Journal of Jewish Identities

Introduction

On the morning of October 15, 1989, Ahmed Mohamad Kathrada was released from Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison near Cape Town, South Africa. A South-African Indian veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, Treason Trialist,¹ and long-serving political prisoner, Kathrada had spent twenty-six years and three months in prison, eighteen years of which were on Robben Island. Leaving his prison cell, Kathrada carried with him some cardboard boxes containing his most prized possessions: a copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, nine hundred carbon copies of letters he had written, and an equivalent number of letters he had received. There were also seven notebooks in which Kathrada had secretly recorded inspiring passages he had encountered over the years.² In his third notebook, Kathrada recorded thirteen entries from The Diary of Anne Frank, which was smuggled onto Robben Island in the late 1960s.³ What drove political prisoners of the racist apartheid regime to engage with a text written by a young Jewish girl in hiding from the Nazis? What stands behind Kathrada’s selection of entries from the Diary, and what makes his reading of Frank’s text so different from popular readings of the Diary in the post-war years?

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was first issued in Dutch in 1947 and was translated into English in 1950. It was published in the United States and Great Britain in 1952, soon becoming a bestseller.⁴ When the Diary was smuggled onto Robben Island, Anne Frank was already considered the best-known victim of the Holocaust, due mainly to the dramatic adaptations of her text on Broadway and on film, in 1955 and 1959 respectively.⁵ However, as Sidra Ezrahi argues, while the adaptation of Frank’s text “brought the Holocaust to the forefront of mass consciousness, [it] did not really seek to dispel the curiously functional ‘amnesia’ toward the events themselves.”⁶ [End Page 175] As I explain elsewhere,⁷ this “amnesia” had to do with the consolidation of a homogenous American identity during the 1950s and 1960s. In the shadow of the Cold War, adaptations of the Diary conformed to constructs of universalized suffering, made palatable to an American audience by adopting a middle-of-the-road approach, as well as delivering a combined message on the virtues of American democracy. Universalism was the principal vehicle of this ideological agenda; in the adaption process, some of Anne Frank’s musings about Jewish suffering were omitted altogether, while others were transformed into declarations about the universal nature of suffering.⁸

The adapted versions were not circulated on Robben Island, yet the Diary in its original form served as an important source of inspiration for the prisoners. Shirli Gilbert’s in-depth article on Anne Frank in South Africa (2012) describes the significance of Frank’s text for some of the most prominent political prisoners imprisoned on Robben Island.⁹ Gilbert argues, however, that it was only after their release from prison, during the transition to democracy, that the former political prisoners who read the Diary on Robben Island incorporated the book into what she refers to as “Consensual Memory in the New South Africa,” situating Frank as a universal victim of discrimination.¹⁰ In 1994, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, in collaboration with the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and the Netherlands Royal Embassy in Pretoria, presented a traveling exhibition entitled “Anne Frank in the World: 1929–1945” in several South African cities. Given the national itinerary of the exhibition and its symbolic importance, the former political prisoners/newly minted national figureheads were among the key speakers at the various events launching the exhibition. ¹¹

The first to testify to the Diary’s unique influence on political prisoners was Govan Mbeki, one of the nine activists sentenced to life imprisonment by the apartheid regime during the Rivonia Trial in 1964. Speaking shortly after the transition to democracy in South Africa, at the grand opening of the...