Lola Lafon one-on-one with Anne Frank

“When you will listen to this song”, by Lola Lafon, Stock, “My night at the museum”, 250 p., €19.50, digital €14.

If a fairy offered you a night in a museum of your choice, would you go to the Louvre, for a one-on-one with Mona Lisa ? At the British Museum? For When you listen to this song, Lola Lafon preferred to lock herself in a small empty apartment in Amsterdam. A sort of prison, located behind 263 Prinsengracht. It was here, in the cramped rooms of a building adjoining her house, that Anne Frank lived in hiding with her family and four friends from July 1942. Here she wrote her Log. Here she was arrested on August 4, 1944, before being deported to Auschwitz, then Bergen-Belsen.

Looking in the face “what will never be filled”

Nothing to see, 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 to make it a museumin 1960, the father of Anne and Margot Frank demanded that the apartment remain in this state. “Let us witness it, of the void, without being able to escape it; let’s face itstates Lola Lafon. Thus, on leaving, one will not be able to say: in the Annex, I saw nothing. We will say: in the Annex, there is nothing, And this nothing, I saw it. »

look in the face “what will never be fulfilled” : When you listen to this song is the disturbing, gripping account of this formidable confrontation. Ten hours spent alone by the writer, on August 18, 2021, in the 40 square meters of the Annex, the emptiest of all museums. The rules set at the entrance are strict: no photo, forbidden to drink or eat, but also to hang your bag on a door handle. Like an echo of the constraints imposed on the Frank family. For twenty-five months, the eight inhabitants hidden in the heart of the city who tracked them were forced to silence.

Lola Lafon may have chosen this one-night confinement, engaging in such a closed session is not easy. The day before, seized by a brutal fever, she thinks of canceling her visit. That same evening, she paces the apartment for hours without daring to enter Anne Frank’s room, this little room, this crypt in the center of the tomb. For 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 young girl with the barrette and the pen when she was a schoolgirl. “My parents gave me the Log, I started writing to be like her. » Like millions of adults, she didn’t know much about this teenage icon. “the only Jewish girl to be so madly loved”while being the object of an almost as strong hatred, of a Holocaust denial obsession noted from the publication of the Log.

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