Anne Frank was thirteen years old when she went into hiding in the secret annex above her father’s pectin business at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam on 6 July 1942. She was fifteen when she was arrested there on 4 August 1944 with the seven other people in hiding with her, after an informant whose identity has never been definitively established alerted the Sicherheitsdienst. She died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, two or three weeks before the camp was liberated by British forces on 15 April. Her sister Margot died beside her.
Her father Otto Frank was the only one of the eight from the annex to survive. He returned to Amsterdam in June 1945, was given the diary and other writings by Miep Gies, who had picked them up off the floor of the annex on the day of the arrest, and edited them for publication. Het Achterhuis, The Secret Annex, was published in Amsterdam in 1947 in a print run of three thousand. The English translation, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, came out in 1952. The book has now been translated into more than seventy languages and has sold over thirty million copies. It is the single most-read Holocaust text in the world.
The diary records about two years of the writer’s life. It is not a Holocaust memoir in the strict sense because Anne Frank did not survive the camps. The book ends in August 1944 with her last entry. What follows, the arrest, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, the death of the writer, is reconstructed in the historical material that the Anne Frank House and her father added to subsequent editions. The book is a record of a fifteen-year-old girl thinking about love, family, religion, sex, ambition, and the future, in a hiding place she could not leave. It is the closest the literature comes to a normal adolescent voice and the reason it has reached readers who would never read Levi.
The diary has been the subject of denialist attack since the late 1950s. The claims, repeated in various forms, are that the diary is fabricated, that it was written by Otto Frank or by a ghostwriter, or that it is too well written to be the work of a teenager. None of those claims survive contact with the evidence. The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation conducted a forensic investigation in the 1980s, examined the manuscripts, the handwriting, the inks and the paper, and published a critical edition in 1986 that confirms the work as Anne Frank’s. The German court conviction of Heinz Roth, an early denier, in 1979, was based on the same evidentiary record. The diary is real. The denialist case has been refuted in court and in scholarly print, repeatedly, and is recycled as if those refutations had never happened.
The 263 Prinsengracht building is now the Anne Frank House museum. Around one and a quarter million people visit it every year. Otto Frank, who died in Basel in 1980, devoted the rest of his life after the war to the diary’s publication and to the memorial work it occasioned. The Anne Frank House continues to investigate the question of who betrayed the annex; the most recent investigation, published in 2022, named a Jewish notary, Arnold van den Bergh, on circumstantial evidence, but the case has been challenged by Dutch historians and is not regarded as settled.
Anne Frank wanted to be a writer. The diary’s last full passage, dated 15 July 1944, contains the famous line that in spite of everything she still believed people were really good at heart. The passage is often quoted out of context. The actual passage is more guarded. She believed people were good at heart but she also wrote, in the same diary, that she could feel the suffering of millions and that she was afraid the world would turn into a wilderness. She was right about the wilderness. The faith in human goodness is what she chose to write down anyway. That is the book.
See also
- Anne Frank House Amsterdam
- The Netherlands
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- The Jews of Amsterdam
- The Anne Frank Diary is a Forgery
- Anne Frank Died of Typhus Not Murder
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards