The Books
The Diary of a Young Girl
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Who hid with her family for two years in a secret annex in Amsterdam, kept a diary that became one of the most widely read books in the world, and was murdered at fifteen in Bergen-Belsen — two months before the camp was liberated.
Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.Anne Frank — The Diary of a Young Girl, 1944
Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929, the younger daughter of Otto and Edith Frank. The family fled Germany in 1933 after Hitler came to power and settled in Amsterdam, where Otto ran a spice and pectin business. The German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 and the subsequent implementation of anti-Jewish measures — registration, curfews, yellow stars, deportations — gradually closed in around them.
On July 6, 1942, the day after Margot Frank received a notice ordering her to report for labor in Germany, the family went into hiding in the concealed rooms behind Otto Frank's office on the Prinsengracht canal. They were joined by the van Pels family and, later, by the dentist Fritz Pfeffer. Eight people lived in the Secret Annex for two years and twenty-five days, entirely dependent on a small group of helpers who brought them food and news and maintained the fiction that the building was empty.
On August 4, 1944, German security police raided the Annex. All eight inhabitants were arrested. Otto Frank survived Auschwitz. Anne and Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus in February or March 1945 — weeks before the camp was liberated. Anne was fifteen. Her diary, found on the floor of the Annex after the arrest, was given to Otto Frank after the war by Miep Gies, one of the helpers who had saved it. He published it in 1947. It has since been translated into more than seventy languages.
Anne Frank is not a philosopher in any professional sense. She was a thirteen-to-fifteen-year-old girl writing in a diary during two years of confinement and mortal danger. What she left behind is not systematic philosophy but testimony — the record of a mind developing under extraordinary pressure, with remarkable honesty, toward a set of convictions about human nature and human possibility that have outlasted almost everything else produced in her time.
The famous line — despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart — is often quoted sentimentally, as if it were simply a statement of naive optimism. Read in context, it is something considerably harder: she writes it immediately after acknowledging the cruelty, the destruction, the mass murder that surrounds her. The belief is not ignorance of what is happening. It is a choice, made in the face of what is happening, to maintain a view of human nature that the evidence was conspiring to destroy.
This is the structure of Frankl's meaning-making, Camus's revolt, and every form of active hope in this library: not the denial of difficulty but the insistence, made in the teeth of difficulty, that something else is also true. Anne Frank made that insistence at fifteen, in hiding, while people she loved were being murdered. The insistence cost her nothing she would not have lost anyway. But it produced something — a document of extraordinary moral clarity — that has reached millions of people who needed to know that such insistence is possible.
I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.Anne Frank — The Diary of a Young Girl, 1944
One of the most widely read books in the world. Read the definitive edition, which includes passages her father omitted from the original publication. Read it slowly.
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