Anne Frank: A bright Jewish girl born 1929 in Frankfurt; forced to move with her family in 1933 to Amsterdam, Netherlands; murdered by Nazism in 1945. Anne would have been no one at all if not for her consistent diary, written toward her “Kitty” from 13 to 15. Her family’s helper, Miep Gies, preserved Anne’s Diary of a Young Girl. Once that was published, she became and still is the Holocaust adolescent, almost daily discovering everything from ruinous Nazis and ruined Jews to families, friends, boys, her body, and more: writing.
Perhaps the simplest yet hardest question is this: Would you rather have Anne Frank’s uniquely sad and heartening diary, reaching about 50 million readers, or would you rather have somewhere a fine person living her fine life? This question, if it is one, has much to do with Philip Roth’s gripping book The Ghost Writer—not to mention his brilliant short story “Eli, The Fanatic,” pulling Jewish identity against home in America.
New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in 1955, published The Family of Man, pictures of humanity around the world. One double-page has 11 photos of mainly normal young handsome women. In the center of them is this: “I still believe that people are really good of heart. Anne Frank, Diary.” Go to her diary, two weeks before it ends, and you’ll see this teen-ager: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yes I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good of heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too …” Somewhat crushing the good.
After a Gestapo arrested Anne and her family in their two-year hiding place, they were sent to Holland’s Westerbork camp, then Auschwitz-Birkenau, then Bergen-Belsen. There, broken, she tried to keep her sister alive. Margot died, then Anne.
– John Felstiner