Anne Frank did not become the global symbol of the Holocaust because her story best represented its six million victims. She became a symbol because her story was the easiest for the world to face.
Even as the fighting raged outside her hiding place, she rewrote and revised her diary, believing that someday someone would read it. She was right, but not in the way she intended.
Anne wasn’t the final editor of her own words, and she didn’t get to finish her story. And yet she has become an icon not just of Jewish persecution, but of human resilience in the face of oppression. The question is whether that transformation has done justice to her memory, or quietly betrayed it.
Anne’s childhood
Anne Frank was born in 1929 into an assimilated Jewish family living in Germany. She was smart, spunky, and a little sassy – the apple of her father’s eye. But her father, Otto, had his eye on the headlines, and what he saw scared him: the rise of the Nazi Party.
When Anne was four years old, Otto moved the family to Amsterdam, believing it would be safe from the Nazi threat. Anne knew nothing about geopolitics. She adjusted quickly to life in her new city and thrived at a progressive Montessori school, the perfect environment for a child who hated sitting still.
Anne was funny and dramatic and sharp. When one teacher called her a chatterbox, Anne responded with a three-page essay pledging to tone it down, while cheekily arguing that constant talking was simply an inherited female trait and therefore not her fault. In another world, she might have been a star lawyer, novelist, or actress, any career that played to her natural gifts for drama, wordplay, and cleverness.
But like many gifted children, Anne was often lonely. When her father handed her a journal and told her to write down her thoughts, she gave the notebook a name, Kitty, a stand-in for the true friendship she so desperately craved.
The journal was where Anne began rehearsing for the life she dreamed of living. One day, she vowed, she would be a writer. Until then, she’d pour all her hopes and dreams into its pages.
When Holland fell to Hitler
Anne had a serious problem, however. Her family had fled Germany’s antisemitism, but Nazi hatred followed them to Amsterdam. When Anne was 10 years old, she was expelled from her school — not because she was a chatterbox or couldn’t manage the curriculum, but because Holland had fallen to Hitler in May 1940.
The new Nazi regime quickly instituted harsh anti-Jewish racial laws, the exact laws Otto had tried to escape in Germany, which barred Jewish children from attending school alongside non-Jews.
Yet again, Otto read the writing on the wall. But his attempts to secure American visas for his family all failed. The United States didn’t want Jewish refugees flooding its borders, no matter how persecuted they were.
The Nazi measures grew harsher by the day. In July 1942, persecution came directly to the Franks’ door: a letter summoning Anne’s older sister Margot to Germany for “labour duty.” If she didn’t report to the work camp within 10 days, the entire family would be arrested. No one knew exactly what “labour duty” entailed, but by that point, they knew it wasn’t good.
Hiding in the secret Annex
It was time for Plan B: hiding. Plan A, fleeing, had already failed. So Otto made his own refuge, right under the noses of the SS. He chose a cluster of back rooms in his Amsterdam office, concealed behind a bookcase fitted to swing open like a door, leading to a secret compartment where his family and a few others could shelter. He called it the Annex.
In the months before Margot’s call-up letter, Otto had quietly stocked it with supplies, telling his daughters nothing and hoping they’d never need to use it. After the letter arrived, he and his wife, Edith, decided the worst-case scenario had come. In July 1942, the four Franks left for Otto’s office dressed in as many layers of clothing as they could manage, no suitcases, nothing to raise suspicion. They entered the building and would not leave it for the next two years.
The Franks were not alone. Otto had arranged for another family and a single man to join them — eight people in total, cramped into a space barely large enough to breathe. Silence was their only defense. Most of Otto’s non-Jewish employees had no idea that eight Jews were quietly clinging to life in a hidden compartment just meters away.
Life in the Annex, as it turned out, was excruciatingly boring. There was enforced silence — no joking, no pacing, no flushing toilets during working hours. There was the suffocating sameness of the same eight faces, day after day. For Anne, Margot, and Peter van Pels, there was the particular difficulty of being a teenager, a time of exploration and independence, while trapped in a tiny space that could not be left. The three teens had to endure all the turbulence of adolescence in a hidden room.
Kitty became Anne’s only real refuge. She wrote about everything: God, religion, the nature of humanity, her crush on Peter, and the grinding indignities of daily life in the Annex. The one thing that occasionally broke the monotony was visits from their non-Jewish helpers, most notably Otto’s colleague Miep Gies and her husband Jan, who brought supplies and news from the outside world at great personal risk.
In May 1944, the Dutch government broadcasted a radio appeal for citizens to preserve their letters and diaries. After the German occupation ended, the Dutch wanted a record of their resistance. The appeal transformed Anne entirely. Kitty was no longer just a companion in the gloom, the journal was now a historical document, and this was her chance to become the writer she had always dreamed of being. She began revising with fierce purpose, writing not only about her private thoughts and daily life but with one eye fixed on the future and her contribution to the record of life under German occupation.
Terror stalked the Annex as the news from the outside world grew increasingly dire. Everyone in the Annex was well aware of the stakes. If they were found, they were unlikely to survive, and so, despite the frustrations and difficulties, Anne and her family did everything they could to stay quiet, stay hidden, stay together, and stay strong.
Betrayal, arrest, deportation
For 760 days, their luck held. On the 761st, it ran out. It was August 1944, just over two years since the Franks had gone into hiding. To this day, no one is entirely certain who betrayed them.
When the SS arrived, it looked at first like a standard house search, if one ignored the revolver leveled at the employees as soldiers ripped apart every box and crate. When they reached the bookcase concealing the entrance to the Annex, they paused, then worked at it until the secret door swung open.
It was a sunny summer morning. The kids were doing schoolwork – or trying to, anyway, after two years without school. The soldiers rounded everyone up at gunpoint and ransacked the Annex, shaking out Otto’s briefcase in the process. Papers flew everywhere — all of Anne’s secret hopes and thoughts, crushed underfoot. Miep Gies would later return to find the pages scattered across the floor. She gathered them up and waited, certain that someone would come back.
Only one person did.
All eight residents of the Annex were transported to Auschwitz. Packed with a thousand other deportees into a train so tightly that it was hard to breathe, they made the three-day journey east. Upon arrival, a third of the prisoners were in such terrible condition that they were sent immediately to the gas chambers. All eight Annex members were instead forced into the camp’s labor system. It was hell. But at least the three Frank women were together, for a while, anyway.
In November 1944, as the Allied powers gained ground, Anne and Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, part of a mass movement of prisoners designed to keep them away from the advancing Soviet and American forces. Bergen-Belsen was not officially an extermination camp, but as more and more prisoners poured in, its inmates perished in the tens of thousands from starvation and disease. Anne and Margot were among them, both succumbing to typhus within days of each other, just weeks before British soldiers arrived to liberate the camp. Anne was 15 years old.
Otto survives
Otto was liberated from Auschwitz, the sole survivor of the Secret Annex. He returned to Amsterdam with no idea of his family’s fate, hoping against the odds that his wife and daughters were still alive. They were not; all he had left was Kitty.
When Otto finally brought himself to read Anne’s diary, he was stunned by the bright, observant, deeply thoughtful young writer, occasionally biting but full of astonishing inner life. His friends read the diary and were equally astounded. One wrote that after finishing it, he felt transported – plucked from his everyday life, back into the surreal world of German occupation.
Otto’s friends found him a publisher and he set about editing the manuscript, condensing the story and removing what he felt the world had no business reading: Anne’s private musings about sex and romance, her harsh observations about her parents’ marriage. He wanted the diary to focus on her idealism and hopeful spirit — to force people to look at his daughter’s goodness and courage and be inspired.
His daughter had a message for the world. Maybe, just maybe, this teenager could help society find some kind of healing as the entire globe confronted the scale of what had just happened.
The diary goes global
The first Dutch edition was published in 1947. If she had lived, Anne would have been 19 years old, and she might have been stunned by the diary’s success.
The book sold tens of thousands of copies in Dutch, then in French, then in German. English-language publishers were initially skeptical — questioning who would want a reminder of those years — and allocated just 5,000 copies and no marketing budget for the American edition. It flew off the shelves regardless.
A New York Times review praised the diary and its teenage writer, noting: “There is anguish in the thought of how much creative power, how much sheer beauty of living, was cut off through genocide. But through her diary, Anne goes on living. From Holland to France, to Italy, Spain. The Germans too have published her book. And now she comes to America. Surely she will be widely loved, for this wise and wonderful young girl brings back a poignant delight in the infinite human spirit.”
Anne’s legacy
The reviewer was right. Anne was almost universally beloved. Her story is taught to children around the world, children who are the same age that she was when she was forced into hiding.
In her wisdom, her optimism, her precocity, and her goodness, Anne is now an icon, a stand-in for six million Jews slaughtered in six years. Her story is tragic but hopeful, lingering on the kindness of strangers, the inherent goodness of humanity.
Why? Because she didn’t write about extermination camps, starvation, disease, or mass murder. She didn’t write about seeing her family lined up and shot, then piled into a mass grave. She didn’t write about the journey to Auschwitz, the gas chambers, or the chimneys that never stopped smoking.
She wrote about hope, life, humankind’s inherent goodness, and the most famous line from her diary is also the most ironic: “I still believe that in spite of everything, people are really good at heart.”
Anne’s story provided a convenient introduction to the Holocaust. She was relatable, with a surprisingly modern voice, writing: “I know what I want, I have a goal, I have opinions…I know that I’m a woman with inner strength and a great deal of courage!”
She was sassy, funny, thoughtful, and inquisitive. Her story, though tragic, had a pleasing arc. But Anne’s story, of course, is incomplete. It stops before discovery. It stops before Auschwitz, before Bergen-Belsen, before the end, and that makes it relatively “easy” to read.
Holocaust historian Alvin Rosenfeld believes that the diary’s popularity is an example of the “Americanization of the Holocaust.” He writes that “the Anne Frank we remember is the one we want to remember.” Reading her story makes us feel good, even optimistic and inspired.
After all, if Anne could remain hopeful, so can we. She turned atrocities into affirmation. It’s a comforting understanding of the Holocaust, but it’s also incomplete.
The Story People Miss
In a 1997 New Yorker article, the Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick reflected: “…in the fifty years since ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ was first published [it] has been bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied, all the while contributing to the ‘subversion of history.’”
That subversion began as early as 1952, with the first American edition of the diary. The publisher had asked former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to “introduce” the book.
Her foreword included the claim that the diary “is not preeminently a Jewish book…it will equally appeal to a less specialized and larger group of readers.” Instead, it is an example of the “ultimate shining nobility of [the human] spirit” – inspiring, palatable, and divorced from the wider context and mechanics of genocide.
In the years since, Anne’s legend has only grown. The Secret Annex is Amsterdam’s most popular tourist attraction, something to do between eating a fabulous pancake brunch and going to see the tulips. Even pop star Justin Bieber visited, writing in the guestbook: “Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a Belieber.”
It’s easy to roll our eyes at Bieber, whose comment was clueless and uninformed. But he’s hardly the only person to misunderstand Anne’s story.
Anne has been appropriated and misused as a symbol by all sorts of groups who have zero understanding of or respect for her story. Pro-Hamas activists depict her wrapped in a keffiyeh. Protestors compared the COVID-19 lockdowns to the Frank family’s retreat from the world. Even disgraced musician Roger Waters, who projected her name on screen during a concert in Germany, meant to draw parallels between Israel and Hitler’s regime.
Even attempts to push back on this trend have not escaped distortion. “Slam Frank,” a viral satirical musical created to mock exactly this kind of appropriation, was intended as a critique of how Anne’s story gets flattened and repurposed for modern political agendas. And yet, it too has been pulled into the same cycle, with audiences and commentators interpreting it through their own ideological lenses, often reinforcing the very misuse it set out to challenge.
At best, these are ignorant and offensive misuses of Anne’s story; at worst, they are flatly antisemitic.
But these are simply the most egregious misuses of Anne’s image. By making her the symbol of the Holocaust, we reduce her from a complicated, sophisticated, sometimes prickly teenager to an almost saintly figure, a one-dimensional portrait of A Good Person, whose goodness stands in stark contrast to the tragic circumstances of her short life. We sanitize the horrors she and other victims suffered by cutting off the story before Auschwitz, before Bergen-Belsen.
Anne wasn’t a metaphor for the resilience of the human spirit. She was a child murdered by the Nazis solely because she was Jewish.
Her memory has been softened, whitewashed, and flattened, providing us with a comforting story about the Holocaust and the triumph of the human spirit. But Anne Frank’s story is not the be-all, end-all of Holocaust education; it is merely the beginning.
