AUTHOR: ANNE FRANK
DATE: 1947
The Diary of a Young Girl (also commonly known as The Diary of Anne Frank) is the true-life diary of Anne Frank, the teenage daughter of a German family living in Amsterdam during the Second World War. Written in an affecting tone, it tells the story of Anne and her family as they spend some two years evading capture by the occupying Nazi forces, living in an annex attached to the premises of her father’s business. That we know the tragic fate awaiting Anne and her loved ones gives the diary an emotive power arguably unsurpassed in twentieth-century literature.
Anne was just four years old when her parents decided to move the family from Frankfurt to Amsterdam as Hitler tightened his grip on Germany. As Jews, the Franks were acutely aware of the rising tide of anti-Semitic persecution and hoped to find safety in the Netherlands. Anne’s father, Otto, established a successful business, trading in pectin, a gelling agent used in food manufacturing. However, the family’s hopes of outrunning Hitler’s grasp faded as the Netherlands was overrun in 1940.
THE DUTY TO REFLECT
Anne Frank’s diary counts as arguably the most famous of a vast swathe of writing related to the Holocaust. Every year, new first-person accounts of that horror are discovered and published. In 1986, Elie Wiesel received the Nobel Prize for Literature, having risen to fame with publication of his memoir, Night, in 1960. The Nobel Committee described him as ‘a messenger to mankind; his message is one of peace, atonement, and human dignity’. Primo Levi, an Italian-born Auschwitz survivor, published his own world-renowned recollections, If This Is a Man, in 1947 and later warned that the events of the 1940s might be repeated. ‘For this reason,’ he said, ‘it is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened.’
By the summer of 1942, Jews were suffering deportations to concentration camps. In July that year, Anne’s older sister, Margot, was summoned for ‘labour duty’ in Germany. It was the warning shot that spurred Anne’s parents into action. The family immediately went into hiding in the annex of Otto’s business, its door hidden by a bookcase. They were supported in living there by a small band of confidantes, who supplied them with food and other essentials. For the duration of their exile in the secret apartment, the Franks were able to keep their presence secret from all but these few people despite the premises being populated by employees throughout the working week. Anne would in due course note that while others showed their heroism in battle, the family’s helpers proved theirs each day by their affection and good spirits.
Anne received her diary (or, rather a checked red autograph book that she used as her diary) on her thirteenth birthday, 12 June 1942. The entries start on that day, with Anne keen to confide everything to it. She wrote that, in lieu of a companion to whom she could reveal everything, the book would become a source of support and comfort.
Over the months and years, it evolved into a record not only of Anne’s existence in the annex but also of her inner life. She talked about further arrivals sharing the space to escape the Nazis – the Van Pels, consisting of Hermann (her father’s business partner), Auguste (his wife), Peter (their son), and later a dentist called Fritz Pfeffer.
Anne found the appearance of these newcomers a trial at first, not least because she had to share her room with Peter, who was of a similar age to herself. Her diary entries tell us much about her relationships – her closeness to her father, the comparative distance with her mother and her great affection for her sister. She covers an enormous range of subjects but what most distinctly emerges is Anne as an ordinary girl facing the challenges of transitioning from childhood to the teenage years in the most extraordinary of circumstances. Among the many subplots is her evolving relationship with Peter, with whom she grows very close before they gradually drift apart again.
On Christmas Eve of 1943, she confided how being shut up for a year and a half was taking its toll. She talked of her wish to ride a bike, to dance, to look at the world and ‘to feel young and know that I’m free’. But, she realizes, there is nothing to be gained by feeling sorry for herself. ‘Where would that get us?’ she asked plaintively.
In March 1944, Anne’s diary entries already amounted to a significant body of work when she heard an announcement on the wireless by a member of the exiled Dutch government in London. The minister announced plans eventually to gather together diaries and other personal records of the German occupation once the war was over. Anne took it upon herself to rewrite and edit her existing diary with this in mind, creating what are now known as a ‘Version A’ and ‘Version B’. The idea of the diary serving a wider purpose appealed, as she harboured a dream to become a famous writer and journalist. By this stage, all diary entries are addressed to ‘Kitty’, the diary now fully personified as confidante.
The final entry in the diary is dated 1 August 1944. Just three days later, their hiding-place was discovered and its inhabitants arrested. It has long been assumed that the location of the eight was betrayed to the authorities, although others have more recently suggested their discovery may have been the result of misfortune instead, with the police raid originally focused on alleged ration fraud. Regardless, the result was much the same. They were deported to various concentration camps. These included Auschwitz, but Anne was later moved to Bergen-Belsen, enduring myriad horrors along the way. She died, aged just fifteen, in February or March 1945, probably during a typhus outbreak. The camp was liberated by Allied troops just a few weeks later. Only her father, Otto, would survive the war.
When he returned to Amsterdam, he was given his daughter’s diaries by someone who had rescued them immediately after the raid on the annex. At first, he struggled to find a publisher. It was thought there would be little appetite to revisit the horrors of the war and the crimes against Jews so soon after the events.
Otto then passed on the diaries to historian Jan Romein, who quickly recognized their value. ‘This apparently inconsequential diary by a child,’ he wrote in a newspaper article in 1946, ‘this “de profundis” stammered out in a child’s voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence of Nuremberg [the Nazi War Trials] put together.’ The following year, The Annex: Diary Notes 14 June 1942–1 August 1944 was published in Europe and caused a sensation. Five years later, it was published in the US as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, complete with an introduction by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. It has gone on to sell tens of millions of copies, becoming a staple on school curriculums and inspiring plays, films and television shows.
It remains perhaps the best-known first-hand record of the Jewish experience in the Second World War, and as such stands as a historical document of immense importance. But it is ultimately an intensely moving record of what it is to be human. And amid the tragedy, Anne emerges as an emblem of hope. Not least in her assertion: ‘I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.’