The writer spends a night in the most empty of all museums, to confront her family history and some other ghosts.
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If a fairy offered you one night in a museum of your choice, would you go to the Louvre, for a tête-à-tête with the Mona Lisa? At British Museum? For when you listen to this song, Lola Lafon preferred to lock up in an empty apartment in Amsterdam. A kind of prison, located behind 263 Prinsengracht. It was here, in the cramped rooms of a building adjoining his house, that Anne Frank lived hidden with her family and four friends from July 1942. Here she wrote her newspaper. Here she was arrested, on August 4, 1944, before being deported to Auschwitz, then Bergen-Belsen.
look in front “which will never be filled”
Nothing to do, or so little, in this secret annex. A rectangle of wallpaper, a few portraits on the wall, that’s all. On his return from Auschwitz, in 1945, Otto Frank found the hiding place devastated by the Nazis. And when it comes to making it a museum, in 1960, the father of Anne and Margot Frank demands that the apartment remains in this state. “Let us witness it, emptiness, without being able to escape it; that we confront it, states Lola Lafon. Thus, when leaving, we cannot say: in the annex, I did not Nothing seen. We will say: in the appendix, there is nothing, and this nothing, I saw it. “
look in front “which will never be filled”: when you listen to this song is the disturbing, striking story of this formidable confrontation. Ten hours spent alone by the writer, August 18, 2021, in the 40 square meters of the annex, the most empty of all museums. The rules set at the entrance are strict: no photo, forbidden to drink like eating, but also to hang your bag from a door handful. As an echo of the constraints imposed on the Frank family. During twenty-five months, the eight inhabitants hidden in the heart of the city who tracked them were silenced.
Lola Lafon may have chosen this prosecution of one night, engaging in such a camera is not easy. The day before, seized with a brutal fever, she thinks of canceling her visit. The same evening, she walks for hours the apartment without daring to enter Anne Frank’s room, this reduced, this crypt in the center of the tomb. A moment, she even leaves the annex and takes refuge in the contemporary part of the building.
This “imaginary sister”
Like millions of readers, Lola Lafon discovered the girl at the bar and the pen when she was a schoolgirl. “My parents offered me the newspaper, I started writing to do like her.” Like millions of adults, she didn’t know about this teenager who has become an icon, “the only Jewish girl to To be so madly loved “, while being the subject of an almost as lively hatred, of an obsession negationist observed as soon as the newspaper was published.
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