March 1959
A THIRD childhood… This book completes all that we are likely to know of Anne Frank. Her diary and the play made from it contain her account of the twenty-five months spent shut up in hiding in the Amsterdam office until her family were betrayed and sent to Auschwitz. Mr. Schnabel has carefully collected evidence from forty-two people - including her father - who knew her before, during and after her imprisonment. He follows the trail to Belsen where she dies a few days after her sister.
Anne Frank may have become a symbol of the millions of Jews who met her fate, but what emerges from this book is the extraordinary quality of Anne herself. The diaries showed her to be gifted, observant, touching, lively and unusually honest with herself: these accounts show the nature of her spirit to the very end. As one witness remarks: ‘she knew who she was’. Thus in one of the round-ups when selections were being made for the gas chamber, Anne, naked, her head shaved, walked into the glare of light encouraging her older sister and stood looking at her mother, still and straight with her unclouded face before she was moved on.
She never lost her compassion for others: she never, as one witness describes it, ‘lost her face’. She endured the misery and horror without either indifference or despair: as her teacher had earlier said; ‘she was able to experience more than other children, if you know what I mean’. She was sixteen when she died, and both the nature of her experience and the way in which she received it, makes this book worthy of record.