On August 18, 2021, at the invitation of the “My Night at the Museum” collection at Stock, novelist Lola Lafon spent the night at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, in the so-called Annex, which was once an unused part of Anne Frank’s father’s business premises.
This is where, for two years, eight people had hidden to escape the Nazis during the Second World War. Where the teenager wrote — and even rewrote — her famous Log, “which all school children have read and which no adult really remembers”. There also where, like the eight other people, she will be arrested by the Gestapo following a denunciation and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen camps.
“Anne Frank whom the world knows so much that it does not know much about her”, writes Lola Lafon in When you listen to this song, the beautiful story of this long night. Anne Frank which we have made a kind of symbol. But what, exactly, wonders the writer. “Adolescence? Of the Holocaust? Writing? »
Searching in these haunted places for something, without really knowing what, turning in circles in the Annex without daring or even being able to set foot in the room of the young girl in the heart of this “house-prison”, the author of The little communist who never smiled and of capsize (Actes Sud, 2014 and 2020) also summons in this book his family and personal memory.
Of Russian-Polish origin, Lola Lafon’s mother was hidden as a child during the war. His grandparents, secular and communist, spoke Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish and French. Lola Lafon is Jewish — a Jewess, she admits, who does not know how to pray. But all this is not enough, she also says, to explain her interest in Anne Frank and her desire to spend the night in the Annex.
” I know the story of these families raised in the love of a fictional France, that of Hugo, Jaurès and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. I know that, far from the haven they hoped to find there, they were humiliated, hunted down, deported. A story that we told him, that we passed on to him. Even if it is a tattered, incomplete, sometimes interrupted story.
She recounts her “refusal” to be part of this story, a refusal which for a long time was expressed through literary tastes which carried her as far as possible from herself, she who in adolescence chose dance as the only religion, dedicating itself “to perpetuating the international illusion of lightness”.
When you listen to this song — whose title refers to the painful memory of a young Cambodian with whom she corresponded as a teenager — is undoubtedly Lola Lafon’s most personal book.
It is both a questioning of the legacy of Anne Frank and a reflection on identity, as well as a quest coupled with an investigation. A struggle against anxiety and doubts, against the mixture of fascination and repulsion that Lola Lafon feels for this kind of black hole where she has decided to spend a whole night, “coming to experience its space because time cannot be experienced.