“Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes … Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared.”
Written by Anne Frank about the persecution of Jews by Nazis in Amsterdam, these words went viral during the first Trump administration. ICE agents were targeting undocumented immigrants in enormous raids, and news reports described adults seized at their workplaces and children left without care after a parent was taken into custody. “Read this quote from Anne Frank in light of exactly what happened this week,” one activist urged.
Since 1947, when Anne’s diary was first published in Dutch (it appeared in English in 1952), her words and image have been harnessed to any number of political causes. It’s heartening to know that her story remains a touchstone for many, especially at a time when Americans, especially younger generations, are startlingly ignorant about the Holocaust. In one study, 66 percent of millennials could not correctly identify Auschwitz, the death camp liberated 80 years ago tomorrow, as a Nazi camp.
Still, as someone who’s spent years researching Anne and her world, I cringe to see her invoked in contexts far removed from her historical situation. This happened during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that Anne Frank had more freedom than people required to get the Covid-19 vaccine. Even in situations where the comparison feels more relevant, such as the migrant crisis in Europe and the United States, taking Anne’s words out of context risks flattening her into an archetypal symbol of victimhood, ignoring her historical reality and the remarkable achievement of her diary, and downplaying the continuing threat of antisemitism.
Anne’s father, Otto Frank, published her diary so that her words could reach a large audience and serve as a beacon of global peace and tolerance. “The book should be read as widely as possible, because it should work for people and for humanity,” he urged. Nearly 80 years later, with more than 30 million copies in print in 70 languages, it’s clear that his mission was successful. During my research, I found stories of Anne inspiring Japanese people in the wake of Hiroshima and an Eritrean refugee who translated the diary into his native Tigrinya after reading it in an Ethiopian refugee camp.
But Anne’s iconicity requires her story to achieve a difficult balancing act. It warns powerfully against all persecution, but must remain true to its character as a Jewish work — as the complicated story of its publication and reception helps us to see.
Anne intended her diary to testify to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. She first imagined a public audience for it in March 1944, after hearing a radio address by a minister of the Dutch government in exile who called for people to preserve private documents of the war years for inclusion in a future national archive. At that point she had been keeping a diary since her 13th birthday — nearly two years, most of which she had spent in hiding.
But Anne quickly realized that as she had written it, her diary wouldn’t make sense to a larger audience. It included details that she found too personal to share and lacked enough context for readers to understand her situation. So she went back and rewrote it from the beginning, adding entries with more information about how the Nazi persecution unfolded and removing some of the childish material she had written as a 13-year-old who didn’t yet realize she was living through world-historical events.
Anne’s revision may not yet have been complete when the Nazis raided her hiding place in August 1944 and deported everyone living there with her to concentration camps. After the raid, two of the helpers who had supported the family in hiding found Anne’s papers and gave them to Otto — the sole survivor of his family — after her death was confirmed. He edited the diary further, mostly making minor changes, and brought it to a Dutch publisher who was skeptical about its prospects, initially printing a modest first edition.
Editors at Doubleday, which published Anne’s book in America as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” shared Otto’s vision, and marketed the book aggressively to a general audience. The introduction — signed by Eleanor Roosevelt, but written by a young Doubleday editor, Barbara Zimmerman — did not include the word “Jew,” emphasizing the diary as a commentary “on war and its impact on human beings.” Doubleday even advertised the book as a Christmas present.
Meyer Levin, a writer and journalist who had reported on the liberation of Buchenwald, would later take Otto to task for allowing husband-and-wife screenwriting team Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich to adapt the book for the stage, arguing that their version downplayed Anne’s Jewish identity to cater to a wide audience. But even Levin was part of the initial push to highlight the diary’s general appeal. In a review that ran on the cover of The Times Book Review, Levin described Anne as an ordinary teenager whose feelings were “of the purest universality.” The characters in the diary, he wrote, “might be living next door … their tensions and satisfactions are those of human character and growth, anywhere.”
It wasn’t just the desire to sell books that motivated this framing of the diary. It was also the existential anxiety felt by many Jews —Americans as well as Holocaust survivors like Otto — in the aftermath of the war. As a German Jew so deeply connected to his country that he served as an officer in the German Army during World War I, Otto did not believe his religion would make him a target of persecution — until it did. While antisemitism in America took subtler forms, such as hotels that advertised a “restricted clientele” (code for excluding Jews and Blacks), it was nonetheless a source of discrimination that kept Jews out of certain schools, social circles and professional positions.
Under such circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that Jews and their allies would emphasize their commonalities with the rest of society rather than their differences. In so doing, they fell into a trap. In order to reach the largest possible audience, the diary, and later the play and movie based upon it, had to portray Anne’s Judaism as marginal to her identity. But the fact that a Jewish character could not be seen as universally relatable reveals the extent to which antisemitism remained a social force.
With its essence as a document of Jewish persecution diluted, Anne’s diary could do little to counteract that prejudice, which Otto seems to have eventually realized. While he wrote in a letter to Levin that the diary was “not a Jewish book,” he went on to say that “in some way of course [the play] must be Jewish … so that it works against anti-Semitism.”
Since Anne’s name and image are still so often invoked, we might think that means her story remains unforgotten. But in fact the opposite is true: The more she becomes a generic symbol of all historical tragedy, the less we remember who she was and what happened to her.
Broadening the meaning of Anne’s story doesn’t have to cheapen it. The use of the diary by anti-apartheid activists offers one helpful example. Political prisoners on South Africa’s Robben Island, an isolated compound where many were kept in solitary confinement, gained access to the book, passed it among themselves until the pages fell apart and copied out their favorite quotes. They absorbed the heinous specifics of Anne’s persecution and murder while finding consolation in her fortitude.
In 1994, when an exhibition about Anne Frank came to South Africa, several of those former prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, spoke publicly about the diary. While acknowledging the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust, they celebrated Anne’s book as a personal inspiration. It “kept our spirits high and reinforced our confidence in the invincibility of the cause of freedom and justice,” Mandela said. Rather than simply equating Nazism with apartheid, they recognized Anne as an individual experiencing extreme discrimination. They could sympathize with her while avoiding the distortion of identification without context.
In an age of sound-bite-length opinions and viral hot takes, nuance is difficult to achieve. But we owe it to Anne to try. Without also appreciating her individuality, to say that today’s Anne Frank is a refugee from the Middle East, a Latin American migrant, or whomever else we might imagine her to be plays into the hands of those who persecuted her. The erasure of the specifics of Anne Frank’s life and death risks implying that antisemitism is no longer a destructive force.
To do Anne justice, we must learn to see her as both a symbol of all persecution and a target of antisemitism — an icon and a human being.
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