Titans of History

ANNE FRANK

1929–1945

I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the suffering 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.

Anne Frank (July 15, 1944)

The diary of a Jewish girl in hiding during the Second World War has become a totemic symbol of the Holocaust, a monument to the 6 million Jews killed and a talisman for victims of persecution across the world. But Anne Frank was far more than a symbol. She was a teenager whose refusal to be broken by fear or despair in the face of the blackest persecution is a triumph of humanity, the mark of a truly heroic soul. She also became, in spite of her youth, a great writer, an observer and recorder of the terrible events of her dark time and her family’s struggle to survive. Hers was not the only such diary to emerge, but it was the finest—an immortal classic.

On July 6, 1942 Anne Frank, her parents Otto and Edith, and her elder sister Margot left their house on the Merwedplein in Amsterdam. Wearing layers of clothes and carrying no suitcases to avoid arousing suspicion, they made their way to Otto Frank’s office building on the Prinsengracht. At the top of the stairs there was a door, later concealed behind a false bookcase. It led to what Anne named the Secret Annex—four rooms where the Franks, with another family, the van Pels, and a dentist called Fritz Pfeffer, would hide for the next two years.

The Franks were German Jews who had emigrated to the Netherlands a decade earlier, following Hitler’s rise to power. A lively and vivacious girl, Anne was given a red-checked cloth-bound book on her 13th birthday. Addressing her first entry “to Kitty,” she hoped that “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 comfort and support to me.”

The German occupation of the Netherlands was two years old when Anne began her diary. By 1942 Jews were subject to a curfew and made to wear yellow stars on their clothing. They were forbidden to take the tram, to ride bicycles or to take pictures. On July 5, 1942 sixteen-year-old Margot received papers ordering her to report for transportation to a work camp. At 7.30 the following morning the Franks left their house.

The Annex’s occupants had prepared themselves for a long stay. Anne’s parents had been making secret trips to the hiding place for months. But nothing could have prepared them for the oppressive reality of hiding away from the world. Their survival was dependent on their “helpers,” four loyal employees of Otto Frank who risked their lives to bring them food, clothes, books and news. Absolute silence had to be maintained during the day to avoid arousing the suspicions of the workers in the store downstairs. “We are as quiet as baby mice,” wrote Anne in October 1942. “Who, three months ago, would have guessed that quicksilver Anne would have to sit still for hours—and what’s more, could?”

Anne was a talented writer, funny, quick and possessed of a somewhat caustic eye. But her diary is also the work of a normal teenager—bright, impetuous, moody and impatient. She struggled between the “good Anne” she would like to be and the “bad Anne” she felt she more often was. She was insightful, unstintingly honest and, increasingly, wise.

“There is no way of killing time,” she wrote in 1943. But she refused to give up hope. “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out,” she wrote on July 15, 1944. “Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

Three weeks later the German police stormed the Secret Annex. It is still unknown who betrayed them. The Annex’s inhabitants were sent to Westerbork, then to Auschwitz. In October Anne and Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen. They died of typhus within days of each other in March 1945, just a few weeks before the British liberated the camp.

Otto Frank was the only one of the Annex’s inhabitants to survive. When he returned to Amsterdam after the war, Miep Gies, one of their loyal helpers, gave him the diary that she had found scattered on the Annex’s floor. Asked later for his response on first reading his daughter’s diary, Otto replied: “I never knew my little Anne was so deep.”

While she was in hiding, Anne became convinced that she wanted to be a writer. Anne was not the only Jewish child diarist of the Holocaust. Probably there were many. A gifted Czech boy, Peter Ginz, kept a witty diary in Prague during 1941–2: “When I go to school,” he wrote, “I counted 9 ‘sheriffs’”—referring to Jews made to wear the yellow star. He was gassed in Auschwitz in 1944. These gifted diarists were not the only ones to turn hell into literature: Night by Elie Wiesel (b. 1928) and If This is a Man by Primo Levi (1919–87) are the two masterpieces of this European dark age.

A year before she died, Anne Frank wrote of her desire “to be useful or give pleasure to people around me who yet don’t really know me. I want to go on living even after my death!”