Anne Frank: the saddest story

The photograph of Anne’s silky black hair, bright eyes and charming smile on the cover of her brilliant and tragic Diary of a Young Girl (English edition 1952) has attracted readers throughout the world.  She was born in Frankfurt and wrote in Dutch, and her name was pronounced in the German way: AH-na Frrahnk.  Aged 13 to 15 when writing, Anne reveals herself as intelligent and independent, funny and vivacious, as well as temperamental and critical.  Confined with her family and others in the Amsterdam hiding place that housed her father’s business, she was shocked by the screaming fights of the adults and her mercurial moods ranged from flirtatious to enraged.

Anne’s father Otto Frank was, like an Old  Testament prophet, a wise and good man.  He was one of only 2,000 Jews who had served as German officers in World War I and was accustomed to command.  When Otto made lame attempts to be amusing and lighten the dark mood of the Secret Annex, Anne sharply noted, “I find Daddy’s special liking for talk about flatulence and lavatories revolting.”  Nevertheless, her love for her father was passionate and unconditional.

When Otto invited the middle-aged dentist Fritz Pfeffer to join the seven other people in their overcrowded quarters, he moved his older and always perfectly behaved daughter Margot from the room she shared with Anne into her parents’ bedroom.  Otto still regarded Anne as a child and, surprisingly insensitive to her physical and emotional changes during the turmoil of puberty, made her share a tiny room with Pfeffer.  Otto could have put Pfeffer together with the teenaged Peter van Pels and allowed Anne to sleep by herself in Peter’s attic room.  She soon came to dislike the crude Pfeffer, Peter’s mother and even her own.

Anne’s physical torments during the 25 months of hiding—the claustrophobic quarters, the need for absolute quiet, the stench of the unflushed toilet, the severely limited diet—were intensified by the constant fear of discovery, and uncertainty about the outcome of the war and the duration of their apparently endless imprisonment.  Hungry and without privacy, Anne was surrounded by uncomprehending and critical adults.  Half-starved during the “hungry winter” of 1943, she referred to her hiding place and bitterly wrote, “Whoever wants to slim down should stay in the Secret Annex.”

Anne and the other residents were betrayed and arrested in August 1944 and taken to Westerbork, 110 miles northeast of Amsterdam.  This Godforsaken transit camp for Jews en route to their deaths in Poland was on a “wind-swept plain, little better than a peat-bog”.  But the work there was tolerable and the prisoners could enjoy their free time.  The improbable orchestra at Westerbork included half of the pre-war members of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.  In September 1944 Anne was shoved onto the very last train that left Westerbork for Auschwitz.

As the Russian army advanced eastward into Poland, Anne was sent to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany.  She had no warm clothes, wore only rags, and lamented “they took my hair.”  In Bergen-Belsen she had the chance to save herself, but chose to stay with her sister who was dying of typhus, and may even have caught that fatal disease from her.  Typhus causes severe headaches, muscle pain, high fever, rashes and delirium.  Anne’s slow, agonising death from typhus was perhaps even worse than murder by suffocation in the gas chamber.

Anne’s memoir in the form of a diary addressed to an imaginary friend reveals a poignant mixture of a child and adult sensibility.  She wanted to make it in Horace’s words dulce et utile, both pleasurable to read and useful as a historical record of what she had endured.  Anne’s book has much in common with the Brazilian Diary of a Young Girl (1942), translated by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop as The Diary of Helena Morley (1957).  Both Anne and Helena, isolated outsiders in their communities, were extrovert, clever and resourceful.  They recorded closely observed details about themselves and their constricted family life, and described their awakening consciousness and growth into maturity.  According to Bishop, Helena’s lively, idiomatic language was (like Anne’s), “fresh, sad, funny, and eternally true.”  Both girls were show-offs and occasionally saucy to grown-ups; loved Hollywood movie stars; and worried about their food, tattered clothing and physical appearance.

Anne’s book is even closer to the Diary of  Marie Bashkirtseff, a Russian émigré artist who wrote in French and died of tuberculosis aged 25.  In August 1884, the last year of her life, Marie recorded, “My weakness and the preoccupation of my thoughts keep me apart from the real world which, however, I have never seen so clearly as I do now.  All its baseness, all its meanness, stand out before my mind with a saddening distinctness.”

Anne justly insisted, “You can’t and mustn’t regard me as fourteen, for all these troubles have made me older. . . . I have more experience than most; I have been through things that hardly anyone of my age has undergone.”  During the two years of its composition, her Diary developed from the simple record of a schoolgirl to an articulate and amusing, accomplished and sophisticated narrative.

Anne’s bold and sometimes funny sexual entries were the most controversial among readers, especially when her Diary came to be taught in schools.  When her period came “she felt a new maturity, which contributed to her longing for love”.  When she asked a close friend if they could touch each other’s breasts, the girl refused but allowed Anne to kiss her.  Anne wanted to ask Peter van Pels if he knew what female genitalia looked like, but wondered “how in heaven’s name to explain the setup to him if he didn’t.”

Idealistic, self-assured and ambitious, Anne resolved, “If God lets me live I shall not remain insignificant.  I shall work in the world for mankind . . . . I want to go on living even after my death!” And she did.  The premature extinction of her genius was a great loss to literature.  But her book has sold 30 million copies in 70 languages, and the museum at her hiding place in Amsterdam still attracts 1.3 million visitors per year.

Ruth Franklin’s well-written and lively, sensitive and perceptive The Many Lives of Anne Frank (Yale University Press, 424pp, $30) is perhaps the best book about her.  Franklin describes “the multiplicity of ways in which Anne has been understood and misunderstood, both as a person and as an idea, chronicles and interprets Anne’s brief life while explaining the social and historical context.”  She also analyses Anne’s cultural history since the first Dutch edition in 1947, including Otto’s changes to her text, the stage and screen adaptations, and the fictional portrayals of Anne.

In Nazi-occupied Amsterdam the Jewish Councils, who cooperated with the Nazis in rounding up the Jews in a futile effort to save themselves, were “nothing more than burial societies”.  They couldn’t even save an amputee who applied for an exemption from labour service and was rejected by the Nazi commander who declared, “A Jew is a Jew, legs or no legs.”

Ruth Franklin describes the Nazi horrors with scalpel-like objectivity and precision:

The man who arrested the secret residents “seems to have been an extremely boorish and insensitive man, even for a Nazi.”

There was always the “possibility of being killed by a bullet fired by a guard feeling sadistic or just in a bad mood.”

In Mauthausen near Linz, Austria, “the commandant gave his son fifty Jews to execute as a birthday present.”

In Auschwitz “carts with corpses were pulled by moving corpses.”

Prisoners rescued by the British army were “trying to cry but had not enough strength.”

“Women no longer cared about bathing naked next to men.  Sex had no meaning there.”  They washed in a dark room “where dead bodies lay in heaps, with rats feasting on them.”

Franklin confusingly spells the Dutch van and Van differently throughout the book, even in the same paragraph, sentence and line.  In an unintentionally comic allusion to Otto Frank’s business slogan, “Make Your Own Jam With Opekta!,” she says that Anne’s tightly written entries were “jam-packed”. She wittily tells an elusive informant, “if you’re reading this, I’d still like to interview you.”  She also imitates Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.  He wrote, “How did you go bankrupt?”  “Gradually and then very suddenly.”  She writes that the Franks disappeared like a submarine, “gradually and then all at once.”

Anne’s endlessly quoted childish effusion, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” was emphasised in the play and the film version of her Diary to attract audiences and make them feel good when they left the theatre.  But other, more powerful and persuasive, entries by the famous doomed victim deny this assertion:

 I can feel the suffering of millions.

 I can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.

The world is gradually being turned into a wilderness.  I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too.

 There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage.

The history of the Holocaust and the whole of human history massively contradict her optimistic entry.  Most Dutch citizens were hostile to the Jews and many officials actively helped the Nazi roundups.  Dutch policemen accompanied the Nazi sergeant who arrested Anne and the other residents.  Dutch railway workers did not go on strike, but rushed the Jews to their doom in Auschwitz.  The Nazis killed 75 percent of all the Jews in Holland, a higher percentage than in any other country in western Europe.  Only 35,000 out of 140,000 Jews survived.  The American government knew about the trains to Auschwitz, but didn’t bomb the transports and claimed the planes were needed for more valuable missions.  A traditional Jewish song expresses Anne’s tragedy: “there is no end to the days of evil”.

Anne expressed a dominant theme in modern literature—loss—her lost childhood, lost literary genius and lost life.  Her Dutch soul-sister Audrey Hepburn poignantly commented:

Anne’s life was very much a parallel to mine.  We were born the same year, lived in the same country, experienced the same war, except she was locked up and I was on the outside.  Reading her diary was like reading my own experiences from her point of view. . . . It was in a different corner of Holland, but all the events I experienced were so incredibly accurately described by her—not just what was going on on the outside, but what was going on in the inside of a young girl starting to be a woman.

  Jeffrey Meyers has a chapter on Anne Frank and Audrey Hepburn in Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath (2024).  His book Forty-Three Ways to Look at Hemingway will be published in November 2025 and The Biographer’s Quest in the spring of 2026.

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