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Generations have learned about the Holocaust from Anne Frank, a teenage girl whose extraordinary diary, first published in 1947, documented her two-year experience hiding from the Nazis. Countless ...
Otto Frank returns. After the liberation of Auschwitz, Otto Frank received care and slowly recovered. He left Auschwitz on 5 March 1945 and went to Katowice, a city 35 kilometres away. He then travelled through Ukraine to Odesa and from there by ship to Marseilles. He arrived back in Amsterdam on 3 June 1945.
- Overview
- A Chronicle of Life During the Holocaust
- After Proving a Huge Success in Europe, an American Editor Takes a Chance On the Diary
- Anne Frank as a Symbol of the Holocaust
Publishers were initially reluctant to publish the teenage author’s chronicle of life during the Holocaust. They thought readers were not ready to confront the horrors of World War II.
Usually, the upper floors of the office building at 263 Prinsengracht were silent. But on August 4, 1944, they came to terrible life. Miep Gies never forgot the sounds. “I could hear the sounds of our friends’ feet,” she wrote in her 1988 memoir. “I could tell from their footsteps that they were coming down like beaten dogs.”
Hours later, when she got up the courage, Gies went upstairs. She had helped her friends, the Frank family, live out of sight in the middle of Amsterdam for two years, bringing them the essentials of life as they hid from the persecution of Europe’s Jews. Now, the attic was trashed, ransacked by German police.
Then she saw it: a red checkered diary and years’ worth of papers strewn across the floor. Miep got on her hands and knees and gathered up the writing, then locked it in a drawer to wait for its author's return.
Anne Frank never came back. Within months of the arrest, the fifteen-year-old died of starvation and disease at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. But her diary outlived her.
Today, it is the Holocaust’s best-known and most widely read document, and its author is seen as a symbol of the 1 million Jewish children who were murdered during the Holocaust. The Diary of a Young Girl has sold more than 30 million copies, is required reading in many schools, and has been translated into more than 70 languages. The building where she hid draws over a million visitors each year. But how did the diary go from a pile of discarded papers to an international publishing phenomenon that still shapes modern historical memory?
This photo is one of the last pictures taken of Anne Frank in 1941. The following summer, as Nazi oppression grew worse, the Franks went into hiding.
Anne Frank received her diary as a gift on her thirteenth birthday in 1942. At first, it was her place to record observations about friends and school and her innermost thoughts. But when she and her family went into hiding the month after the diary began, it became a war document.
Inside the “secret annex,” as she called it, Anne documented her daily life, writing about herself, her family and the other people in hiding, Hermann and Auguste van Pels, their son Peter, and dentist Fritz Pfeffer. She wrote about their protectors’ efforts to smuggle in the essentials of life at great risk. And she increasingly thought about her work as a potential book.
In March 1944, Anne heard a radio broadcast from the Dutch minister for education, art and science, who was in exile in London along with other members of the Dutch government. “History cannot be written on the basis of official decisions and documents alone,” he said. “What we really need are ordinary documents—a diary, letters.” Anne wrote about the broadcast in her diary and decided to edit and rewrite it with an aim for publication.
By the time of her capture, Anne had rewritten much of her diary. Since both versions of the diary survive, so do Anne’s shrewd edits. She edited for content, length and clarity and made a list of suggested pseudonyms for the people in her life. “The differences between Anne’s initial efforts and her revisions vary from trivial to profound,” writes critic Francine Prose, “and deepen our respect for her as a writer.” Anne also wrote and rewrote essays and works of fiction. Her future as a writer was snuffed out when she was betrayed, deported and murdered.
Seven of the eight people in hiding died before the end of the war. The only survivor was Anne’s father, Otto Frank. When news finally came that Anne and her sister Margot had died, Gies gathered up the papers she had kept locked in the drawer since the Frank family’s arrest. “Here is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you,” she told Otto, placing the diary in front of him.
Anne's diary given to her by her parents for her 13th birthday.
Despite worries that readers would not want to be reminded of the war, the book was enormously successful in Europe. Soon, it was flying off the shelves in the Netherlands and was joined by translations into French and German. But it faced an uphill battle in the United States. An advance copy of the French edition had been submitted to Doubleday, but rejected for an English translation deal. Then, editor Judith Jones discovered the book in a pile of rejects while her boss was at lunch.
“I read it all day,” she told the Jewish Chronicle in 2016. “When my boss returned, I told him, ‘We have to publish this book.’ He said, ‘What? That book by that kid?’” At the time, publishers thought that readers did not want to confront the Holocaust. But Jones felt that the book would find a strong market in the United States. The first American edition was published in 1952 with a foreword by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
A gushing review from author Meyer Levin stoked national interest in the book. Days later, the book had gone into its second printing. The book was subsequently turned into a play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who had written the screenplays of It’s a Wonderful Life, The Thin Man and other Hollywood classics. Their play was a smash hit, won a Pulitzer prize, and was adapted into a 1959 film that won three Academy Awards and was nominated for Best Picture. However, the play and film both downplayed the Franks’ Jewishness and focused on her brief romance with Peter van Pels.
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Anne Frank’s story quickly became part of school curricula around the world, with the diary becoming required reading in many school districts. For most readers, The Diary of a Young Girl is the only in-depth work they read on the Holocaust. But the work's fame is a double-edged sword: the diary does not show the aftermath of Anne's life in hiding—imprisonment, deportation, genocide—the horrors experienced by around six million Jews.
Anne’s story is also not representative: Only a small percentage of Jews went into hiding. The vast majority who did were betrayed, discovered and killed. Those who survived relied on non-Jews to support and protect them.
Although she was only 13 when she began documenting her wartime experiences, Anne Frank's diary was hardly the work of a naive writer. “I know I can write,” she wrote in April 1944. “but…it remains to be seen whether I really have talent.” An astute author and editor, Anne Frank’s carefully chosen words helped shape her legacy.
READ MORE: Who Betrayed Anne Frank?
READ MORE: Anne Frank's Family Tried Repeatedly to Immigrate to the U.S.
Series: In Their Own Words: Holocaust Survivor Testimonies. What was it like to live through the Holocaust? Learn about individuals' experiences, actions, and choices from survivors themselves. Listen to excerpts from their oral testimonies. Browse transcripts of the recordings. And get to know the featured survivors by reading their biographies.
Jan 25, 2024 · A cotton bag was among his few possessions. Otto Frank was the only one of the eight people in hiding in the Secret Annex to survive the concentration and extermination camps. On his journey back from Auschwitz to the Netherlands, he carried a small cotton bag. Otto Frank would hold on to the bag for the rest of his life.
The Franks hid in a secret attic annex in Amsterdam from July 1942 to August 1944. The family relied on the help of family friends and colleagues for food and clothing. After a tip off, the Gestapo discovered the annex in 1944 and arrested everyone inside. Only Anne’s father, Otto Frank, survived the Holocaust.
Feb 19, 2016 · A worldwide callout to find the letters of Auschwitz survivor Otto Frank written throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s reveals an Australian woman became his unlikely confidante after the Holocaust.
