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Anne Frank: Diary

The Diary of Anne Frank is the first, and sometimes only, exposure many people have to the history of the Holocaust. Meticulously handwritten during her two years in hiding, Anne's diary remains one of the most widely read works of nonfiction in the world. Anne has become a symbol for the lost promise of the more than one million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust.

There are several versions of her diary. Anne herself edited one version of the diary, in hopes of it being published as a book after the war.

The Diary of Anne Frank was published posthumously in 1947 and eventually translated into almost 70 languages.

It became popular after it was adapted for the stage in 1955.

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The Diary Begins

The house at Prinsengracht 263, where Anne Frank and her family were hidden.

I n July 1942, Anne, her sister, Margot, her mother, Edith, and her father went into hiding. They huddled into a secret attic apartment behind the office of the family-owned business at 263 Prinsengracht Street, which would eventually hide four Dutch Jews as well.

While in hiding, Anne kept a diary in which she recorded her fears, hopes, and experiences. She received her first diary on her 13th birthday, June 12, 1942. She wrote:

I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me. I expect you will be interested to hear what it feels like to hide; well, all I can say is that I don't know myself yet. I don't think I shall ever feel really at home in this house but that does not mean that I loathe it here, it is more like being on vacation in a very peculiar boardinghouse. Rather a mad way of looking at being in hiding perhaps but that is how it strikes me. [July 11, 1942] The fact that we can never go outside bothers me more than I can say, and then I'm really afraid that we'll be discovered and shot, not a very nice prospect, needless to say. [July 11, 1942]

October 10, 1942, excerpt from Anne Frank's diary

Anne also wrote short stories, fairy tales, and essays. In her diary, she reflected on her "pen children," as she called her writings. On September 2, 1943, she began to meticulously copy them into a notebook and added a table of contents so that it would resemble a published book. She gave it the title "Stories and Events from the Annex." Occasionally she read a story to the inhabitants of the annex, and she wrote about her intention to send one of her fairy tales to a Dutch magazine. Increasingly, she expressed her desire to be an author or journalist.

On March 28, 1944, a radio broadcast from the Dutch government-in-exile in London urged the Dutch people to keep diaries, letters, and other items that would document life under German occupation. Prompted by this announcement, Anne began to edit her diary, hoping to publish it after the war under the title "The Secret Annex." From May 20 until her arrest on August 4, 1944, she transferred nearly two-thirds of her diary from her original notebooks to loose pages, making various revisions in the process.

Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the "Secret Annex." The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story. But, seriously, it would be quite funny 10 years after the war if we Jews were to tell how we lived and what we ate and talked about here. Although I tell you a lot, still, even so, you only know very little of our lives. [March 29, 1944]

On April 17, 1944, Anne began writing in what turned out to be her final diary notebook. On the first page she wrote about herself: "The owner's maxim: Zest is what man needs!" A few months later, she and the other inhabitants of the annex celebrated the Allied invasion of France, which took place on June 6, 1944. They were certain the war would soon be over.

In one of her last diary entries, dated July 15, 1944, Anne wrote:

I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death, I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out. yours, Anne M. Frank.

On August 4, 1944, Anne, her family, and the others in hiding were arrested by German and Dutch police officials. Her last entry was written on August 1, 1944.

The Diary Survives

The Franks and the four others hiding with them were discovered by the German SS and police on August 4, 1944. A German official and two Dutch police collaborators arrested the Franks the same day. They were soon sent to the Westerbork transit camp and then to concentration camps.

Anne's mother Edith Frank died in Auschwitz in January 1945. Anne and her sister Margot both died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March 1945. Their father, Otto, survived the war after Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.

Otto Frank later described what it was like when the Nazis entered the annex in which he had been hiding. He said an SS man picked up a portfolio and asked whether there were any jewels in it. When Otto Frank said it only contained papers, the SS man threw the papers (and Anne Frank’s diary) on the floor, walking away with silverware and a candlestick in his briefcase. “If he had taken the diary with him,” Otto Frank recalled, “no one would ever have heard of my daughter.”

Miep Gies, one of the Dutch citizens who hid the Franks during the Holocaust, kept Anne Frank’s writings, including her diary. She handed the papers to Otto Frank on the day he learned of his daughters’ deaths. He organized the papers and worked doggedly to get the diary published, first in Dutch in 1947. The first American edition appeared in 1952.

The Diary of Anne Frank did not become a best-seller until after it was adapted for the stage, premiering in 1955 and winning a Pulitzer Prize the next year. The book remains immensely popular, having been translated into more than 70 languages and having sold more than 30 million copies.

There are three versions of the diary. The first is the diary as Anne originally wrote it from June 1942 to August 1944. Anne hoped to publish a book based on her entries, especially after a Dutch official announced in 1944 that he planned to collect eyewitness accounts of the German occupation. She then began editing her work, leaving out certain passages. That became the second version. Her father created a third version with his own edits as he sought to get the diary published after the war.

The third version is the most popularly known. Not all of the versions include Anne’s criticism of her mother or the references to her developing curiosity about sex -- the latter of which would have been especially controversial in 1947.

The home where the Franks hid in Amsterdam also continues to attract a large audience. Now known as the Anne Frank House, it drew more than 1.2 million visitors in 2017.

New Educational Resource

Diaries as Historical Sources Lesson

Students study examples of diaries written by young people during the Holocaust, particularly examining the ways in which Anne Frank, the most famous diarist of the Holocaust, thought about her audience while writing. By analyzing these diaries as sources, students are encouraged to think of themselves as historical actors and to consider how they are documenting their experiences for future historians.

Series: Diaries

Children's Diaries during the Holocaust

Hidden Children: Expressions

“Give Me Your Children”: Voices from the Lodz Ghetto

Diaries and Journals

Series: anne frank.

Anne Frank Biography: Who was Anne Frank?

Anne frank: amsterdam and deportation, children during the holocaust.

Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust

How did the Nazis and their collaborators implement the Holocaust?

The Netherlands

Bergen-Belsen

Switch series, critical thinking questions.

Find diaries of other children impacted by the Holocaust. Compare and contrast their stories with Anne and Margot’s.
Learn about the network of individuals who tried to shield the Franks from arrest. What pressures and motivations may have affected them?
What can be learned from the choices of those who supported the Frank family in hiding?

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Anne frank: international symbol of holocaust victimhood.

The Diary of a Young Girl is one of the world’s most widely read books, which has made Anne Frank an international symbol and her story deeply embedded in the collective memory of the Holocaust.

Top Photo: Anne Frank in 1940, while at 6. Montessorischool, Niersstraat 41-43, Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Photograph by unknown photographer. Source Anne Frank Stichting, Amsterdam (Wikimedia Commons)

Anne Frank was born on June 12, 1929, to Otto and Edith Frank in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where she lived until she was four years old. She had one sister, Margot, three years her elder. Otto Frank came from an upper-middle-class German-Jewish family in Frankfurt, and Edith, also Jewish, was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist from Aachen. While living in Germany, the Frank family saw the effects of the Great Depression firsthand, including rampant inflation and soaring unemployment. They witnessed, too, the rise of National Socialism and the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. To avoid persecution amid growing antisemitism in Germany, Otto Frank moved to Amsterdam in the summer of 1933 and established two companies specializing in the production of spices, pectin, and other foodstuffs. Edith and Margot followed shortly thereafter, and Anne, who had been living with her grandmother in Aachen, joined the rest of her family at the beginning of 1934.

Until the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, Anne enjoyed a normal childhood in Amsterdam. The Franks lived in the middle-class Jewish neighborhood of Merwedeplein in the southern part of the city, and Anne easily acculturated to Dutch society. She quickly learned Dutch, made new friends, and went to a Dutch school near her home until she was in sixth grade before being accepted into the Jewish Lyceum where Margot also attended school. Anne did exceptionally well in school, getting along with her teachers and enjoying learning (except for math). The first month of diary entries provides insight into Anne’s daily life before going into hiding, detailing friendships, afterschool activities, such as playing ping pong and frequenting ice cream parlors, and encounters with several admirers.

On May 10, 1940, German forces invaded the Netherlands. The Dutch armed forces held out for four days, but by the end of May, the Nazis had installed a civilian-led government under the leadership of the Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart . During the occupation, the Nazis slowly introduced scores of antisemitic laws and regulations. As Anne describes in her diary, in addition to wearing a yellow star, the freedom of Jewish people in the Netherlands was severely restricted: Jews were no longer allowed to use streetcars, bicycles, or ride in cars; were forbidden from enjoying any form of public entertainment and from socializing with the non-Jewish population; could only frequent Jewish-owned businesses; and had to adhere to a strict curfew.

Amid these stringent decrees, there were also rumors that all Jews would eventually have to leave the Netherlands, which prompted Otto Frank to begin furnishing a hiding place in the annex of his business premises at Prinsengracht 263. Beginning in the first half of 1942, Otto converted the annex of his office building into a living space large enough to accommodate the entire Frank family as well as Herman van Pels, a work colleague and close friend of the Frank family; his wife, Auguste; and their teenage son, Peter. Later, Friedrich Pfeffer, a Jewish dentist known as Albert Dussel in Anne’s writings, joined them. Assisting them was a small, loyal cohort of trusted employees who provided food, supplies, information, and critical support to the annex’s residents for over two years. These “helpers,” as they would be referred as in Anne’s diary, included Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, Johan Voskuijl, and Elizabet “Bep” Voskuijl.

Present-day photo of Prinsengracht 263, Amsterdam, Photo: Jennifer Popowycz

In late June 1942, the chief German administrator of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Amsterdam informed the local Jewish population that within a few weeks, deportations from the Netherlands would commence. He instructed the Jewish Council to compile a list of thousands of Jews to be transferred to Germany for “labor service.” Margot Frank, then 16 years old, was on the first list of 4,000 Jews designated for deportation during the first week of July. While the Franks and van Pels had not planned on moving into the “secret annex” until the end of the month, after Margot received her summons, both families quickly went into hiding.

Documenting the Holocaust

Anne chronicled the details of life in the “secret annex” in a diary that her parents had given her for her 13th birthday. Anne addressed the diary to a fictional friend named Kitty: in the absence of an intimate confidant, she wanted to write letters to a close personal friend to whom she could openly share her thoughts and feelings. As the war dragged on and life in hiding became increasingly isolating, Anne’s diary became her refuge. What began as practice in self-reflection became, in Eleanor Roosevelt’s words, a “poignantly clear” illustration of “the ultimate shining nobility” of the human spirit.

Anne’s diary provides a crucial firsthand account of the experience of Dutch Jews during the Holocaust.

At the beginning of Nazi occupation, there were over 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands, mostly concentrated in Amsterdam and other larger cities such as Rotterdam and The Hague. During the war, between 20,000 and 30,000 Dutch Jews went into hiding, with an estimated 16,000 to 17,000 surviving the war. According to the historical educator Jennifer Foray: “These numbers alone indicate that life in hiding, although hardly a guarantee of survival, constituted an integral wartime experience for Jews in the occupied Netherlands.”

Anne’s intimate and personal account of the Holocaust in the Netherlands not only depicts certain key events experienced by the eight people living in the annex, but also demonstrates human courage and frailty. Strewed with metaphors of a coming storm, her writing oscillates between optimism and hope on the one hand, and desperation and despair on the other, giving the reader a sense of what it was like to live under constant fear of detection. As Alex Sagen argues, Anne’s diary occupies a “uniquely prominent place” in Holocaust literature, because it brings readers close to grasping the suffering of European Jews during World War II. Moreover, “she draws particular attention to the difficulty of developing and maintaining one’s ideals in a world which seems to undermine all idealism.”

Anne’s diary is also a timeless coming-of-age narrative, which makes her story accessible to all. As she navigates adolescence, Anne documents her life growing up as a young teenager between the ages of 13 and 15 years old, frequently writing about self-criticism and personal development, dreams and cherished hopes, friendships, relationships with the opposite sex, and intergenerational conflict—all while under the constant threat of death. As a result, her diary has become a seminal first-person account of the Holocaust as well as an established piece of 20th-century literature.

Anne Frank’s Legacy

On March 8, 1944, Anne and the other members of the annex listened on their illegal radio to a speech given by Gerrit Bolkestein, the Dutch Education Minister (in exile), who stated: “History cannot be written on the basis of official decisions and documents alone. If our descendants are to understand fully what we as a nation have had to endure and overcome during these years, then what we really need are ordinary documents.”

Statue of Anne Frank at The National WWII Museum, Photo: Jennifer Popowycz

“Not until we succeed in bringing together vast quantities of this simple, everyday material,” he continued, “will the picture of our struggle for freedom be painted in its full depth and glory.” After hearing Bolkestein’s call for Dutch citizens to record their wartime experiences, Anne began editing, revising, and condensing her diary with the goal of publishing it after the war.

Anne’s project was cut short, however, on the morning of August 4, 1944, when German and Dutch police raided the annex and arrested all eight inhabitants along with Viktor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, who had been assisting the group while in hiding. After being held in a prison in Amsterdam and the Westerbork transit camp, Anne and the other members from the secret annex were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on September 3, 1944. They were part of the very last transport to leave from Westerbork.

Upon arrival in Auschwitz , close to 350 people from the transport were immediately selected and taken to the gas chambers. Anne, Margot, and Edith were sent to the labor camp for women while Otto was imprisoned in a camp for men. Otto Frank was the only member of the annex group to survive the war. Both Hermann van Pels and Edith Frank died in Auschwitz—Hermann shortly after his arrival in the autumn of 1944 and Edith from starvation and exhaustion on January 6, 1945, just three weeks before the Soviets liberated the camp. Friedrich Pfeffer died on December 20, 1944, in the Neuengamme concentration camp, and Peter van Pels perished on May 2, 1945, in Mauthausen. In November 1944, Anne and Margot were deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they both died from typhus sometime in February or March 1945. The date and location of Auguste van Pels’ death are unknown.

Following the raid on the “secret annex,” Miep Gies, the Frank family’s main link to the outside world, retrieved several items from the annex, including Anne’s diary, which she held onto for safekeeping. When Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam, Miep gave him all the belongings she had kept, including all of Anne’s writings. Respecting his daughter’s intention to publish her writings, Otto published Anne’s diary in Dutch in June 1947. Its first German translation was published in 1950 and, in 1952, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was published in English. It quickly became an international bestseller and a cultural phenomenon.

A work published to combat racism and discrimination, Anne Frank’s diary is one of the world’s most widely read books and has been translated into 65 languages. Her story has also been adapted into numerous films, stage productions, and a graphic biography, making her, despite her terrible fate, an iconic figure and establishing her as the most well-known victim of Nazi persecution. In Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, Francine Prose argues that Frank’s diary “should be awarded its place among the great memoirs and spiritual confessions, as well as among the most significant records of the era in which she lived.” Indeed, Anne Frank and her story have become part of the world’s collective memory of the Holocaust.

References:

Anne Frank House, www.annefrank.org/en , (accessed August 17, 2023).
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition , ed. by Mirjam Pressler, trans. by Susan Massotty, mass market edition, (New York: Bantam Books, 2021).
Jennifer L. Foray, “The Nation Behind the Diary: Anne Frank and the Holocaust of the Dutch Jews,” The History Teacher 44 no. 3 (May 2011): 329-352.
Francine Prose, Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife , reprint edition, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010).
Alex Sagen, “An Optimistic Icon: Anne Frank’s Canonization in Postwar Culture,” German Politics & Society 13, no. 3 (36) (Fall 1995): 95-107.

Jennifer Popowycz, PhD

Jennifer Popowycz, PhD is the Leventhal Research Fellow at The National WWII Museum. Her research focuses on the Eastern Front and Nazi occupation policies in Eastern Europe in World War II.

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The Diary of Anne Frank

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Inner Self, Outer Self, and Isolation

The idea of secrets and hiding away – both literally and figuratively – are central to The Diary of a Young Girl. Just as Anne Frank and her family are secreted away in the Secret Annex adjacent to the Dutch Opekta Company, Anne finds herself secreting away aspects of herself from those around her. "Can you tell me why people go to such lengths to hide their real selves?" Anne wonders in her diary. "Or…

Given that Anne's diary begins just as Anne hits adolescence, The Diary of a Young Girl is as much a story about growing up as it is a story of Jewish experience in World War II. In spite of her extraordinary circumstances, Anne grapples with many normal problems of adolescence: feelings of isolation, rebellion, and alienation; curiosity about adulthood; shifting attitudes towards those she once loved and admired (she realizes that her mother will never…

Love and Sexuality

Although it's certainly an integral part of her journey from childhood to adolescence, Anne 's sexuality, as well as her desire to love and be loved, deserves its own theme. Anne spends a lot of time puzzling out her sexual and romantic desires. What does it mean to be romantically involved with someone versus just being friends? For instance, Anne swears she's not in love with Peter van Daan ( she argues that the only…

Human Nature: Generosity and Greed

Given the extreme circumstances of life in the Annex, Anne 's exploration of human nature often focuses on generosity and greed. The adults around her buckle under the pressure of confinement and find themselves struggling between being generous (a vestige of their prewar life) and being greedy (which, to be fair, is what they often have to do in order to survive). Mr. Dussel , for example, often hoards food, and Anne takes him to…

World War II: Fear, Suffering, and Hope

While Anne 's diary is a remarkable evocation of a growing teenage girl under any circumstances, this is above all the narrative of a Jewish girl in the grips of World War II and the Holocaust. Anne is a girl forced to go into hiding with her family, and a girl terrified that she and everyone she loves will be killed. With every stray ring of the doorbell and knock on the wall, Anne is…

Essay on Anne Frank

Students are often asked to write an essay on Anne Frank in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Anne Frank

Introduction.

Anne Frank was a Jewish girl born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany. Her family moved to Amsterdam in 1933, escaping the growing Nazi power.

Life in Hiding

When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1942, Anne and her family went into hiding in a secret annex. Here, she wrote her now-famous diary.

Anne’s diary, written between 1942 and 1944, provides a vivid account of her life in hiding. It’s a powerful testament to her courage and hope during a time of great fear and uncertainty.

After her death in a concentration camp in 1945, Anne’s father published her diary. Today, it serves as a reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust.

250 Words Essay on Anne Frank

Anne’s family went into hiding in a secret annex in her father’s office building in 1942, after her sister Margot received a call-up notice from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. For over two years, Anne documented her experiences, thoughts, and emotions in her diary, providing a unique insight into the life of Jews during the Nazi regime.

In August 1944, the Secret Annex was discovered, and its occupants were sent to concentration camps. Anne and Margot died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen camp in early 1945. Her father, Otto Frank, the only survivor, returned to Amsterdam after the war and discovered Anne’s diary. Recognizing its historical and personal value, he published it in 1947.

Anne Frank’s Diary, now translated into more than 70 languages, serves as a stark reminder of the atrocities of the Holocaust. It also stands as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity. Anne’s poignant writing, her introspection, and her unwavering hope in humanity continue to inspire millions around the globe. Her story remains a powerful symbol against intolerance, racism, and prejudice.

500 Words Essay on Anne Frank

Anne frank: a voice from the shadows.

Anne Frank, a name that resonates with millions around the world, symbolizes the human spirit’s resilience in the face of horrifying adversity. Born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, Annelies Marie Frank was a German-Dutch diarist, globally recognized for her poignant diary written during the Holocaust.

Early Life and Emigration

Anne Frank was born into a liberal Jewish family. Her father, Otto Frank, was a decorated German officer in World War I. However, when the Nazis came to power in 1933, Otto, sensing the impending danger, moved his family to Amsterdam, Netherlands. For a while, they lived a peaceful life, until the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, and the Franks found themselves entrapped once again.

The Secret Annex

The diary of anne frank.

Anne’s diary, a unique blend of adolescent introspection and terrifying reality, is a testament to her extraordinary narrative skill. Her entries, filled with vivid descriptions and insightful reflections, depict the horrors of war, the human capacity for cruelty, and the sparks of kindness and humanity that persist even in the darkest times. She also explored her identity, ambitions, and the complex dynamics of growing up in such an oppressive environment.

Arrest and Death

In August 1944, the Frank family was betrayed, leading to their arrest and deportation. Anne and her sister Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they both died of typhus in March 1945, just weeks before the camp’s liberation. Anne was only 15.

Anne Frank’s story is a stark reminder of the devastating consequences of prejudice and hatred. Her diary, a testament to the indomitable human spirit, continues to inspire generations, advocating for tolerance, empathy, and peace. Though her life was tragically cut short, her voice echoes through the corridors of history, urging us to remember and learn from the past.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

Happy studying!

Becoming Anne Frank

Why did we turn an isolated teenage girl into the world’s most famous Holocaust victim?

People love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much.

This disturbing idea was suggested by an incident this past spring at the Anne Frank House, the blockbuster Amsterdam museum built out of Frank’s “Secret Annex,” or in Dutch, “Het Achterhuis [The House Behind],” a series of tiny hidden rooms where the teenage Jewish diarist lived with her family and four other persecuted Jews for over two years, before being captured by Nazis and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Here’s how much people love dead Jews: Anne Frank’s diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 via her surviving father, Otto Frank, has been translated into 70 languages and has sold over 30 million copies worldwide, and the Anne Frank House now hosts well over a million visitors each year, with reserved tickets selling out months in advance. But when a young employee at the Anne Frank House in 2017 tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum’s managing director told newspapers that a live Jew in a yarmulke might “interfere” with the museum’s “independent position.” The museum finally relented after deliberating for six months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.

One could call this a simple mistake, except that it echoed a similar incident the previous year, when visitors noticed a discrepancy in the museum’s audioguide displays. Each audioguide language was represented by a national flag—with the exception of Hebrew, which was represented only by the language’s name in its alphabet. The display was eventually corrected to include the Israeli flag.

These public relations mishaps, clumsy though they may have been, were not really mistakes, nor even the fault of the museum alone. On the contrary, the runaway success of Anne Frank’s diary depended on playing down her Jewish identity: At least two direct references to Hanukkah were edited out of the diary when it was originally published. Concealment was central to the psychological legacy of Anne Frank’s parents and grandparents, German Jews for whom the price of admission to Western society was assimilation, hiding what made them different by accommodating and ingratiating themselves to the culture that had ultimately sought to destroy them. That price lies at the heart of Anne Frank’s endless appeal. After all, Anne Frank had to hide her identity so much that she was forced to spend two years in a closet rather than breathe in public. And that closet, hiding place for a dead Jewish girl, is what millions of visitors want to see.

Surely there is nothing left to say about Anne Frank, except that there is everything left to say about her: all the books she never lived to write. For she was unquestionably a talented writer, possessed of both the ability and the commitment that real literature requires. Quite the opposite of how an influential Dutch historian described her work in the article that spurred her diary’s publication—a “diary by a child, this de profundis stammered out in a child’s voice”—Frank’s diary was not the work of a naif, but rather of a writer already planning future publication. Frank had begun the diary casually, but later sensed its potential; upon hearing a radio broadcast in March of 1944 calling on Dutch civilians to preserve diaries and other personal wartime documents, she immediately began to revise two years of previous entries, with a title (Het Achterhuis , or The House Behind ) already in mind, along with pseudonyms for the hiding place’s residents. Nor were her revisions simple corrections or substitutions. They were thoughtful edits designed to draw the reader in, intentional and sophisticated. Her first entry in the original diary, for instance, begins with a long description of her birthday gifts (the blank diary being one of them), an entirely unself-conscious record by a 13-year-old girl. The first entry in her revised version, on the other hand, begins with a deeply self-aware and ironic pose: “It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I—nor for that matter anyone else—will be interested in the unbosomings of a 13-year-old schoolgirl.”

The innocence here is all affect, carefully achieved. Imagine writing this as your second draft, with a clear vision of a published manuscript, and you have placed yourself not in the mind of a “stammering” child, but in the mind of someone already thinking like a writer. In addition to the diary, Frank also worked hard on her stories, or as she proudly put it, “my pen-children are piling up.” Some of these were scenes from her life in hiding, but others were entirely invented: stories of a poor girl with six siblings, or a dead grandmother protecting her orphaned grandchild, or a novel-in-progress about star-crossed lovers featuring multiple marriages, depression, a suicide and prophetic dreams. (Already wary of a writer’s pitfalls, she insisted the story “isn’t sentimental nonsense for it’s modeled on the story of Daddy’s life.”) “I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work,” she wrote a few months before her arrest. “I know myself what is and what is not well written.”

What is and what is not well written: It is likely that Frank’s opinions on the subject would have evolved if she had had the opportunity to age. Reading the diary as an adult, one sees the limitations of a teenager’s perspective, and longs for more. In one entry, Frank describes how her father’s business partners—now her family’s protectors—hold a critical corporate meeting in the office below the family’s hiding place. Her father, she and her sister discover that they can hear what is said by lying down with their ears pressed to the floor. In Frank’s telling, the episode is a comic one; she gets so bored that she falls asleep. But adult readers cannot help but ache for her father, a man who clawed his way out of bankruptcy to build a business now stolen from him, reduced to lying face-down on the floor just to overhear what his subordinates might do with his life’s work. When Anne Frank complains about her insufferable middle-aged roommate Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel, per Frank’s pseudonym) taking his time on the toilet, adult readers might empathize with him as the only single adult in the group, permanently separated from his non-Jewish life partner whom he could not marry due to anti-Semitic laws. Readers Frank’s age connect with her budding romance with fellow hidden resident Peter van Pels (renamed Peter van Daan), but adults might wonder how either of the married couples in the hiding place managed their own relationships in confinement with their children. Readers Frank’s age relate to her constant complaints about grown-ups and their pettiness, but adult readers are equipped to appreciate the psychological devastation of Frank’s older subjects, how they endured not only their physical deprivation, but the greater blow of being reduced to a childlike dependence on the whims of others.

Frank herself sensed the limits of the adults around her, writing critically of her own mother’s and Peter’s mother’s apparently trivial preoccupations—and in fact these women’s prewar lives as housewives were a chief driver for Frank’s ambitions. “I can’t imagine that I would have to lead the same sort of life as Mummy and Mrs. v.P. [van Pels] and all the women who do their work and are then forgotten,” she wrote as she planned her future career. “I must have something besides a husband and children, something that I can devote myself to!” In the published diary, this passage is immediately followed by the famous words, “I want to go on living even after my death!”

By plastering this sentence on Frank’s book jackets, publishers have implied that her posthumous fame represented the fulfillment of the writer’s dream. But when we consider the writer’s actual ambitions, it is obvious that her dreams were in fact destroyed—and it is equally obvious that the writer who would have emerged from Frank’s experience would not be anything like the writer Frank herself originally planned to become. Consider, if you will, the following imaginary obituary of a life unlived:

Anne Frank, noted Dutch novelist and essayist, died Wednesday at her home in Amsterdam. She was 89. A survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Frank achieved a measure of fame that was hard won. In her 20s she struggled to find a publisher for her first book, "The House Behind ." The two-part memoir consisted of a short first section detailing her family’s life in hiding in Amsterdam, followed by a much longer and more gripping account of her experiences at Auschwitz, where her mother and others who had hidden with her family were murdered, and later at Bergen-Belsen, where she witnessed her sister Margot’s horrific death. Disfigured by a brutal beating, Frank rarely granted interviews; her later work, "The Return ," describes how her father did not recognize her upon their reunion in 1945. "The House Behind" was searing and accusatory: The family’s initial hiding place, mundane and literal in the first section, is revealed in the second part to be a metaphor for European civilization, whose f acade of high culture concealed a demonic evil. “Every flat, every house, every office building in every city,” she wrote, “they all have a House Behind.” The book drew respectful reviews, but sold few copies. She supported herself as a journalist, and in 1961 traveled to Israel to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the Dutch press. She earned special notoriety for her fierce reporting on the Nazi henchman’s capture, an extradition via kidnapping that the Argentine elite condemned. Frank soon found the traction to publish Margot , a novel that imagined her sister living the life she once dreamed of, as a midwife in the Galilee. A surreal work that breaks the boundaries between novel and memoir, and leaves ambiguous which of its characters are dead or alive, Margot became wildly popular in Israel. Its English translation allowed Frank to find a small but appreciative audience in the United States. Frank’s subsequent books and essays continued to win praise, if not popularity, earning her a reputation as a clear-eyed prophet carefully attuned to hypocrisy. Her readers will long remember the words she wrote in her diary at 15, included in the otherwise naive first section of "The House Behind" : “I don’t believe that the big men are guilty of the war, oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind without exception undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and disfigured, and mankind will have to begin all over again.” Her last book, a memoir, was titled "To Begin Again."

The problem with this hypothetical, or any other hypothetical about Frank’s nonexistent adulthood, isn’t just the impossibility of knowing how her life and career might have developed. The problem is that the entire appeal of Anne Frank to the wider world—as opposed to those who knew and loved her—lies in her lack of a future.

There is an exculpatory ease to embracing this “young girl,” whose murder is almost as convenient for her many enthusiastic readers as it was for her persecutors, who found unarmed Jewish children easier to kill off than the Allied infantry. After all, an Anne Frank who lived might have been a bit upset at the Dutch people who, according to the leading theory, turned in her household and received a reward of approximately $1.40 per Jew. An Anne Frank who lived might not have wanted to represent “the children of the world,” particularly since so much of her diary is preoccupied with a desperate plea to be taken seriously—to not be perceived as a child. Most of all, an Anne Frank who lived might have told people about what she saw at Westerbork, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and people might not have liked what she had to say.

And here is the most devastating fact of Frank’s posthumous success, which leaves her real experience forever hidden: We know what she would have said, because other people have said it, and we don’t want to hear it.

The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—is often called “inspiring,” by which we mean that it flatters us. It makes us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift, it is worth noting, at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” three weeks before she met people who weren’t.

Here’s how much some people dislike living Jews: They murdered six million of them. Anne Frank’s writings do not describe this process. Readers know that the author was a victim of genocide, but that does not mean they are reading a work about genocide. If that were her subject, it is unlikely that those writings would have been universally embraced.

We know this because there is no shortage of texts from victims and survivors who chronicled the fact in vivid detail, and none of those documents has achieved anything like the fame of Frank’s diary. Those that have come close have only done so by observing the same rules of hiding, the ones that insist on polite victims who don’t insult their persecutors. The work that came closest to achieving Frank’s international fame might be Elie Wiesel’s Night , a memoir that could be thought of as a continuation of Frank’s experience, recounting the tortures of a 15-year-old imprisoned in Auschwitz. As the scholar Naomi Seidman has discussed, Wiesel first published his memoir in Yiddish, under the title And the World Kept Silent. The Yiddish book told the same story, but it exploded with rage against his family’s murderers and, as the title implies, the entire world whose indifference (or active hatred) made those murders possible. With the help of the French Catholic Nobel laureate François Mauriac, Wiesel later published a French version of the book under the title Night —a work that repositioned the young survivor’s rage into theological angst. After all, what reader would want to hear about how his society had failed, how he was guilty? Better to blame God. This approach did earn Wiesel a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as a spot in Oprah’s Book Club, the American epitome of grace. It did not, however, make teenage girls read his book in Japan, the way they read Frank’s. For that he would have had to hide much, much more.

What would it mean for a writer not to hide the horror? There is no mystery here, only a lack of interest. To understand what we are missing, consider the work of another young murdered Jewish chronicler of the same moment, Zalmen Gradowski. Like Frank’s, Gradowski’s work was written under duress and discovered only after his death—except that Gradowski’s work was written in Auschwitz, and you have probably never heard of it.

Gradowski was one of the Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz’s Sonderkommando: those forced to escort new arrivals into the gas chambers, haul the newly dead bodies to the crematoriums, extract any gold teeth and then burn the corpses. Gradowski, a young married man whose entire family was murdered, reportedly maintained his religious faith, reciting the kaddish (mourner’s prayer) each evening for the victims of each transport—including Peter van Pels’ father, who was gassed a few weeks after his arrival in Auschwitz on September 6, 1944. Gradowski recorded his experiences in Yiddish in documents he buried, which were discovered after the war; he himself was killed on October 7, 1944, in a Sonderkommando revolt that lasted only one day. (The documents written by Gradowski and several other prisoners inspired the 2015 Hungarian film Son of Saul , which, unsurprisingly, was no blockbuster, despite an Academy Award and critical acclaim.)

“I don’t want to have lived for nothing like most people,” Frank wrote in her diary. “I want to be useful or give pleasure to the people around me who don’t yet know me, I want to go on living even after my death!” Gradowski, too, wrote with a purpose. But Gradowski’s goal wasn’t personal or public fulfillment. His was truth: searing, blinding prophecy, Jeremiah lamenting a world aflame.

“It may be that these, the lines that I am now writing, will be the sole witness to what was my life,” Gradowski writes. “But I shall be happy if only my writings should reach you, citizen of the free world. Perhaps a spark of my inner fire will ignite in you, and even should you sense only part of what we lived for, you will be compelled to avenge us—avenge our deaths! Dear discoverer of these writings! I have a request of you: This is the real reason why I write, that my doomed life may attain some meaning, that my hellish days and hopeless tomorrows may find a purpose in the future.” And then Gradowski tells us what he has seen.

Gradowski’s chronicle walks us, step by devastating step, through the murders of 5,000 people, a single large “transport” of Czech Jews who were slaughtered on the night of March 8, 1944—a group that was unusual only because they had already been detained in Birkenau for months, and therefore knew what was coming. Gradowski tells us how he escorted the thousands of women and young children into the disrobing room, marveling at how “these same women who now pulsed with life would lie in dirt and filth, their pure bodies smeared with human excrement.” He describes how the mothers kiss their children’s limbs, how sisters clutch each other, how one woman asks him, “Say, brother, how long does it take to die? Is it easy or hard?” Once the women are naked, Gradowski and his fellow prisoners escort them through a gantlet of SS officers who had gathered for this special occasion—a night gassing arranged intentionally on the eve of Purim, the biblical festival celebrating the Jews’ narrow escape from a planned genocide. He recalls how one woman, “a lovely blond girl,” stopped in her death march to address the officers: “‘Wretched murderers! You look at me with your thirsty, bestial eyes. You glut yourselves on my nakedness. Yes, this is what you’ve been waiting for. In your civilian lives you could never even have dreamed about it. [...] But you won’t enjoy this for long. Your game’s almost over, you can’t kill all the Jews. And you will pay for it all.’ And suddenly she leaped at them and struck Oberscharführer Voss, the director of the crematoriums, three times. Clubs came down on her head and shoulders. She entered the bunker with her head covered with wounds [...] she laughed for joy and proceeded calmly to her death.” Gradowski describes how people sang in the gas chambers, songs that included Hatikvah, “The Hope,” now the national anthem of Israel. And then he describes the mountain of open-eyed naked bodies that he and his fellow prisoners must pull apart and burn: “Their gazes were fixed, their bodies motionless. In the deadened, stagnant stillness there was only a hushed, barely audible noise—a sound of fluid seeping from the different orifices of the dead. [...] Frequently one recognizes an acquaintance.” In the specially constructed ovens, he tells us, the hair is first to catch fire, but “the head takes the longest to burn; two little blue flames flicker from the eyeholes—these are the eyes burning with the brain. [...] The entire process lasts 20 minutes—and a human being, a world, has been turned to ashes. [...] It won’t be long before the five thousand people, the five thousand worlds, will have been devoured by the flames.”

Gradowski was not poetic; he was prophetic. He did not gaze into this inferno and ask why. He knew. Aware of both the long recurring arc of destruction in Jewish history, and of the universal fact of cruelty’s origins in feelings of worthlessness, he writes: “This fire was ignited long ago by the barbarians and murderers of the world, who had hoped to drive darkness from their brutal lives with its light.”

One can only hope that we have the courage to hear this truth without hiding it, to face the fire and to begin again.

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What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Re-Forming Holocaust Memory Through The Fictional Narratives of Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, and Nathan Englander

Miller, Samantha Tracy (Author)
Goodman, Brian (Thesis advisor)
Holbo, Christine (Committee member)
Lockard, Joe (Committee member)
Arizona State University (Publisher)
Negative identity
Over-identification
Post-Holocaust literature
Masters Thesis English 2020

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Representation Of Anne Frank’s Maturity In Her Diary

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