The diary of Carla Simons, the other Anne Frank

“I haven’t written in this diary for weeks. No, it’s not just themonotonous history of the Jews of Amsterdam”… It’s the story of scandalous things that I really experience, day after day… The Jews are now being taken away at such a rapid pace that one horrible scene is immediately followed by another». These words were written in March 1943 by Carla Simons and have remained hidden for years, are published again at the Memorial Day 2023.

Carla Simons died at Auschwitz-Birkenau on November 19, 1943, like so many, shortly after arriving here. She had been arrested on August 3rd. She was 40 years old. She writer, journalist and translator she lived in Amsterdam, the same city as Anne Frank. She specialized in Italian language and culture, but she also translated from English and French. During the Second World War, she was protected by the Italian Romano Guarnieri, of whom she was a pupil and companion, but after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and the fall of Mussolini, Adolf Eichmann personally ordered his internment.

He entrusted his diary to Guarnieri, published in the Netherlands only in 2014 and in Italy in 2023 after an original typewritten copy, 150 sheets, was found in the personal archive of Romano Guarnieri’s daughter, the medieval historian Romana Guarnieri, kept by the Fondazione Lercarus of Bologna. The title is The light dances restlessly. Diary 1942-1943. Edited by Francesca Barresi. Translation by Francesca Barresi and Lisa Visani Bianchini, History and Literature Editions, Rome, 2023.

The time frame of the diary goes from January 1942 to May 1943 and tells of the Dutch city occupied by the Nazis. In Amsterdam, in the early 1940s, no Jew was allowed to enter a public building or sit on a park bench. The roundups are systematic. «In front of me the troop of soldiers passes by. Ready, snappy, in their gray uniforms… I think: I am a thousand times freer. Despite my yellow star, despite the restrictions and bans». Recounting everyday life, people standing in front of shop windows they can’t enter or looking at umbrellas they can’t sit under, he recounts the horror.