Into the Secret Annex: Reading Anne Frank at Last

Before touring the Anne Frank exhibition at New York’s Center for Jewish History (CJH), I decided to do background research. That is, I read the definitive edition of “Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl” for the first time.

As a Jew and a writer with my own journal project, I had always known about Anne and her diary. I knew about the controversies, the spin-offs into theater and film, and museum exhibits about her (I’d tried to visit the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam in 2016 but no times were open). I’d read the diary of another Jewish teen, Renia Spiegel, as well as memoirs by Viktor Frankl and Elie Wiesel. Anne’s book, however, in all its adolescent insights, hopes and despair, remained unexplored.

Anne Frank books at the CJH (courtesy of author).

The exhibit had a reconstruction of  the secret annex where Anne and seven others hid from 1942 to 1944, when a Gestapo agent and Dutch toadies raided the annex. Finally, I could sense the claustrophobic quarters of bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen/living room where Anne, her parents, sister Margo and other residents clustered, bickered, sulked, laughed, played board games and felt the terror of unknown knocks on the door.

The story moved to its inevitable conclusion of arrest and deaths of all annex occupants except her father Otto Frank, who survived, along with the destruction of most of Dutch Jewry.

At that point, the exhibit became less familiar and more compelling. I knew how their lives ended; how did Anne’s afterlife unfold?

The more I learned about the posthumous arc of Anne’s diary, the more I marveled at everything that had to happen for Anne to not just achieve global fame and impact, but to have any of her writings survive at all. Other Jews were keeping journals; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has the complete text, translations and explanations for numerous journals, from children to a man in his 70s. One not listed that impressed me was by Renia Spiegel, a Jewish teen in Poland who kept a diary between the ages of 15 and 18, before she was killed in 1942 in Przemysl. At 700 pages, Renia’s Diary: A Holocaust Journal eventually went to Renia’s surviving sister and mother and wasn’t published in English until 2019.

Renia became known as the Polish Anne Frank, but what had to happen for Anne to achieve the immediate acclaim, rather than be known as the Dutch Renia Spiegel?

The CJH exhibit walked viewers through the process. Through an astonishing alignment of actions, Anne achieved her dream of literary immortality, in part, I think, by the book’s appearance so soon after the war. Here’s the sequence:

• Anne gets a diary on her birthday in 1942 and writes until August 1, 1944.
• The SS sergeant and Dutch Secret Service agents loot the annex of any valuables but leave the diary materials scattered around. Miep Gies, a secretary in the building, collects the materials and stores them in a drawer, unread.
• Otto Frank survives Auschwitz and is liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. The exhibit maps Otto’s six-month odyssey through Poland to Odessa to a boat trip to Marseilles (where another survivor tells him his wife had died) and then home to Amsterdam.
• Miep Gies gives Otto Anne’s papers and he learns that Anne and Margo died in a typhus outbreak.
• After initial hesitation to read the journals, Otto edits them into a coherent document and queries publishers. According to the Anne Frank House,

Otto was so impressed by what he read that he typed out her diary entries and gave them to others to read. One of those people was the historian Jan Romein, a member of the editorial board of the literary journal De Nieuwe Stem (The New Voice). He wrote about the diary on the front page of the Het Parool newspaper of 3 April 1946. In June 1946, Anne Frank made her posthumous debut with excerpts from her diary in De Nieuwe Stem. On 25 June 1947, Anne Frank’s diary was published under the title of Het Achterhuis [The Secret Annex]. After the book had been translated into German, French, and English, the diary became so well known that it was made into a play and later a movie in the United States.

Anne’s diary appeared in English in 1951 and the floodtide of translations, presentations, reinterpretations and related books continues unabated.

The immersion into the Frank family’s history and her book even prompted my very first AI query to Microsoft’s Copilot AI program on my personal laptop. The question: “Who ratted out Anne Frank?” The response:

The identity of the person who betrayed Anne Frank and her family has been a mystery for decades. Several suspects have been named over the years, including Willem van Maaren, a warehouse employee, and Lena Hartog, another employee. However, none of these investigations have conclusively proven who was responsible.

Recently, a book titled “The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation” by Rosemary Sullivan suggested that Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish businessman and member of the Jewish Council in Holland, might have been the informant. This theory is based on a combination of historical research and modern investigative techniques.

It’s a complex and sensitive topic, and the true identity of the betrayer may never be known for certain. What are your thoughts on this?

The journal itself felt familiar. Anne started it at 12, and her last entry was August 1, 1944. She grew as a writer, mixing memories of friends and family with the realities of the restricted existence in the annex. She muses on puberty and the prospects of motherhood, and curiosity about male anatomy. From newspapers and radio broadcasts, she and other annex dwellers know about the progress of the war, along with the fate of Jews across Europe. Deportation and death shadow every hour in the annex, with no false hopes for survival apart from staying in the annex and an end to the war.

There must be a trigger in certain adolescents to start journals around that age. The first entry in mine was when I was 12, on September 15, 1970. I wrote about junior high school, sports, religion, books I read, adolescent romantic longings. Like Anne, I struggled with issues with my parents, who were divorced.

Anne and I both chronicled our lives and the world beyond. Her investigation of the war beyond the annex fascinated me as she tried to comprehend the terrifying events visible from the annex windows. Anne’s comments on the Jewish population bear the marks of a prophetic vision. I share my impressions of history as it happens from the college in the 1970s through New York in the 1980s, marriage and family, 9/11, the pandemic, 10/7, layoffs and new jobs and, now, the realization that my joints ache I forget where I put things, and I can’t see well enough to drive at night.

Anne only lived 15 years and she was extraordinary; her presence is permanent through exhibits, books, graphic novels, memories of people who knew her and what-if speculation about her life had she survived. She even gained a place at the 9/11 Ground Zero site in New York, through the “Anne Frank Tree,” grown, according to an explanatory panel, “from a sapling from the original chestnut tree that grew outside the Secret Annex . . . The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect planted this tree in Liberty Park in 2016. It was dedicated on June 12, 2017, Anne Frank’s birthday.”

Like Anne’s writings, the tree is permanent, a fitting way to honor her legacy and her inspiration for readers and writers young and old, everywhere. Reading her book for the first time, I gained a new appreciation for the solitary pursuit that needs no more than a pen, a notebook and something you want to say.

The Anne Frank Tree (courtesy of author)