As a young Jewish girl living in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II, Anne Frank wrote an epistolary diary while hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam. Her literary voice, considered among the finest in modern literature, was silenced by the Holocaust 77 years ago this month.
The Nazis captured Anne on August 4, 1944, capping a saga of the most egregious bigotry and betrayal of the 20th century. Her Austrian family emigrated to Holland in 1933 following the rise of Nazism in Germany. Anne’s father Otto built a business in Amsterdam.
The Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, and as their suppression of Jews escalated, in 1942, Anne, her sister Margot and their parents, accompanied by four other Jews, took refuge in the backroom office and warehouse of Otto Frank’s business. This “secret annex,” as Anne called it, “is an ideal place to hide in,” she wrote in her diary. “It may be damp and lopsided, but there’s probably not a more comfortable hiding place in all of Amsterdam. No, in all of Holland.”
For two years, four of Otto Frank’s employees—all of them Christians—supplied the eight people hiding in the annex with food, clothing and other essential supplies. But a Dutch informer tipped off the Nazis, and Anne and her family were deported to concentration camps, where all but Otto perished.
Friends who searched the annex following the Franks’ capture found and preserved Anne’s diary and gave it to her father on his return. It was published in 1947, originally in Dutch, under the title, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.
Anne began working on her diary, which she was given on her 13th birthday, June 12, 1942—less than a month before her family went into hiding and a little less than three years before her death.
“I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support,” she wrote on her diary’s first page, addressing it Kitty, an imaginary friend.
“Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me,” she wrote. “Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.”
Besides providing a vivid and poignant glimpse of what it was like for Jews to live in occupied Holland, the diary describes Anne’s relationship with her family and friends, often with humor and the sharp wit for which she was known.
But many of the entries in the diary testify ominously to the dangers and horrors of Nazism. “At three o’clock … the doorbell rang,” Anne wrote, describing an event that occurred on July 5, 1942, three weeks after her birthday and days before she went into hiding. “I didn’t hear it, since I was out on the balcony, lazily reading in the sun. A little while later, Margot appeared in the kitchen doorway looking very agitated. ‘Father has received a call-up notice from the SS,’ she whispered. … I was stunned. A call-up: everyone knows what that means. Visions of concentration camps and lonely cells raced through my head.”
Upset about being unable to go outside and “terrified our hiding place will be discovered and that we’ll be shot,” Anne spent long hours silently reading her schoolbooks, playing games with others and writing in her diary, which became her best friend. “The finest thing of all is that I can at least write down what I think and feel,” she wrote on March 16, 1944, “otherwise I would suffocate completely.”
Anne dreamed of becoming a famous writer someday. Although she tragically did not live to see her dream come true, the words in her diary have continued to enrich the lives of millions of people, providing them hope when all has seemed lost.
“It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality,” Anne wrote in her diary’s final entry on August 1, 1944, three days before her family’s capture. “Yet I cling to them … . It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions.
“And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I must hold on to my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I’ll be able to realized them.”
