The Diary of a Young Girl, written by Anne Frank in the secret annexe in Amsterdam between June 1942 and August 1944, is the single most widely read piece of Holocaust literature. The book has been translated into more than seventy languages and has sold around thirty million copies. It is taught in schools across the world. It is the book that has carried the catastrophe to a wider audience than any other.
Anne Frank was thirteen when she received the diary as a birthday present on 12 June 1942. The family went into hiding in the secret annexe behind her father’s spice and pectin business at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam on 6 July 1942, after her older sister Margot received a deportation summons. Anne wrote in the diary almost every day for two years and one month. She addressed most of the entries to an imaginary friend she called Kitty. She rewrote substantial sections of the diary in 1944 after hearing a Dutch government broadcast from London asking citizens to keep wartime diaries for postwar publication. The rewritten text, intended for publication, ran in parallel with the original entries.
The annexe was raided on 4 August 1944 by the Sicherheitsdienst officer Karl Silberbauer, acting on a tip-off whose source has never been definitively identified despite decades of investigation. The eight people in the annexe were arrested and sent through Westerbork to Auschwitz on 3 September 1944, the last transport from the Netherlands. Anne and Margot were sent on to Bergen-Belsen in late October 1944. Both died of typhus there in late February or early March 1945, two weeks before the camp was liberated by British forces on 15 April 1945. Otto Frank, Anne’s father, was the only one of the eight to survive.
The diary was given to Otto Frank by Miep Gies, the Dutch employee who had hidden the family and who had recovered the loose papers from the annexe floor after the arrest. Otto edited the diary, conflating the two versions Anne had written and removing passages he considered too critical of his late wife and too explicit about Anne’s adolescent sexuality. The first Dutch edition was published as Het Achterhuis in 1947 by Contact Publishing in Amsterdam. The first English edition appeared in 1952 from Doubleday, with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. The Hackett-Goodrich stage adaptation opened on Broadway in 1955 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The 1959 film, directed by George Stevens, brought the book to a global audience.
The Critical Edition of the diary, prepared by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation and published in Dutch in 1986 and in English in 1989, presented all three versions in parallel, the original entries, Anne’s own 1944 rewrite and Otto’s edited version. The Critical Edition settled the long-running argument over the authenticity of the diary, which had been challenged by Holocaust deniers from the 1950s onwards. The forensic examination of the paper, the ink and the handwriting confirmed beyond reasonable dispute that the diary was Anne’s. The deniers’ claims have continued to circulate but are no longer taken seriously by anyone outside the denial movement.
The book’s reception has been more contested than the book itself. The standard postwar reception in the United States, set by the Hackett-Goodrich play and the Stevens film, presented Anne as a universal symbol of optimism in the face of evil, drawing on her line that in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. Critics from the 1990s onwards, in particular Cynthia Ozick in her 1997 New Yorker essay, argued that this reading sentimentalised the case and obscured the catastrophe. The line about people being good at heart was written before Anne was caught. The catastrophe was the catching, the deportation, the cattle car, the typhus block at Belsen. The diary that ends with the entry of 1 August 1944 ends in the middle of a thought because Anne did not know what was about to happen. The standard sentimental reading, Ozick argued, takes the unfinished hopefulness of a hidden child and uses it to comfort the survivors of the catastrophe she did not survive.
The Anne Frank House at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam, which opened to the public in 1960, is now one of the most visited museums in the Netherlands. The annexe is preserved as it was in 1944. Otto Frank ran the museum until his death in 1980 and refused to allow the rooms to be furnished, on the principle that the catastrophe should not be made comfortable for the visitor.
See also
Sources
- Anne Frank, Het Achterhuis, Contact, 1947; The Diary of a Young Girl, Doubleday, 1952
- Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler, Doubleday, 1995
- Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, Doubleday, 1989
- Cynthia Ozick, Who Owns Anne Frank?, The New Yorker, 6 October 1997
- Melissa Müller, Anne Frank: The Biography, Metropolitan, 1998
- Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, archive and exhibition material