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What it argues
Anne Frank's diary, kept during the two years she spent hiding with her family in a concealed Amsterdam apartment, stands as one of the most widely read first-person accounts of the Holocaust. Anne received the blank diary as a birthday present in June 1942, a month before the Frank family went into hiding in the annex above her father's business. She addressed her entries to an imaginary friend she called Kitty, writing with a candor and self-awareness that belies her age.
The diary records the mechanics of life in hiding — the enforced silence during business hours, the dependency on a small group of Dutch protectors who risked their lives to bring food and news, the claustrophobia of eight people sharing cramped rooms for twenty-five months. Anne catalogues the tensions between the families, her complicated feelings about her mother, and her growing attachment to Peter van Pels, the teenage son of the other family hiding in the annex. She is frequently exasperated by the adults around her and acutely conscious of her own contradictions.
What it gets right
- 1.
Human interiority persists under extreme conditions. Anne's diary shows that adolescent self-discovery, jealousy, ambition, and humor do not pause even when survival is uncertain.
- 2.
Anne distinguished between her public and private selves long before she had the vocabulary for it. Her writing is partly an attempt to reconcile the two.
- 3.
The diary is a document of complicity and courage equally: the Dutch protectors who kept the family alive were exceptional; the neighbor who eventually betrayed them was ordinary.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1929 and moved with her family to Amsterdam in 1933 after her father, Otto Frank, relocated his business. She began keeping the diary that would become her legacy at age thirteen, less than a month before the family went into hiding. Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945. Her father, the only member of the annex group to survive the war, recovered the diary from Miep Gies and arranged its publication in Dutch in 1947. The definitive edition, incorporating Anne's own revisions, was published in 1995.
