The Diary of Anne Frank
Anyone who has traipsed around the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam struggles to believe that an entire family managed to survive and remain hidden for more than two years in the cramped upper floors. During that time they never went out, depended on the kindness of Dutch friends who risked their lives for them on a daily basis, and might have survived there until liberation if they hadn't been betrayed by an informant.
Anne, along with most of her family, perished in Bergen-Belsen, but the diary the enterprising teenager left behind would become a major bestseller and a constant source of contention.
In this five-part dramatisation of her story, broadcast on successive nights, Anna's poignant, funny and ultimately heartbreaking story is nicely re-told, and it's a telling microcosm of the millions of little tragedies that make up the Holocaust.
Anne Frank is played by Ellie Kendrick, and in this opening episode it's June 1942, and Amsterdam is under Nazi occupation. Anne, a Jewish girl, is celebrating her 13th birthday. Among her birthday presents, she is given a diary, in which she starts to write immediately. Days later, call-up papers arrive for her 16-year-old sister, Margot, prompting her parents, Otto and Edith, to hasten their plan to go into hiding from the Nazis.
The family moves into a secret annex at the back of Otto Frank's workplace. The Franks' helpers, Mr Kleiman, Mr Kugler, Bep and Miep, are the only people to know of their location. The Franks are soon joined by another family, Mr and Mrs Van Daan, and their teenage son, Peter. Anne doesn't think much of Peter, but decides she must try to be pleasant to him to keep the peace. She writes more and more in her birthday diary, detailing life in the annex and her feelings about her companions.
What's particularly touching about Anne's diary is its mix of teenage innocence and the looming shadow of the tragedy outside, and the fact that we all know how her story ends makes her recollections the more poignant.
The only Frank who survived the concentration camps was Anne's father, Otto. When he got back to Holland, he was delighted to discover that his daughter's diary had survived, and it was he who managed to get it published in 1947. When it was translated into English and other languages in 1950, it became a major international bestseller, but soon after the attacks on it began.
In an early example of the kind of Holocaust denial that would become depressingly common, various right-wing groups and Nazi-lovers insisted that the book was a forgery. The style was too accomplished to have been written by a teenager -- it had been concocted after the war by Jewish propagandists. This nonsense persisted for many years, until the original manuscript was forensically verified.
It's still read widely today, and it was another celebrated Jewish writer who best summed up its importance.
"One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did, but whose faces have remained in the shadows," wrote Primo Levi. "Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live."
- Paul Whitington
