Anne Frank began her diary in 1942 when she was thirteen years old. It ends abruptly two years later – just three days before she and her family were dragged out of their hiding place in Amsterdam by the SS and deported to a Dutch concentration camp, from where they were loaded onto a packed cattle-wagon on the last transport to Auschwitz in September 1944. Ravaged by typhus, hunger and exhaustion, Anne and her elder sister Margot died in Bergen-Belsen a few weeks before British troops liberated the camp in April 1945.
Kept by Miep Gies, one of the Frank family’s helpers, Anne’s diary was handed over to her father Otto after the war. He was the only member of the family to have survived. His edited version of the diary was turned down by several publishers in the Netherlands, before it first appeared there in 1947. A German edition followed in 1950, after some disobliging remarks about the Germans had been removed from the text. But the book really took off when it was published by Doubleday in the US in 1952. The editor was Barbara Zimmerman, Anne Frank’s exact contemporary, who later founded the New York Review of Books as Barbara Epstein. The diary has now been translated into more than sixty languages. There is even a manga version in Japan.
What lifted this diary above so many other accounts of the Holocaust? Is it because the author was still a young girl, injecting the story with the pathos of innocence brutally defiled? Is it because the book appeared at a time when the mass murder of Jews was still wrapped in guilty silence, and she lent a human face to millions of barely mourned victims? Or is there something about the tone and style of the diary that transformed the writing of a precocious teenager into a work of literature?
Anne’s youth surely had something to do with the extraordinary reception of the book. The murder of a cantankerous old man, though no less heinous, would not have been nearly as poignant. To some, Anne Frank is a saintly figure. The house on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, where the Frank family was penned in with four other Jewish fugitives, is now a pilgrimage site, visited by millions of people, weeping, taking selfies, leaving flowers, gazing at the quasi-sacred walls decorated with Anne’s collection of movie star pin-ups. Otto Frank received a letter from a priest who told him he prayed to Anne, as though she really were a saint. In the Japanese city of Nishinomiya there is a Rose of Anne Church. Mormons in Salt Lake City gave Anne a posthumous baptism, to make her one of their own. Some people even claim to have seen Anne, as a kind of apparition. When a horse chestnut tree in the garden behind the hiding place became diseased some years ago and was scheduled to be cut down, there was a campaign to save it. The tree had been glimpsed by Anne through the curtain of a back window, so the precious relic had to be preserved. The tree did not survive, but after it blew down in a storm, some visitors took chips from the trunk, treating them like the fragments supposed to have come from Christ’s cross.
The Christian imagery is no coincidence. Jews don’t have saints. But certain instances of Jewish remembrance of the Holocaust have been Christianized nonetheless. Sainthood is connected to martyrdom. One of the centres of Holocaust remembrance, in Los Angeles, is called Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust. A martyr cannot be a mere victim. Martyrs die for a reason; they sacrifice themselves, like Christ, for a belief, a principle, or a cause. Religious faith is soaked in their blood. Martyrs offer us a chance of salvation. Their suffering supposedly ennobles them, and by extension those who worship them.
The notion of Anne Frank as a martyr was not entirely invented by Christians. Otto Frank, who dedicated his life to promoting his daughter’s diary as a story of hope and redemption, described the book as “the fruit which grew from the suffering of the Jews”. Of course, one can pluck passages from any sacred text to prove sometimes quite contradictory points. Just so, one can find sentences in Anne Frank’s diary that confirm the view that Jewish “martyrdom” was invested with a special meaning. On April 11, 1944, she wrote: “In the eyes of the world, we’re doomed, but if, after all this suffering, there are still Jews left, the Jewish people will be held up as an example. Who knows, maybe our religion will teach the world and all the people in it about goodness, and that’s the reason, the only reason, we have to suffer”.
Reading this, I was reminded of something the late Amos Oz once said in an interview with a German newspaper about the Christian idea of purification through suffering. In the eyes of many people, Oz said, the Jews were “purified” by the Holocaust, “as though the showers in the gas chambers had sprayed the victims with a moral detergent”. This might explain some of the extreme versions of anti-Zionism: the Jews should be better, more saintly, than other people; and so bad Jewish behaviour should come in for special opprobrium.
The notion of Anne Frank’s diary as a source of redemption, or at least consolation, received a further boost from the American stage play, written by two Hollywood screenwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, in 1955. The famous last words in the play are taken from a diary entry on July 15, 1944: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”. Thus, the story that would end in Anne’s squalid death was given an uplifting Hollywood ending.
- Times Literary Supplement
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