July 12, 2002

4:33 PM

Even though Anne cannot possibly know on her birthday that only a month later she will have to go into hiding, she begins her new diary with the following extremely significant sentence:

"I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support."

60 years ago today, Anne Frank started her diary while in hiding.
posted by mathowie (38 comments total)

Being in a stage production of The Diary Of Anne Frank as a teenager helped to open my eyes to the terrible reality of what the Holocaust really was. I remember the whole cast getting together one night to watch a few documentaries on video, and the whole experience was mind-numbing. Being so close to Anne's words and experiences for close to 3 months was a major influence on me, and continues to be to this day. Thanks for pointing this out, Matt.
posted by toddshot at 4:45 PM on July 12, 2002

Her name came up in another context recently--Dutch historians are reopening investigations into who made the anonymous phone call which led the Nazis to the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family on a warm summer evening in 1944.
Also, there is this MSNBC story.
posted by y2karl at 4:59 PM on July 12, 2002

she was so young but such an excellent writer...one can only imagine what sort of novel she would've penned had things been different.
posted by mcsweetie at 5:03 PM on July 12, 2002

And yet whenever someone has suggested that her story might be a fraud, penned by the man who "discovered" her writings, the cries of outrage are really impressive.

When cornered about the lack of real evidence, and after her proponents have screamed themselves silly with cries of "holocaust denier!" and "Nazi apologist!", even they will submit Anne might be a "composite" person, and admit that "some" of the artifacts at the Anne Frank museum weren't hers, but were of the 'period.' "But it doesn't matter. There were many people like her and her family."

Also, I would like to mention, that when I was in school, we were taught that "3 million Jews and 3 million others had died in the camps." But I notice that over time, it has become "6 million Jews", with no mention of any others. Well, it's still 45 million killed, total. That would make Jews 13.3% of the casualties.

Or 6.67%. Depending on who's counting.

The bottom line, I suppose, is *why* does the US have a Holocaust Museum? Does it make me "anti-Jewish" to even ask that question?
posted by kablam at 5:25 PM on July 12, 2002

someone should do a modern day update, as in remaking romeo + juliet.

the blog of ann frank.

or maybe not.
posted by xmutex at 5:38 PM on July 12, 2002

one can only imagine what sort of novel she would've penned had things been different.

There is a book called "Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex" which has short stories, part of a novel, and other writings that were not included in the published diary. I found it a nice supplement to the diary.

I own an older edition of the diary, the "definitive" edition, and am going to shell out the big bucks for the "critical" edition one day. The critical edition shows the different edited versions that she altered as she realized the value of her diary to history. My favorite quote of hers is "paper is patient."
posted by girlhacker at 5:39 PM on July 12, 2002

No, kablam, it makes you "anti-Jewish" to laugh at The Livejournal of Anne Frank.

<tries desperately to stifle laughter>
posted by Danelope at 5:42 PM on July 12, 2002

And yet whenever someone has suggested that her story might be a fraud, penned by the man who "discovered" her writings, the cries of outrage are really impressive.
This whole post really saddens me, in more ways than I can say. Anne Frank was the author of the book; what "evidence" is there otherwise? (And the last thing I want to see in this thread is a fight over this, so email me privately if you are dying to answer this question). The camps existed, millions died, and there were many intelligent young people among them. We're lucky that Anne's diary survived; many documents didn't. Thanks to Matt for reminding us of the significance of this date; I'll be thinking about Anne today, and her sister Margot, whose diary was lost, and all the Dutch Jews who went to their deaths.
posted by jokeefe at 5:52 PM on July 12, 2002

kablam: It was approximately 9 million who died in the camps, 6 million of them being Jews. I don't know where you got the 45 million figure from; perhaps that is the number of total deaths that resulted from the war and everything that went on within it.
posted by bingo at 6:41 PM on July 12, 2002

What I've always found somewhat objectionable is the increasing Disneyfication of Anne by her family trust ... ironically at odds with the actual Disney corporation last year when ABC aired a rather affecting (I admit it, I cried) but mildly warts-and-all telepicture about Frank that her foundation was not very pleased with.

(Sidenote: I *do* continue to find it strange that America has a Jewish Holocaust museum when what we really ought to have is some sort of official stone-set hand-wringing over slavery, since that is by far our special shame.)
posted by donkeyschlong at 6:43 PM on July 12, 2002

Despite kablam's needlessly inflammatory formulation, the controversy over the authenticity of Anne Frank's diary is always worth a look, if only for the glimpse into the Nazis' lingering effect on certain kinds of speech in Europe [news story posted on a revisionist site, if that offends]. It is possible to discuss difficult issues of authorship, alternate versions, selective editing and missing pages thoughtfully, although kablam doesn't seem interested in that here.

The bottom line, I suppose, is *why* does the US have a Holocaust Museum?

That's your "bottom line"? Yeesh. Why do we have a National Museum of Asian Art? Or a National Zoo that keeps pandas? It's called the world, kablam. It's interesting and worth learning about, and a highly organized group of American Jews made this particular piece of it into a museum.

donkeyschlong: agreed on the need for a national slavery museum. And have you read Cynthia Ozick on the diary? She apparently agreed with you about the way it's been "kitschified."
posted by mediareport at 7:27 PM on July 12, 2002

What bothers me is this: memorializing the Holocaust is treated as a kind of immunization against evil. Like we've now gone and seen the glass boxes filled with the shoes of the Jewish victims and been horrified, had a good cry, see what good people we are. I feel sickened by the slogan 'Never Again' - how can anyone dare say that when the community of nations has stood by and done nothing to stop several genocides since 1945 (Biafra, Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans)? 'Remembering' the Holocaust has a moral value on its own terms, I don't dispute that, but I don't see that it has led to any real commitment to stop ethnic and racially based murder. It's depressing.
posted by crunchburger at 7:57 PM on July 12, 2002

I agree completely, crunch.
posted by donkeyschlong at 7:59 PM on July 12, 2002

kablam also doesn't seem to feel that museums made out of, or portraying, specific locations are authentic unless all the items there are certified to have been used by the persons who lived there. Frankly, that's ridiculous -- most museums are lucky to get the building. The question is one of dishonesty: if, as kablam says, the museum is clear that some of the pieces dressing up a room are simply representative of the period, where is the harm? Do they all have to have Anne Frank's fingerprints?

Pfaugh.

There's a legitimate debate on whether the Holocaust has become commodified, commercialized, ritualized. In Israel especially, what's cynically called Holocaust tourism, death-camp tourism revolves around the annual ritual of school trips to Auschwitz -- an attraction with an uncomfortable relationship with its setting, a museum which has a gift shop. We can't forget; we shouldn't. But the economics of remembering can be non-trivial. Here in America we handle these things a certain way.
posted by dhartung at 8:24 PM on July 12, 2002

when what we really ought to have is some sort of official stone-set hand-wringing over slavery, since that is by far our special shame.

It hasn't been built yet for the same reason that the Germans still haven't decided on an appropriate Holocaust memorial, I think. dhartung, thanks for the eloquent post about the debate over the ways in which we remember and misremember the Holocaust. It reminded me of Claude Lantzman's assertion that any attempt to portray the Holocaust in fiction was, if not immoral, doomed to failure. I don't have the quote in front of me, so that's an approximation. I believe he was writing about Schindler's List.
posted by jokeefe at 8:40 PM on July 12, 2002

Last week, my mom attended the 80th birthday party for a friend she's known for 30 years. When we'd go to this lady's greenhouse to buy plants, you could see her concentration camp tatoo as she handed you your beautiful flower. When I was in seventh or eighth grade, I got to have a discussion with her about how she came to the decision not to have the tatoo removed. I think I'd rather have kids read something like "The Diary of Anne Frank" than give them a personal memory of one of those unspeakable tatoos.

Making the Holocaust kitschy or trivial defeats the point, but how painful do we have to make things in order to get the point across? I watched one of my college roommates (and about half the other people in her class) start sinking into a rather significant state of depression when a professor tried teaching "The History of the Holocaust" as a demanding, semester-long course. Even students who weren't in the class started to be affected, and everyone reached the point where they had to either walk away or break into tears as people described what they were finding. It was a very long semester watching students alternate between throwing their required materials down because they couldn't take it anymore, and then suddenly go back and obsessively read incredible amounts of horrifying material ... Subjecting all undergraduates to an academically rigorous, semester-long study of the Holocaust like this would be a serious mistake.

Anyone else seeing that popup window on the web with the Nizkor Holocaust search engine?

We've built our monument to slavery. It's the ever-expanding cell blocks of black men and the tears of our AIDS researchers and medical people who are working in Africa-- heartbreak enough for now.
posted by sheauga at 8:50 PM on July 12, 2002

dhartung: The question is one of dishonesty: if, as kablam says, the museum is clear that some of the pieces dressing up a room are simply representative of the period, where is the harm? Do they all have to have Anne Frank's fingerprints?

I don't know if you've been to the Anne Frank house; I have, and as I remember there were signs on the walls overtly stating that the rooms were dressed up using the actual ornamentation that was on them when the diary was written. At no time do I remember any indication that I was in a simulation or recreation of any kind.

sheauga: Subjecting all undergraduates to an academically rigorous, semester-long study of the Holocaust like this would be a serious mistake.

Tell me about it. I had to look at those pictures and read those books in Hebrew school, year after year, beginning when I was about 10. By the time I was in college, I was about as desensitized to the information as I could get...which was surely the opposite of the intended effect. But you can't stay in shock forever (although some seem to try).
posted by bingo at 9:33 PM on July 12, 2002

The bottom line, I suppose, is *why* does the US have a Holocaust Museum?

There are Holocaust Museums all around the country, as The Museum of Tolerance in LA, dedicated to the exposure of intolerance to various persecuted groups, in the hope of educating through research to raise the conscience of its visitors to accept the humanity of all people. There is a lot of Jewish support for this type of education, as to most liberal causes, and ample historical material from Jewish history. As the US is a leading proponent of the concept of tolerance, it's understandable why the US officially aligns itself with its education.

Does it make me "anti-Jewish" to even ask that question?

It makes you nothing, to ask that question. Merely a cheap shot based either on your ignorance, or a priviliged position, or on your being a pitiable sociopath who cannot identify with the pains of "others".
posted by semmi at 9:55 PM on July 12, 2002

[1] Obligatory pile-on of kablam. You sound like a Holocaust denier. Want to come out and say it?

[2] In mediareport's link, this caught my eye:

Amsterdam District Court ruled that anyone found guilty of denying the diary's authenticity can be fined 25,000 guilders ($A21,225).

Anyone else get a cold chill reading that? Heaven knows America has its problems, but I *heart* the 1st Amendment.

[3] America has a Holocaust Museum because we have a politically active and influential Jewish community. Germany doesn't have one because they murdered theirs half a century ago. Also because it's too humiliating for them, the same reason America doesn't have a slavery museum. Maybe Germany could build one for us?

[4] Make an effort to go to the Holocaust Museum if you can. Stalin once famously said that a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. I think part of the point of the Holocaust Museum is to turn that '7 million' statistic back into seven million individual tragedies, to make you think of the Holocaust not as a historical abstraction, but as your brother, your cousin, your best friend being murdered, over and over and over again. I visited it for the first time about a year ago, and wrote it up here. [self-link]
posted by Slithy_Tove at 10:08 PM on July 12, 2002

Germany has a Holocaust museum under construction, in Berlin, set to open later this year.
posted by bingo at 10:53 PM on July 12, 2002

The images of the holocaust were my first encounter with horror on a grand scale. Only later would I learn of Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Pinochet. The stories and photos, once seen, are indelible.

I think kablam's questions are fair and there is no reason to shut him down as a 'Holocaust denier' The museum, the memorial is not the same thing as the event. You can question the museum's relevance and its existence just as you can question concentration-camp gift shops.

Philip Gourevitch would agree with crunchburger:
"Rwanda had presented the world with the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews ... The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good."

I appreciated crunchburger's post. I too find the phrase 'Never again' extremely distasteful. It made me realize what I most dislike about the concept of institutionalized grief - that like all human institutions it can be so easily politicized. The museum shouldnt exist because there are politically active Jews to make it happen - in an ideal world (which this is not) the museum would have been built by humans in the memory of other humans who died. Is the Holocaust museum to stand for that particular genocide or for all genocides? If the former, then we have a lot more museum-building to do.
posted by vacapinta at 11:02 PM on July 12, 2002

I know it's almost a tourism cliche, but visiting Anne Frank's hiding place in Amsterdam stunned us all. Actually seeing the small space where these people hid--and had to be silent all day, and stay away from the windows--just above some of the most busy, bustling, active and fun streets of a wonderful city. And at the very end of the tour, as you walk through a room that you may think is just the way out--there it is. In a small case in the middle of the room, the small book with an orange-and-red plaid cover that was Anne's actual diary, surrounded by editions of the published version translated into dozens of languages. It was both sobering and inspiring.
posted by GaelFC at 11:05 PM on July 12, 2002

I don't think Anne Frank's diary is a hoax or forgery but it always appeared to me as a reader that Frank herself had introduced a great deal of fantasy into the proceedings. There must have been thousands of Jews in Holland going through the exact same struggles as the Frank family but Frank's diary is the one that survived. Why? Because her writing style is so unique. It's not like most girls' diaries.

By the way, I'm not saying the Holocaust didn't happen - of course it did - just that surely there must be more insightful historical documents out there than Anne Frank's diary.
posted by skylar at 11:40 PM on July 12, 2002

Is the Holocaust museum to stand for that particular genocide or for all genocides? If the former, then we have a lot more museum-building to do.

Done, done and done.As to how many more we will need...

Canada has debated the question, too.
posted by y2karl at 12:03 AM on July 13, 2002

Holocaust diaries of young people
posted by mecran01 at 5:27 AM on July 13, 2002

They are buiulding the The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. Not a slavery museum, but somehow I don't think they'll shy away from it.
posted by Mick at 6:20 AM on July 13, 2002

Anne Frank's Diary was the first holocaust piece I ever read, probably because of the innocence in her psychological pondering. It's a "clean" read; her lack of knowledge of the truly gruesome aspects of genocide, makes it a great book for kids and those unwilling to deal with the nitty-gritty details of sicko "doctors" and violently intrusive mindgames that made "The Final Solution" work like such a well-oiled machine. Fragments of Isabella is a more horrific account of a girl's trip to freedom, from capture to escape. It seems to be a very accurate memoir, and any other genocidal study can parallel this account easily.
posted by Quixoticlife at 6:31 AM on July 13, 2002

Does it make me "anti-Jewish" to even ask that question?
It makes you nothing, to ask that question. Merely a cheap shot based either on your ignorance, or a priviliged position, or on your being a pitiable sociopath who cannot identify with the pains of "others".
He could also be a Holocaust denier. Or a particularly sad, pathetic troll. Or both.

I know it's almost a tourism cliche, but visiting Anne Frank's hiding place in Amsterdam stunned us all.
He did -- it stuns all the visitors who actually have a heart.
About "tourism cliches": the Sistine Chapel is one, just like the Louvre. It doesn't make them less beautiful. I don't care if Anne Frank's house is a Amsterdam cliche -- it doesn't make the visit less heartbreaking

And Matt, thanks for reminding us
posted by matteo at 6:41 AM on July 13, 2002

Well, to answer succinctly:

1) No, I am not a Holocaust denier. In fact, my formal training is as a historian, specializing in the 19th-20th Centuries.
2) I see nothing special, unique or different in the horrific mass deaths of Jews as compared to those of Russians, Cambodians, Armenians, Romanians, Poles, Germans, French, Czechs, Hungarians, Arabs, Chinese, Yugoslavians, Koreans, Communists, Homosexuals or the innumerable "others" who have been slaughtered in the last century. If there is something inherently "superior" about Jews, please let me know how racist you are.
3) I do, however, see Americans as being abysmally ignorant about history, and having a "white-tower" attitude about the rest of the world. I was especially moved by the tale of children made distraught by a course in the Holocaust, because they had been shielded from horror all their lives. How very ironic that what moved them so deeply is *not* something special, but is indeed all too common.
4) And at last, a warning: if you ever chance to visit Dachau, be prepared to look at America. It is a place that looks like a high school quad in the middle of suburbia. It was run by people who were much like Americans are today. Educated yet ignorant. Vigorous yet corrupt. All too willing to "give" or "take away" the humanity of others.
Before you deny it, consider the remarks you have made at me.
posted by kablam at 9:22 AM on July 13, 2002

bingo: I have not been to the museum. Kablam stated "some" of the artifacts at the Anne Frank museum weren't hers, but were of the 'period.' which implied that the museum stated upfront something approximating his wording. Your reporting of the museum's stating categorically that "actual ornamentation" was used would, if kablam's statement is also accurate, conflict with established professional museum practices.
posted by dhartung at 11:54 PM on July 13, 2002

kablam: if you are not a Holocaust denier, then my apologies. But the way you phrased your post, seeming to raise FUD about whether 6-7 million Jews really perished, and then questioning why there is a Holocaust museum in America, set red flags waving.

I agree, that the Holocaust was neither more nor less bad than the many other genocides the world has known. I think it occupies our attention, and acts as the prototype for genocide in general for two reasons:

First, it happened not to an obscure rural people without a voice, but to one of the most highly educated, articulate, and wealthy peoples in the world, who were already undergoing, in Zionism, a renaissance of ethnic pride and consciousness.

Second, it was done not by semi-literate thugs in third-world backwater, of whom one might expect such behavior, but by the Germans, arguably the most educated, scientifically advanced, and highly cultured nation in the world at that time.

The horror and mystery of the Holocaust to Western intellectuals is that it was done to people like them, by people like them. If the Germans could descend so far, and even the Jews, wealthy, articulate and educated, were not safe, who among us might not also perpetrate such a horror, or be its victim? It makes intellectuals question their core values: if learning and culture didn't save the Germans from being monsters or the Jews from being their victims, are they really as valuable as we think they are?

And no, I don't have an answer to this question.
posted by Slithy_Tove at 6:22 AM on July 14, 2002

dhartung: It's not my reporting that would conflict with established museum practices, it's the practices of the museum. It's been about nine years, so I could be wrong about the displays, but I don't think so.
posted by bingo at 7:23 AM on July 14, 2002

bingo: well duh. Not having been there myself, I was RELYING on your reporting being accurate. What do I have other than your word?

Slithy: impeccable summation.
posted by dhartung at 10:05 AM on July 14, 2002

Once again, I do not deny that the Holocaust took place. I only said that the number of Jewish victims had doubled, at least in the usual description of the Holocaust, since I had gone to school. Three million "others" became three million Jews. One heck of an accounting error on someone's part. Also an insult to the Catholics, Communists, Homosexuals, Gypsies and the rest who died alongside the Jews.

As far as "semi-literate thugs in third-world backwater(s)", I can use the Russian Stalinist horrors as an example. Were you aware that in 1900, Russia was the 4th most industrialized country in the world? That Lenin had introduced compulsory education, on the European model (after one mistake) early on in his reign? Perhaps 25 million people died under Stalin. Solzhenitsyn is a great read.

I claim as a friend an ethnic Khmer (not a "Rouge"), a highly-literate schoolteacher who speaks five languages. He and his family are just a few of the surviving elites, tens of thousands, who perished in "The Killing Fields."

Perhaps the 1/4th of Poland that perished in the war--white people, educated, polite, Catholic, are more sympathetic to a westerner.

My grand total point is that Jews were a tiny minority of the peoples who suffered during the war and throughout the century. They are not special, and neither were the Nazis that killed them--Germans, for the most part, who had *always* hated the Jews, not victims of Goebbels' propaganda machine as some have suggested. The combat SS ("Waffen") were the highly-educated. Any scum off the street could be in the "General" (prison camp) SS.

Nor were the "concentration camps" (a US invention) special. Nor was the "ethnic cleansing," as was done to the Yaquis of Mexico around 1910, with packed railroad cars taking a despised minority across the country.

The 'einsatzgruppen' were no different than the Turkish killers of the Armenians.

The Holocaust wasn't the first, it wasn't and won't be the last. It's just *not* special.
posted by kablam at 10:08 AM on July 14, 2002

kablam: I have no problem with most of what you said in your last comment, except the part about the fudged numbers. I'm 31 and my whole life I've been told that it was 6 million Jews and 3 million others (in the camps). What year was it when you were told 3 million? If you're close to my age or younger, I think a strong argument could be made that you were simply misinformed about that specific issue.
posted by bingo at 10:34 AM on July 14, 2002

"I only said that the number of Jewish victims had doubled, at least in the usual description of the Holocaust, since I had gone to school..."

The day of Nine Eleven, the estimated death toll was in the tens of thousands. Anywhere between 25-40K people could have been in the World Trade Center on that day, and the deaths on the planes and in the Pentagon were also uncertain for days or weeks after the event. Thankfully the final number was less than the initial fears. Last I heard the actual number of those confirmed dead or believed to be dead is down to 3,000. Give or take. I don't have exact numbers in front of me. Does this lesser number diminish the importance of this event or the horror imposed upon the free world? No. It's still a horrific number but much better than it could have been, and even at a worst case scenario, the deaths or potential deaths on Nine Eleven were nothing compared to the actual deaths of World War Two. Three words tie these two terrible events together. Why did those people on Nine Eleven die? Because the people who hijacked those planes, and those who directed them, were filled with fear, ignorance and hatred for Americans.

Never again? Ignorance fear and hatred did not die with Auschwitz. Still, as time heals all wounds, so too does it offer a bit of clarity to the past. Over the decades, as more research has been done on the Holocaust, we've gotten more accurate numbers when it comes to the death toll, and more accuracy regarding many other aspects of the historical event. However, as time wears on, there is also a natural erosion to history that causes one to question the accuracy of these details. Part of this erosion is inevitable. As we lose eyewitnesses of the event to death, we are forced to depend on secondary information. There's also many factions attempting to influence this information, or put their own spin on it. The extremes of nazi sympathizers who try to deny the event ever happened, to those with agendas that encourage them to color the tragedy even worse than it was, each pull to distort and taint the actual facts of the events themselves, to the point where some will always question even the most certain information.

There's an old adage that says the victor of a battle gets to write the history. In the case of World War Two that has not completely been accurate. Of course we should never let it happen again, and we must remember these anniversaries or days of rememberance as they come in order to reinforce our resolve, but we must also have the freedom to question the evidence that remains as it is brought before us, and see it in a larger context. The question of whether or not Anne Frank was ever real shouldn't be an issue. The evidence strongly reinforces the fact that there were many like her, and the Diary of Anne Frank allowed an entire world community the ability to put a face and a name to the victims in a way that strengthens that resolve that we never forget and we do what we can to never let it happen again.

Will people die due to such ignorance, fear and hatred? Undoubtedly. Has it happened since? History proves that to be so. Should we consciously allow this? Of course not. Anne Frank's depiction of the events in which she lived are so heartfelt to so many not because of their accuracy, but because despite the darkness of her nights she still could sense an inescapable hope with the morning dawn. It's painful to read and yet uplifting. Anne Frank gave each and every one of us hope that a day will come when we can honestly say never again and mean it. Not just with our hearts and minds but with the evidence of that day's present and future. I for one hope I live to see that breaking dawn.

Again, Matt. Thanks for the reminder. =)
posted by ZachsMind at 11:25 AM on July 14, 2002

Thanks for the reminder Matt - Anne Frank's diary was my first introduction to the horrors that man can perform on his own kind.

Other events in modern history, rather than reducing the importance of the holocaust, only serve as reinforcement to the potential for man to do harm. Whether there were 3 million, 6 million, 45 million or any number is irrelevant (I have heard all of the above numbers and then some) - the fact that these things happened at all is what matters. The holocaust, to me, has always been a symbol of what can happen when the wrong people get into power at the wrong time. I don't think that there are many countries who can point the finger at others and say "well, we never did anything like that here".

In the same way that we all have our special days when we celebrate particular events in history, the history of the holocaust serves as a reminder of what we can achieve if we choose to - we can be evil and destroy lives, we can be good and save lives, we can endure the unthinkable and we can be brave and sacrifice ourselves for the good of others. It may not be any worse than any other *ethnic cleansing* event in history, but it has struck a chord around the world and thus serves as an example.

Remember, all it takes for evil to flourish is for good men (and women) to do nothing.
posted by dg at 5:17 PM on July 15, 2002

May I recommend

The Diary of Anne Frank, The Critical Edition

prepared by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, in which "every aspect of the diary -- include Anne's handwriting and the paper used -- is meticulously examined, providing both compelling proof
and historical affirmation of its poignant testament".

(Bantam Doubleday, 1989, ISBN 0-385-24023-6.)


Oh, in the evening when I lie in bed and end my prayers with the words, "Ich danke dir, fur all das Gute and Liebe and Schone," I am filled with joy. Then I think about "das Gute" of going into hiding, of my health, of my whole being, of "das Liebe" of Peter, of that which is still embryonic and impressionable and which we neither of us dare to name or touch, and of "das Schone" which exists in the world; the world and Nature, Beauty, and everything, everything exquisite and fine.

I don't think then of all the misery, but think of the beauty that still remains.

--Anne Frank


My heart shatters, reading those words.

Rest in the arms of love and peace, Anne Frank and family... and all families touched by the lies and horror of racism and warfare.
posted by fold_and_mutilate at 8:48 PM on July 16, 2002