Anne Frank’s Diary Hauntingly Humanised the Holocaust

‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ was first published in the Netherlands on June 25, 1947.

 Anne Frank stamps. (Photo: iStockphotos)

(This piece is from The Quint’s archives and was first published on 25 June 2015. It is being reposted to mark the anniversary of The Diary of a Young Girl — popularly known as The Diary of Anne Frank — being first published in 1947)

On Humanising The Story

One of the first lessons I learnt in The Quint newsroom was to humanise the story.

Human tragedy could be stirringly narrated, I was told, enough to move humans forever, if only we could tell its story through a human perspective.

The horror of the Holocaust was captured in the diary of teenager Anne Frank in a most poignant manner.

Snapshots from a Too-Short Life

The Diary of Anne Frank was first published in the Netherlands on 25 June, 1947. A young Anne’s feckless innocence gave way very soon to the trepidatious adult world, when she wrote about her experiences hiding from the Nazis during World War II.

The Impossible World of Anne Frank

Born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, Anne Frank was given a red checkered diary on her 13th birthday. Frank, who wanted to be a journalist and writer, had hoped that her diary would be published as a novel after the war.

Anne Frank wrote her diary from June 12, 1942 to August 1, 1944. A page from her book. (Photo: annefrank.org) 

Unfortunately, the book was published posthumously but the book became historic, to be read by millions for years.

Crossed Swords and Pens

The hiding place where the Franks hid. (Photo: annefrank.org)

The Franks were among 600,000 Jews who were killed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

The Franks fled to Netherlands from Germany, but after German occupation of Amsterdam, they hid behind a bookcase in a secret attic to escape from the Nazis. During the time, the young Anne wrote amidst bomb blasts and gun fires. Her first hand account of the Holocaust made Anne the journalist she had always desired to be; nay, even more remarkable.

To me, however, this apparently inconsequential diary by a child... stammered out in a child’s voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence at Nuremberg put together.
– Article Children’s voice, by historian Jan Romein in Het Parool, April 3, 1946

The Word Lives On

Anne Frank, who was then just fifteen years old, was captured along with her family by the Nazi Gestapo, acting on tip from a Dutch informer. Anne’s diary survived the war, but she perished in a Nazi death camp.

Writing must have provided the young Anne with resilience, for she once wrote, “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”