SPEAKING SKILL:

Discussion Points:
Task 6: Read the article given below and frame ten questions based on it.

Anne, from Diarist to Icon

How did Anne Frank's diary become one of the most-read books in the world? And how did
Anne become an international icon? Read here how Anne's diary still inspires millions of
readers.

-Jeffrey Shandler

How did a diary—abandoned in a fragmentary state, and for five years known to exist by only
a few people—become one of the world’s most widely read books? And how did its author
become a figure of international renown, despite having died two years before the book was
first issued? As remarkable as Anne Frank’s diary is, the story of its publication and its
engagement by millions of readers around the world over the past seven decades is equally
powerful.

Writing her diary

Anne began her diary in June 1942, when she turned thirteen years old, just weeks before
her family went into hiding in the annex behind the business office of her father, Otto, at
263 Prinsengracht, in order to escape the persecution of Jews in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

She continued keeping her diary during the following two years while in hiding with her
parents, her sister, and four other Jews. Responding to an appeal by the Dutch government-
in-exile to people in the Netherlands to document the Nazi occupation, Anne started
rewriting her diary during the spring of 1944.

Envisioning it as a work for publication, she transformed her original entries into a kind of
epistolic novel. Anne’s reworked diary remained incomplete at the time of her arrest,
 together with the other Jews with whom she was hiding, by
the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) on August 4, 1944.

Otto receives Anne’s diary

Shortly afterwards, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, two of the

people who helped hide Anne and the others, discovered her
diary, notebooks, and other papers in the annex. The
following year, after it was certain that she had died during
the war, Miep gave all of Anne’s writings to her father, the
only member of her immediate family who had survived the
Holocaust.

Otto Frank found his young daughter’s writing profoundly

moving and remarkably insightful, and he soon shared some
excerpts from her diary with his mother and a few close
friends. Persuaded to publish the diary as a book, Otto compiled a version of the text from
the diary’s two versions as well as some of the short stories Anne had written while in hiding.

The Diary of a Young Girl is a hit

Het Achterhuis (The Annex, Anne’s proposed title for the book) was first issued in 1947 in
an edition of 3,000 copies. The diary was translated from Dutch into more widely read
languages shortly thereafter, beginning with French and German in 1950 and English in 1952.

Within a few years, a dramatization of Anne’s diary was staged on Broadway, then performed
internationally and filmed in Hollywood. The Franks’ former hiding place at 263 Prinsengracht
became an official museum—the Anne Frank House—in 1960. By then, Anne’s life story had
become widely familiar around the world, establishing her as the most well known victim of
Nazi persecution.

On the left: Otto Frank in 1954 in Anne’s room in the Secret Annex. On the right: the writers and director of
the play ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’, which opened on Broadway in 1955.

Photo collection: Anne Frank Stitching, Amsterdam/ Copyright: Maria Austria/MAI/Amsterdam

Otto and the memory of Anne

Otto Frank’s role as caretaker of Anne’s diary was definitive. On one hand, he was dedicated
to his daughter’s life and work being widely known through translations of the diary (into
more than thirty languages by 1970) and its dramatization. His motive for doing so was
rooted in a commitment to advocating for universal human rights as a response to the
Holocaust.

Both Anne and her father understood Jewishness not as inimical to universalism but rather
as being realized in its embrace. Thus, Otto envisioned the Anne Frank House as both a site
of Holocaust remembrance and an educational institution, where ‘young people of all nations…
could seek ways to work for peace.’

This led to the establishment of an International Youth Centre at the Anne Frank House,
which for several years organized annual ‘meetings and conferences, at which the problems
of discrimination, democracy, cross-cultural communication, religion, and international
cooperation are discussed.’

On the other hand, Otto was committed to a close regulation of how Anne’s life and work
would appear in public. Under his aegis, there was only one licensed drama based on the diary,
and permission to excerpt Anne’s writing in books, plays, or films was granted on a very
limited basis. Only a small number of sites or institutions dedicated to Anne’s memory were
sanctioned, and there was to be no official Anne Frank memorabilia.

A multi-faceted icon

As a result of this extensive embrace, Anne Frank has become an iconic figure, whose
paradigmatic status is as manifold as it is widespread. She has been invoked variously as ‘an
archetypal Jew, Holocaust victim, human rights champion, girl, adolescent writer, diarist, or
feminist voice.’

The values invested in Anne’s life and work reflect larger developments in how people across
the spectrum of nationalities, religions, and ideologies have grappled with the significance of
the Holocaust. Greater interest in studying the writings of young women has prompted
reappraisals of Anne’s diary as a literary landmark.

And the inspiration that activists have found in Anne’s life and work have made her an
emblematic figure of human rights, notwithstanding the fact that her murder at the age of
fifteen cut short her potential of becoming a public advocate for social justice.

Lessons for the living

Today, when people read Anne’s diary or visit the building in which most of it was written,
they not only encounter an extraordinary work, created during the Holocaust. They also
discover that they are joining a vast international body of this book’s readers and the
museum’s visitors, each of whom forges an individual understanding of Anne’s life, which she
revealed with deeply personal candour in her writing.
There is much to learn from the story of this one young woman amid the terrible times in
which she lived and died. In addition, the wealth of responses that Anne Frank has inspired
is itself instructive, revealing the many possibilities of finding meaning at this powerful
confluence of remembrance and imagination.