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In January of last year I read about “The Diary of Anne Frank”, which had just been published as a graphic novel, with images by David Polonsky. Of course, the text was shortened considerably, but David Polonsky’s images made the book a new and different experience. An ordinary teenager in her thirties, whose life suddenly changes completely when anti-Semitism strikes.
It is a well known story about how Anne Frank and her family lived in hiding on a farm in Amsterdam for two years, before the Nazis found them. He died at the age of fifteen in 1945, of typhoid fever in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he arrived after a time in Auschwitz.
I had read it several times before, and yet the rereading was a new experience. Perhaps it was because the images moved the text to a world closer to mine: that’s how my mother was when she was a child, her old family photos recall the world of Anne Frank before the farm. It was so common, so mundane.
But what I had completely He forgot how upset they were with each other, the eight people hiding in the yard. They fought daily over little things and got upset about everything, and sometimes it took up more space than the growing hunger and fear of the Nazis.
Somehow it was a little embarrassing, I thought when I read, that they were so grumpy. Did they have a danger so horrible that it threatened? When the death toll from the pandemic rose this spring, I understood more. It happened to us too, in a situation that was of course much less stressful than life in the country house.
“The Diary of Anne Frank” is much more realistic than any dystopian novel I have read, some of which, however, have been based entirely on reality. But that everyday pettiness rarely appears when the heroes of the books have to endure a long period of isolation. We are not sorry.
Most of us don’t have better people in crisis situations. Instead, we become quarrelsome. Reality becomes so heavy to bear that fear must be allowed to simmer in small, seemingly unnecessary breaths of anger.
Even if everyday life gets a little worse.
This spring I got up himself more and more impatient than ever, precisely because everything was so uncertain and all we could really do was wait. And the irritation quickly turned to anger on all those who did not interpret the crisis in the same way as me: it takes each person to think a little that Sweden’s strategy is crazy / wise, that the Public Health Agency is wrong / correct, that the restrictions are important / ridiculously insufficient. , that mouth protection protects / does not protect. So are you going shopping? That’s stupid, right? It is not necessary! But you are doing it wrong! Moron!
Then I thought of Anne Frank and was ashamed. We have it so easy, comparatively. We live in communion with a humanity that is doing everything possible to stop the pandemic.
And then I repeated to myself over and over again what DN Science Editor Maria Gunther wrote in September: The only thing we know for sure about the infection is that it helps with hand washing, and we’ve known it for 150 years. He cited one of the world’s leading epidemiologists, Stanford professor John Ioannidis (who added that distance can help, but even that is not fully proven).
All other protective measures, everything else, are the kind that we just test.
Not special calming, i think anxious at first. Then I realize that this is exactly what humans can do. We try, because we cannot bear uncertainty and, hopefully, sooner or later we will be able to find a solution.
It’s still a bit beautiful, even though humanity’s success is riddled with annoying whispers.
Read more chronicles and other texts by Lotta Olsson
