The posthumous death of Anne Frank

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.” – Anne Frank

Anne Frank is perhaps the most famous civilian killed in the Second World War. Her family fled Germany, established a jam-making business in Amsterdam, and were hidden by a small number of their employees until the summer of 1944. They were betrayed (we still do not know by whom), deported to Westerbork and then Auschwitz, where the girls survived selection and a death march but both died in Bergen-Belsen. By the end of the war, only Otto Frank was alive. When he returned and was given her diary, rescued by Miep Gies, he ended up publishing it. Anne Frank became, rather quickly, a symbol of the innocence and the injustice of what happened to her. 

But perhaps she became so famous because of what she wasn’t, rather than what she was. Yes, she was Jewish and yes she was killed. But her diary doesn’t speak of anger or revenge; it speaks of her unfailing belief in the goodness of people. And thus the act of reading it became a salve on the souls of people who were not looking to confront their own morality. If she, this young girl, was able to look at the world and identify this experience as one of temporary evil and madness instead of a systemic human condition, then people the world over can feel the absolution she seems to grant through its pages: you too, are fundamentally “good at heart.” 

Anne Frank in hiding, 1944.

But the symbol of Anne Frank has become a problematic one in recent years. Some years ago, a man who worked at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam was asked to not wear his kippa while working, as it was a religious garment that could be seen as “political.” In effect, he was asked to hide his Judaism, while working at the Anne Frank House. In the weeks after the outbreak of war, a daycare named for her in Germany proposed changing its name as “migrant parents of the children at the school wanted the name changed, as Anne Frank did not mean anything to them.” In Amsterdam a few weeks ago, a blood-red “Gaza” was painted on her statue. And in Norway last week, graffiti of her wearing a keffiyeh sparked outrage. 

Why does Anne Frank engender so much emotion? Instead of a symbol of a victim of genocide, she has become associated with genocide. Instead of someone who is being killed for being Jewish, she is dressed in the political symbol of a group that has made no bones about a desire to kill Jews. It’s this association with innocence that seems to generate such vitriol and also demonstrates the profound inversion of Holocaust history in how today’s events are understood. 

Using Anne Frank as a passive symbol to express anger at bloodshed (which, while horrifying, is not genocide) is as problematic as her being a target of antisemitism once more. The artist who created the image of her in a keffiyeh defends her position, saying that having read the book, she knows Anne Frank would have agreed with her. What, that Anne Frank would have believed that the Hamasniks who broke in on October 7th too were “good at heart” and that we should all collectively see our genocidal enemies with equanimity and absolution? We will never know what Anne Frank would have lived to say about the Nazis, because she was killed by genocidal maniacs in the waning days of a war that they had already lost.

And for those who vandalize her statue and the other memorials of the Holocaust around Europe, was it not enough to kill her once? Ones who say that they do so because of the actions of Jews are perhaps not as well versed in history as they should be – remember, the Nazis, too, justified the mass murder and the Holocaust as a result of “Jewish power” (the stab-in-the-back theory, their being communists, their “ruling” the Weimar Republic etc.)

But the continual focus on Holocaust inversion betrays something deeply antisemitic about reactions to this conflict, and something that no doubt Adolf Hitler would be thrilled about (while hopefully burning in hell). If you vandalize Holocaust memorials in the name of a war begun by Hamas, you are providing Hitler a posthumous victory. The same perceptions of Jewish power, the same justification of violence gave rise to a force that killed her once; when you target her and smear her memory as part of the callous attacks on Jews for a complicated war being fought thousands of kilometers away, you’re just providing her with a posthumous death.