Anne Frank

Annelies Marie Frank is born in Frankfurt on 12 June 1929, the second daughter of Otto and Edith Frank. Her sister Margot is three years older. The family is Jewish, comfortable and, by its own sense of itself, thoroughly German. Then the ground shifts. The Nazi party takes power in 1933, and a state that had guaranteed its citizens' rights begins removing them from some of those citizens. Jews are pushed out of public employment, universities and whole professions. To persecute a minority by law rather than by mob is slower and quieter than open violence, and harder to resist, because each new rule looks survivable on its own. Otto Frank does not wait to see where the sequence ends. He leaves for Amsterdam in 1933, and by early 1934 the whole family has followed. There he builds a business selling pectin, the setting agent for jam, and later one dealing in herbs and spices. The girls learn Dutch and go to Dutch schools. For six years the Franks are what we would now call a refugee family, and it works. Anne grows up talkative, bookish and quick.

On 10 May 1940 German forces invade the Netherlands. Within five days the Dutch army has surrendered, and the country the Franks fled to is under the government they fled from. What follows is not sudden. It arrives as paperwork. Jews must register. Jewish businesses must be declared and, in time, handed to non-Jews; Otto transfers his firms on paper to trusted colleagues so that they can keep trading. Jewish children are removed from their schools and sent to separate Jewish ones. Then come the exclusions: from trams, parks, cinemas, swimming pools, and from shops outside certain hours. From May 1942 every Jew over the age of six must wear a yellow star sewn to their clothing. Each measure arrives as a decree, and each is obeyed, because the alternative is unclear and the penalty is not. The effect is a life made steadily smaller, until it will fit inside a few rooms. On 12 June 1942, for her thirteenth birthday, Anne is given a small cloth-covered notebook with a red and white checked cover. She begins writing almost at once, addressing her entries to an imagined friend.

Three weeks later the paperwork reaches the family. On 5 July 1942 a call-up notice arrives for Margot, then sixteen, ordering her to report for a labour camp in Germany. Notices of this kind are how the deportations begin: people are not seized in the street but summoned by letter. Otto has been quietly preparing for months, and the family does not comply. The next morning, in heavy rain, wearing several layers of clothing because luggage would attract attention, the Franks walk across Amsterdam to Otto's premises at 263 Prinsengracht and disappear into the rooms behind and above the offices. The Dutch call the back part of a canal house the achterhuis; in English it has always been the Secret Annexe. The move is clandestine in the fullest sense: they leave an unmade bed and a note hinting that they have fled to Switzerland, so that neighbours and police look in the wrong direction. Within a week they are joined by Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their son Peter, and in November by a dentist, Fritz Pfeffer. Eight people, behind a door that will shortly be hidden by a bookcase.

The rules of the annexe are set by the warehouse below. From the start of the working day until six in the evening, while staff who know nothing work one floor away, the eight cannot run water, use the lavatory, walk in shoes or cough without smothering it. They speak in whispers or not at all. The windows stay covered even when daylight would be safe, because a moved curtain is a question someone might ask. In the evenings the annexe expands a little: they come down into the empty offices and listen to the BBC and to Dutch broadcasts from London. Their survival depends entirely on four employees of Otto's firm — Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler — who know everything and say nothing. Each becomes a benefactor in the exact sense: someone who gives at real cost to themselves. They buy food with black-market ration cards, bring books, newspapers and birthday presents, and maintain downstairs the fiction that nothing is happening upstairs. Miep Gies spent the rest of her long life refusing the word hero, insisting she had done only what any decent person would do. Very few did.

Confinement of this kind does not produce saints, and Anne never pretends it does. Eight people who did not choose one another are pressed together for two years with nowhere to go, and she records the results without flattery, including her own share in them. There are arguments about food, about noise, about who has insulted whom, about whether a girl of thirteen should take orders from a dentist she barely knows. She is sharp about the adults, and sharpest about her mother, with whom she cannot find a way to be gentle; she is also increasingly hard on herself, and returns to her earlier judgements to soften or dispute them. Underneath the frictions runs real deprivation. The food worsens until there are long stretches of spoiled potatoes and little else; everyone falls ill and no doctor can be called; burglaries in the warehouse leave them rigid with fear. What is striking, though, is how much of the diary is ordinary — books, films, growing up, a cautious attachment to Peter van Pels, and a serious ambition to write.

In March 1944 the annexe hears a broadcast from London. Gerrit Bolkestein, education minister of the Dutch government in exile, appeals to ordinary people to preserve their diaries and letters so that the occupation can one day be documented from below. Anne takes this seriously and professionally. She starts rewriting her diary on loose sheets, cutting, sharpening, giving the others invented names, shaping two years of entries into a book she means to publish; she even has a title, the Dutch word for the back house. She is fifteen, and now consciously producing testimony rather than a private journal. On the morning of 4 August 1944 a car stops outside 263 Prinsengracht. Officers of the German security police, with Dutch collaborators, climb the stairs, pull the bookcase aside and arrest all eight, with Kleiman and Kugler. Searching for valuables, they empty a briefcase onto the floor and leave Anne's papers lying there as worthless. Miep Gies gathers them up, puts them in a drawer and does not read them. How the police came to know has never been established.

Who informed on the annexe, if anyone did, is still unknown. Repeated investigations since the war have produced no answer historians accept. A widely publicised cold-case study published in 2022 named an Amsterdam notary as the probable informant; specialists attacked its evidence so heavily that the publisher withdrew the book, and the case is not proved. It is also possible that no one betrayed them at all, and that the raid grew out of an inquiry into ration-card fraud in the warehouse. What happens next is documented. The eight are deported along the route taken by roughly a hundred thousand Jews sent out of the Netherlands, of whom only a few thousand return. They go first to Westerbork, a transit camp in the north-east, and then, on 3 September 1944, on the last train from the country to Auschwitz. The family is separated on arrival. Edith Frank dies in Auschwitz in January 1945, and Hermann van Pels is killed there. Fritz Pfeffer dies in northern Germany at the end of 1944; Peter van Pels at Mauthausen in May 1945; Auguste van Pels in the spring of 1945, in circumstances never established.

In late autumn 1944 Anne and Margot are moved to Bergen-Belsen, a camp without gas chambers and without food, water, sanitation or medicine, where typhus is spreading through grossly overcrowded huts. Both sisters die there within days of each other, in February or March 1945; the exact dates are unknown. British troops reach Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945, weeks later; what they find there is filmed and broadcast, and becomes the way much of Britain first grasps what the camps were. Anne was fifteen. Of the eight who hid in the annexe, one survives: Otto Frank, liberated from Auschwitz by Soviet forces in January 1945. He learns of Edith's death on the journey home and reaches Amsterdam in June, still searching for his daughters; confirmation comes in July, from a woman who had been with them at Belsen. Only then does Miep Gies fetch the papers and hand them over, unread. Otto edits the material — combining her original entries with her rewritten sheets, and omitting passages about her mother and her body that he judged private — and after several rejections a Dutch publisher issues Het Achterhuis in the summer of 1947.

The English translation appears in 1952; the diary has since been translated into something like seventy languages and read in the tens of millions. The house at 263 Prinsengracht, once due for demolition, was saved by public campaign and opened as a museum in 1960; over a million visitors a year now climb the same narrow stairs. Editions from the 1980s onwards restore what Otto removed. Almost as old as the diary is the claim that it is a forgery: because one credible witness is harder to argue with than a statistic, denial needs it to be false. The Dutch state institute for war documentation answered in the most literal way available, commissioning a forensic examination of the manuscripts — handwriting, ink, paper, glue — and publishing the results in 1986 in a vast critical edition. The diary was authenticated in detail, and the denial continued anyway, which tells you what denial is for. A harder question remains, and it is not asked in bad faith. Six million people were murdered, and the mind cannot hold six million; it can hold one girl. Does that voice open the atrocity to us, or give us somewhere comfortable to stop looking? Anne Frank left a book about being alive. What was done to her is not in it.