Child Sacrifice

By Stefan Kanfer

TALES FROM THE SECRET ANNEX by Anne Frank

Doubleday; 136 pages; $14.95 f -L-| n spite of everything, I still believe I that people are really good at heart."

Anne Frank's final words in the play that bears her name seem to belie her fate. She died at 15 in the Bergen-Belsen death camp. Was she merely expressing the naive wishes of a child? What could such an adolescent comprehend of the world?

As her surviving papers prove, the tremulous girl knew all too well the lessons of degradation and inhumanity. But if she was acquainted with the night, she refused to turn her back on the consolations of nature, learning and love. The proof resides in Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex, a group of stories, fables, essays and reminiscences that she kept in a private journal. Though some of these works were previously published in her native Dutch, they are making their first appearances in hard cover, sympathetically translated by Ralph Manheim and Michel Mok.

The arrival is long overdue. To be sure, among these entries are minor and childish writings: a recollection of having cheated in a math exam, an unsuccessful attempt at light verse. But most of the 30 pieces show a heartbreaking potential. For Anne, nuances are crucial and all experiences are carefully assayed, even those that come in the Franks' pitiable Amsterdam refuge behind a wall, temporarily safe from the Nazis. Occasionally she succumbs to depression, and a line concentrates the tragedy of her people: "To be interrupted just as you are thinking of a glorious future!" Yet Anne's mind is too agile and her imagination too febrile for enduring self-pity.

In Dreams of Movie Stardom she constructs a Hollywood that never was, where the '30s stars Lola, Priscilla and Rosemary Lane invite her to join them. Like Kafka's Amerika, Anne's New

World is a fanciful arena of high-speed miracles; within days she becomes a photographer's model. But the attendant publicity and the rigors of studio assignments prove unendurable; in the end Anne is happy to fly back to Holland. After all, she notes ruefully, "I had had a close look at the way celebrities live."

Jack boots sound in the streets, and fear is so palpable it can be tasted in the evening soup, but Anne spends a day wor rying about the pathological Dutch dislike of nudity. In The Sink of Iniquity she pro tests, "Modesty and prudishness can go too far. Do you put clothes on flowers when you pick them? I don't think we're so very different from nature. Why should we be ashamed of the way nature has dressed us?"

It is in the fables that the young au thor's gifts are best displayed, as if confinement had forced her to think in brief, ironic parables. In Blurry, the Explorer, a bear cub ventures into a human city and becomes the intimate -- and the quarry --of dogs, cars and people. At last he re turns to his mother. "I wanted to discover the world," he explains. "And did you discover it?" "No, no ... not really; you see, I couldn't find it!" In Eve's Dream, plants display a variety of personalities, as they do in the tales of Andersen and Grimm. The rose turns out to be a miser able beauty with a catty voice. The chest nut is strong but egotistical; "The trees and flowers know this. When they are in trouble they go to the sympathetic pine."

There is, of course, no way to deter mine what kind of writer Anne Frank might have become. Child sacrifice is a tragedy beyond words, and it scarcely matters whether a genius or an ordinary citizen perished in the Holocaust. It is only certain that her final volume is a testimony to a green talent and a mature spirit. Each page refreshingly repeats the invaluable moral lesson of her diary: if it is implausible to bid farewell to anguish, it is impossible to close the book on hope . -- By Stefan Kanfer