She knows what is out there. Like the other seven people with whom she shares the space, she lives with constant fear, hunger, nightmares of abduction, and the imminent threat of discovery and death. She is not the first to experience this, but she may be one of the first to write about it as it is happening. The other masterpieces we have about the Holocaust—Elie Wiesel’s Night, Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man—are all written in retrospect by people who survived. But Anne Frank will not survive.
And this is what makes reading her diary so harrowing. From the beginning, we know the ending, but Anne Frank does not.
Anne Frank received the diary as a gift for her thirteenth birthday on June 12, 1942. Less than a month later, on July 6, her family went into hiding after her sixteen-year-old sister, Margot, was sent a summons to report for Arbeitseinsatz, compulsory work duty in Germany. Otto Frank already understood that “work duty” was a euphemism for slave labor.
Longing for an intimate companion, Anne Frank invented a friend named Kitty, to whom she writes with complete and utter candor. She writes in her diary about hope, about the mysteries of her female body, about her passionate adolescent crush on the seventeen-year-old boy whose family shared the Annex with the Franks. Anne is still a child: she cuts out images of movie stars and royals and pastes them onto her bedroom wall. Though she was born in Frankfurt, Germany, having arrived in the Netherlands at the age of four and a half, her primary language is now Dutch, the language in which she writes her diary. Her ambition is to become a writer. She dreams of a future when she will be famous. For the reader, all this is shattering since we know that for her, there will be no future.
The world Anne lives in is unrecognizable to us. In July 1943, the family discovers she needs eyeglasses. Miep Gies, one of the helpers of those in the Annex, offers to take her to an ophthalmologist, but Anne is petrified at the thought of stepping out into the street. When she tries to put on her coat, the family discovers she has outgrown it, and that, along with her paleness, would have easily identified her as a Jew in hiding. She does not get the glasses. By August 1944, she will not have walked outside for twenty-five months.
Open windows could alert people in adjacent businesses that the Annex is occupied. To breathe fresh air, the fourteen-year-old Anne must lean down to suck in the bit of air that comes across the windowsill. In her diary she writes that being cooped up in the small rooms is unbelievably claustrophobic, and the silence the hiders must maintain adds a level of terror that never seems to diminish. She finds herself climbing the stairs, up and down, trapped like a caged creature. The only solution is sleep, and even sleep is interrupted by fear.1
But she always rallies. She tells “Kitty” that the way to conquer fear and loneliness is to seek solitude in nature and commune with God—as if, for a moment, sitting in the window of the attic space looking up at the pale sky, she could forget that she cannot leave the Annex. How is it possible that she can be so ebullient, so affirmative, so full of life in the midst of such terrifying repression?
Toward the end of her diary, Anne records a particularly frightening night when thieves break into the warehouse and someone, possibly the police, bangs on the bookcase that camouflages the entrance to the secret Annex.
Anne tells Kitty that she believed she would be killed. When she survived the night, her first impulse was to declare that she would dedicate herself to the things she loved: the Netherlands, the Dutch language, and writing. And she would not be stopped until she fulfilled her purpose.2
It’s an extraordinary declaration for an adolescent just about to turn fifteen. Anne Frank’s last entry in her diary is dated August 1, 1944, three days before she and her family and the others in hiding are arrested. Otto Frank will be the only one of the eight residents of the Annex to return from the camps.
After they were liberated at the end of the war, many survivors found it impossible to put what they’d experienced into words. It took the author Elie Wiesel ten years before he could write Night. He asked, “How was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy? Hunger—thirst—fear—transport—selection—fire—chimney: these words all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they meant something else.” How could you write without usurping and profaning the appalling suffering in that “demented and glacial universe where to be inhuman was to be human, where disciplined, educated men in uniform came to kill?”3
When Primo Levi submitted his book If This Is a Man to Einaudi Publishers in Turin in 1947, both Cesare Pavese, by then immensely famous, and Natalia Ginzburg, whose husband had been murdered by the Germans in Rome, turned it down. Levi tried numerous publishers; all rejected the book. It was too soon, they said. “Italians had other things to worry about . . . than reading of the German death camps. Italians wanted to say, ‘It’s all over. Basta! Enough of this horror!’”4