heard French people say that this was an invention of propaganda], so I saw with my own eyes the gas chambers, with holes in the ceiling through which the gas poured in”[3]), there were never any operating gas chambers at Dachau.

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Torrès had grown up as a, well, crypto-Jew in reverse, if you will. When she was seven, her father revealed to her that they were, in fact, secretly-baptized Catholics. Three years later, some people had found out about their conversion, among them Meyer Levin, who knew the family even back then. Thus, over time the story got out. Her paternal grandparents broke off all contact, even though, as Torrès told in an interview, her grandfather was not religious: “His connection to Judaism was Zionism — he saw it as a national betrayal, not a religious betrayal.”[4] Now that the story was out, the family went to church openly, and young Tereska went to her first communion “in a white dress . . . like all the other little girls.” At around this time she began writing a diary, a practice she continued all her life.

If you are looking for the author of Anne Frank’s diary, I’d say Tereska Torrès is your woman. She has all the right qualifications. She has the right “voice,” she was a young woman at the time who had written diaries ever since she was nine years old, and she knew Meyer Levin, who probably visited her family when he was in Europe at the end of the war. Wouldn’t she be the natural candidate for him to recruit, if he was looking for a ghostwriter?

Also, consider this bit of information from the above-mentioned interview:

What happened to the notes after the trip? Why did you or Meyer type up the part of the diary?

Perhaps I showed Meyer my diary after we returned to Paris. He may have wanted to take something from the diary for the dialogue in the film, but I forgot or didn’t listen.[5]

Maybe. Or maybe he was planning to publish it in some form. Perhaps Tereska Torrès didn’t know or didn’t care — or she did very much, because she was an aspiring writer, after all. Of course the idea would have appealed to her, just as maybe she would have been quite willing to work on Anne Frank’s diary if it got her published, or if she felt it was a worthy cause. The question still remains, though, of how Torrès got ahold of the first French edition of Anne Frank’s diary in the first place, which, as the story goes, she then gave to Levin. Did she just happen to come across it in a bookstore? Did she read a review of it? These are entirely possible, but it would be nice to know for certain.

So in closing, Mrs. Torrès, here’s a rather different quote in answer to your internationalist nonsense. Just because I can:

In the advancement of its own culture alone lies true progress for each of the peoples! There must naturally be ascent in everything, and no standstill. But this upward progress must always take place upon and out of its own soil, not through adopting foreign things, otherwise it is never progress. The word itself in its true sense rejects any imitation. A people can only progress through the upward development of what it already possesses, and not by the adoption of something it has borrowed. Adopting something is not progress, for progress shows itself in the improvement of what already exists. . . . Nor is what is borrowed or adopted really one’s property, even if one wishes to make it so! It is not something personally achieved, not a result of the people’s own spirit, of which alone it could and must be proud! . . .

True progress for each people lies solely in the development of its own culture adapted to the soil, the climate and the race. Man must become indigenous in the purest sense, if he wishes to develop and expect help from the Light. He should beware of adopting the habits and customs of peoples alien to his nature, not to mention foreign opinions. To be rooted in one’s native soil is a basic condition and alone guarantees health, strength and maturity![6]

Notes

[1] Unerschrocken: Auf dem Weg nach Palästina. Tereska Torres‘ Filmtagebuch von 1947. Edited by Ronny Loewy on behalf of the Jewish Museum Berlin, 2004, p. 45. My translation.

[2] Ibid., p. 51.

[3] Ibid., p. 69.

[4] Ibid., p. 131.

[5] Ibid., p. 132.

[6] Abd-ru-shin [Oskar Ernst Bernhardt], In the Light of Truth. Kindle edition, loc. 11607, 11617, 11627.