“It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” 

~ Anne Frank


I’d like to say that I became a writer because of Anne Frank, but that wouldn’t be true.  I wanted to be a writer before I could even read, or had heard of Anne Frank.  But Anne’s work has shaped and inspired me not only as a writer, but as a person.  She exemplifies what I have always admired but fallen so far short of in my own life:  Not being defeated by but instead making the most of whatever circumstance you find yourself in.

As Viktor Frankl, the great existential psychologist and survivor of Auschwitz, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”  It is the attitude that Anne chose, the creativity and optimism that she brought to her dire circumstances, that continues to inspire me.

I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I'm free, and yet I can't let it show. Just imagine what would happen if all eight of us were to feel sorry for ourselves or walk around with the discontent clearly visible on our faces. Where would that get us?  ~ Anne Frank

Anne, an unusually lively and ebullient girl, was spirited off into hiding in “The Secret Annex” (as she called it) in Amsterdam at the age of 13 and remained there until she and her family were discovered and arrested 2 years later.  She died of typhus 9 months later in Bergen-Belsen, along with her older sister and mother, just a few weeks before the Allies liberated the camp.  Only her father Otto survived the camps, and only because the thought of seeing his family again kept him going.

Although Anne did not survive, her writing did – the first example of the durability of art that registered with me.  For I related to Anne, who was around the same age that I was when I read her diary for the first of many times.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. 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. ~ Anne Frank

Particularly to those who’ve never read it, Anne’s diary is mostly known as a historical document – and in my opinion it is one of the great documents of the entire 20th century.  It makes human an utterly inhuman event, and portrays life in wartime and in hiding from persecution in a mesmerizing manner.

But Anne’s diary is more than a piece of history.  It is also a great work of writing, especially remarkable for having been produced by a girl her age.   Her work as a writer has inspired me separately from her life story, for she models much of what any writer aspires to.

"I know I can write. A few of my stories are good, my descriptions of the Secret Annex are humorous, much of my diary is vivid and alive, but... it remains to be seen whether I really have talent." ~ Anne Frank

Like all great writers, Anne not only wrote, but rewrote her work, with a view towards polishing it for the future readers that she hoped for (but had no idea she would gain in such great numbers).  She wanted to be published, and she also knew that documentation of what she was living through would be of interest after the war.  She was talented, and she was ambitious.  She also, ironically, had what all writers say they crave:  unlimited time and space to write.  But more than that, she had great perceptiveness and insight, which she applied not only to her situation but to herself.

“Who would ever think that so much can go on in the soul of a young girl?” ~ Anne Frank

Many who have not read it assume her diary is typical of what any teenage girl would write. And it does start out that way.  Anne received the diary as a gift for her 13th birthday, just 3 weeks before they went into hiding and in those last days of freedom, she writes of friends and ping pong games and ice cream parlors.  But once in the “Secret Annex,” Anne’s writing deepens with her experience, and matures still further as she grows into young womanhood.  

An astute observer of human nature, Anne writes often about her fellow occupants of the Annex, which included not only her immediate family but the Van Daans (parents and teenage son) and the bachelor Dr. Dussel, as well as their beloved protectors in her father’s old business below, who house and feed and cheer them through their long captivity.  (Miep Gies, 100 years old and the last survivor of this group, has written a very interesting and moving book of her own, Anne Frank Remembered, about her experiences, including much that Anne and the others in hiding never knew. Miep is also the one who rescued Anne’s diary and other writings left scattered on the floor of the Secret Annex after the arrests, and is the recipient of many well-deserved humanitarian honors.)


“I have often been downcast, but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary I treat all the privations as amusing. I have made up my mind now to lead a different life from other girls and, later on, different from ordinary housewives. My start has been so very full of interest, and that is the sole reason why I have to laugh at the humorous side of the most dangerous moments.” ~ Anne Frank

Anne-the-writer is a vivid portrayer of scenes, whether dramatic ones like the terror of air raids or a night-time burglary that threatens their hiding place, or humorous descriptions of the art of potato peeling as practiced by each of the Annex’s occupants.  Throughout her diary, she captures intimate and telling details about every person in the attic, until they may feel more real than members of our own families.  

But we are also taken deeply into Anne’s mind and heart, as she falls slowly in love with Peter Van Daan, has struggles with her parents (and, well, just about everyone) and reflects on the implications of the horror she is living through.  She is a typical teenager as well as an extraordinary one, not only in her circumstances but in her outlook on life, her maturity and perceptiveness and her optimism even in the face of probable annihilation.  And yet she was not naïve about human nature:

"I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown, will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again." ~ Anne Frank

We only know Anne and her diary because of Miep Gies and her father Otto Frank, who chose to fulfill his daughter’s wish to be published, despite having some misgivings about how intimate and revealing the work was about his family and their fellow occupants of the Secret Annex.  Like most writers, Anne revealed in her writing what she hid in real life:

"When I returned and after I had the news that my children would not be coming back, Miep gave me the diary which had been saved by, I should say, a miracle. It took me a very long time before I could read it. And I must say, I was very much surprised about the deep thoughts that Anne had, her seriousness, especially her self-criticism. It was quite a different Anne than I had known as my daughter. She never really showed this kind of inner feeling. She talked about many things, criticized many things, but what her real feelings were, that I could only see from the diary." ~ Otto Frank

Particularly after a Broadway play was made from her diary in the 1950’s, her fame grew to the extraordinary level it still holds today.  Schoolchildren are still given her diary to read, as a lesson in both history and the need for tolerance.  Tens of millions of people have read her diary in their own languages.  She has become and remains the most well-known victim of the Holocaust, the face and name that people associate with the killing of innocence, even when they only know the bare outlines of her story.

"The passions the book ignites suggest that everyone owns Anne Frank, that she has risen above the Holocaust, Judaism, girlhood and even goodness and become a totemic figure of the modern world—the moral individual mind beset by the machinery of destruction, insisting on the right to live and question and hope for the future of human beings." […] "The reason for her immortality was basically literary. She was an extraordinarily good writer, for any age, and the quality of her work seemed a direct result of a ruthlessly honest disposition."  ~ Roger Rosenblatt, in TIME magazine’s “100 Most Important People of the (20th) Century” issue, June 1999.

Many people, even those who have not read her diary, have visited the actual location of her concealment.  In May 1960, the Anne Frank House Museum opened in the building that housed the Secret Annex and is now one of the most popular sites in the Netherlands, with the tiny rooms receiving a million visitors a year.  In 2001, more than 30 years after first reading her diary, I finally had a chance to visit it.

My sister and I were on a week-long trip to Amsterdam, the first time there for either of us.  The Diary had been very meaningful to both of us growing up, and visiting the Anne Frank house felt akin to a religious pilgrimage. 

On the third day of our visit, we walked to the Anne Frank house in solemn silence, our normal talkativeness stilled. Although early May is usually cool and rainy in Amsterdam, we had hit a freak hot spell, with temperatures in the 80’s that sent the locals out in shirtsleeves.  As we walked in the heat, the narrow streets along the canals seemed both foreign and familiar in an uncanny way.  Finally I turned to my sister and said, “It was hot the day they went, too."

When Anne recounts their last moments of freedom during a long, terrified walk to the Secret Annex in early July, she mentions how unbearably hot they were, having put on many layers of clothing to have in their captivity (a Jew carrying a suitcase would have been subject to immediate arrest).  With a wrench deep in my gut, I realized that 60 years before, Anne Frank and her family had walked the very streets I was walking, sweating from both heat and fear, walking towards both safety and confinement.  It was as if the weather had been sent to help us understand, to bring us closer to her.

Once in the museum, we were first directed to watch a short film that filled in the background of Anne, her family and their going into hiding, information that might be necessary to some visitors but which was well-known to me. It was then that I began to weep, biting my lips to keep from actually sobbing.  As we ascended the narrow stairs, walked through the famous connecting door hidden by a bookcase and entered the Secret Annex itself, I struggled to contain my emotions.  The rooms were all too eerily familiar, the place more evocative than my own childhood home, and I continued to choke back sobs of recognition and grief, as if I were standing in a graveyard looking at the tombstones of my own loved ones.  Anne’s words had been so powerful that I felt I knew these people intimately, knew their home as if it were my own, and grieved their loss as if they hadn’t died before I was even born.  

But it was Anne, Anne who had once been a young girl, one who longed to be a writer, just as I always have, it was Anne that I grieved most of all.  She had been a great friend to me in adolescence as I repeatedly read her diary, a ghostly figure that was ironically all too real, who wrote of feelings and ambitions that I shared, and yet who lived an unimaginable life that made me ashamed of my own petty complaints. 

Even today, as an adult, if I am tolerant of others, if I put life and its trials in any perspective, if I refuse to engage in self-pity, if I believe in the good of other human beings, then Anne Frank must take some of the credit for my behavior.  Anne Frank made me a better person than I would have been if I'd never known her.

Like many, I wonder what Anne would have done if she'd lived.  Would she have produced even greater works of writing?  Would she have become a humanitarian and activist?  Would she have resisted the lure of a calm, ordinary life, as she resolved to do in her youth?  Would her diary have even been published or would it have had as much power, if she hadn't died?

In the end, I always come back to the truth:  That in both her short life and in her tragic death, Anne fulfilled what she wanted out of life, far beyond anything she could have imagined:

I don't want to live in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death!  ~ Anne Frank

You do, Anne.  And in my heart, always.