In the Une nuit au musée series, authors are invited to spend a night alone in a museum and write about the experience, their emotions, and the works or places that resonate with them. For her contribution, Lola Lafon chooses to spend a night in the Anne Frank House, more specifically in the Secret Annex where Anne Frank and her family hid for two years. With a Russian-Polish Jewish mother and a childhood spent in Bulgaria and Romania, Lafon feels a deeply personal connection to Anne Frank’s story. What begins as a night in the museum gradually unfolds into three intertwined narratives. The first follows Lafon’s own experience as she wanders through the empty museum, avoiding Anne Frank’s bedroom until the very end of the night. The second revisits Anne Frank’s life and the enduring power of her diary. The third explores Lafon’s own family history and recalls her encounter with a young man who would later disappear during Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia. The book is remarkably well constructed, weaving these three stories together with great sensitivity and emotional depth. Rather than competing, they illuminate one another, creating a moving reflection on memory, loss, and the traces left by history. Reading it also brought back my own memories of discovering Anne Frank’s diary as a teenager. More than anything, it reminded me how important it is to pass this story on to future generations, and it strengthened my desire to share it with my children.
We are the children of the novels we have loved; they nestle in the crook of all we have lost, all we lack; they hold everything that escapes our grasp, which passes us by too quickly to be under-stood. We are made of stories that don’t belong to us; they irrigate us and haunt us, we who “walk in the night beneath what is written up yonder, equally senseless in our wishes, in our joys, and in our affliction” (Diderot).
Original Title : Quand tu écouteras cette chanson
Translated from French