The Diary Of A Young Girl – Anne Frank, 1952 ★★★½

All She Wanted Was to Live Forever

Anne Frank belongs to the world, something truer today than ever before. Seventy years after the year of her confirmed death, her famous memoir of a life in hiding fell out of copyright law on January 1, 2016, meaning it can now be printed by anyone.

“I want to go on living even after my death!” she wrote in one of her diary entries. And now she shall, in cyberspace, with people free to arrange her thoughts and dreams with hypertext links and perhaps a GIF animation showing the five seconds when Anne poked her head out a window and was caught on a home movie.

It’s been 70 years since she died, murdered by typhus in a Nazi concentration camp, but the young teenager keeps coming back. There was a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, a movie which featured an Oscar-winning performance by Shelley Winters, television movies and miniseries, even a Japanese anime feature.

Why does she stand out so much? Her fate was sadly typical for a young Jew in Western Europe at the time. She had a fairly unusual situation for a Jewish refugee, in that for two-plus years, she lived in a big city right over the heads of those who would have sold her out or arrested her on sight. But sitting in a secret annex has only so much drama; for the most part her diary communicates a boring existence for Anne and the seven others who lived with her.

I think much of the reason for Anne’s enduring charm has to do with her face. She had a lovely face, a dimpled smile and dark brown eyes, with a plaintive expression that made her seem like someone who could use a friend.

I remember being drawn to it for the first time as a small boy who found the Pocket edition paperback edition on a relative’s nightstand. This must have been the early 1970s. I don’t often have such powerful memories of reading material before the age of ten, but this one grabbed me on account of her face. So pretty, yet so sad. I never saw a girl with rings under her eyes like that, except once in a “Star Trek” episode.

Then I picked up the book and started skimming through it. I remember this clearly, because I was so charmed by her way of expressing herself, so gently yet with a teenager’s biting wit I recognized in some of my sharper cousins. I don’t remember particulars, just a general sense of happiness and adventure. I remember that the part about her being wanted by the police confused me; I assumed the book was about someone like me growing up in the United States, and wasn’t all that clear on what she was hiding for.

I was having so much fun grooving on Anne’s frequency, her seemingly random larks and gossip, shared only with me, her reader. I randomly flipped through the pages, concentration never being my strong suit. Inevitably it happened; I came to the final page, the only one not written by Anne but the postscript that explained her fate. I felt like a sandbag had just been dropped on my gut. I put the book away and didn’t read it again for more than 40 years.

It’s easy to get carried away like that reading Diary Of A Young Girl, not to the point of forgetting the war, but certainly having it recede into the background while Anne regales us with her stories of life, stories as much concerned with the struggles of growing up as they are about being on the run from the Third Reich. She didn’t want to be a hero; all she wanted to do was entertain herself by keeping a record of her life and the many things which brought her excitement and joy.

Anne at age 12, at her Montessori school in Amsterdam. She loved all her subjects except mathematics. Very soon after this photo was taken, she was given a diary for a 13th birthday present. Two weeks later, she went into hiding and never saw a schoolroom again.  Image from www.history.com.

“Oh, so many things bubble up inside me as I lie in bed, having to put up with people I’m fed up with, who always misinterpret my intentions,” she writes. “That’s why in the end I always come back to my diary. That is where I start and finish, because Kitty is always patient.”

Kitty is the name she addresses at the start of every journal entry, and something of a mystery as to where it came from, with the principal candidates being a character in a children’s novel Anne enjoyed and a former playmate. The non-specificity of the name, and its playful aspect, makes an impression, too. It’s possible to imagine Kitty could be Anne’s pet name for you, the way it has been for millions of people drawn into Anne’s interior world by the vehicle of her journal.

Reading Diary Of A Young Girl again, or for the first time as an adult now focused on reading the whole thing front to back, brought home just how good a writer Anne was. She writes at one point about wanting to be a journalist, and even being grateful to God for her gifts in that department. Clearly she had a talent which could have blossomed into a magnificent career. She’s not just imaginative, and humorous in an impish way, but she has this ability to channel her thoughts effectively, taking one idea and building into the theme of one diary passage, then the next date moving on to something else, say the daily routine around the annex, or the difficult relationship she had with her sister, Margot. You get a sense turning the pages of a life in endless motion, even as the writer remains immobile at her fixed address.

Most clear is her ability to express her feelings in ways that makes them seem like our feelings, something she does even when she’s being catty or unfair. In addition to the danger of the Gestapo, Anne had the challenge of living in close quarters with people she didn’t particularly care for, like a dentist who grizzled at giving up the use of a table for a couple of hours so Anne could work on her exercises or her family-tree hobby. Even her mother was difficult company for Anne, in a way that Anne sometimes allows is as much her own fault.

The most problematic co-tenant was Auguste van Pels, the character who appears in my old paperback version of the Diary as Mrs. Van Daan. Given to histrionics and a heightened sensitivity about her treatment from others, she managed to anger Anne a great deal, and accounts for much of the book’s dramatic tension: “There is no question about it, she is an unspeakably disagreeable person,” Anne writes. This was the part that won Winters her Oscar; it’s easy to imagine without even seeing the movie how screeching Shelley would have knocked it out of the park.

The book does follow a certain mundane storyline by necessity. Anne pretty much needs to do nothing but stay quiet and try not to let her fears get to her. She popped valerian pills to alleviate her anxiety, and slept a lot. She also fell in love, a part of the story that apparently gets much play in the dramatic adaptations. For me, it’s probably the book’s only big negative. For a long time she goes on about this boy named Peter in hiding with her, and living in the attic, at first registering her disdain for his nerdy quietness (Anne was a talker). Then something happens, and Peter becomes the all-consuming centerpiece of the Diary’s second half.

Anne’s write-up about their burgeoning love has a kind of superficiality alien from any of the other concerns she addresses. For the first time, she is caught up in tender feelings that seem to resist her efforts to draw them out. “Now we have found each other,” she writes, apparently cribbing from the love fiction she knew.

Near the end of the Diary, Anne indicates in a couple of places that the relationship with Peter has cooled off considerably, ironically because he was more a pessimist about life than she could handle. Also, she was practical enough to realize that she was probably drawn to Peter because he was the only age-appropriate person with compatible body parts to find his way into her world.

The fact Anne is so preoccupied with Peter as the pages of the Diary dwindle down may add to my annoyance over this subplot. You know she’s running out of time, and instead of making ready for her fate she is making out with the boy upstairs. This may be another reason why Anne’s story resonates for others, young love being doomed even in optimal circumstances. For me, it was the other Anne, the journalist, who intrigued.

There’s a passage which is particularly heartbreaking to me, where we observe Anne go through a bout of survivor’s guilt. Peeking outside the window of the secret annex, which was connected to a warehouse in Amsterdam, she could see Jews being led off to what she by then knew was a hard death. She thinks back to a friend she had in school, a girl she calls “Lies” who she imagines was rounded up by the Nazis some time ago. Anne even dreams of Lies, looking at her with haunted eyes, perhaps already dead.

“And Lies, is she still alive?” Anne asks. “What is she doing? Oh, God, protect her and bring her back to us. Lies, I see in you all the time what my lot might have been, I keep seeing myself in your place. Why then should I often be unhappy over what happens here? Shouldn’t I always be glad, contented, and happy, except when I think about her and her companions in distress?”

Hanneli Goslar was indeed captured by the Nazis, and spent 14 months at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she and Anne would meet again. Like most of Bergen-Belsen’s inmates, Anne Frank died there, but Hanneli somehow survived and emigrated to Israel, where she lives to this day, according to Wikipedia, an 88-year-old grandmother of ten. She lives on, too, as the friend of a girl whose has achieved immortality of a different kind. Whether under copyright or not, there is every reason to expect that immortality to continue.