IN AMSTERDAM, ON THE SUNNY AND OTHERWISE QUIET morning of Friday, August 4, 1944, a car pulled up in front of the Opekta warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht.
That is all one needs to write, and already the reader knows who was hiding in the attic and the fate about to befall them. We know it more than sixty years later, at a historical moment when it is often noted how little history we remember. We know the reason why we know, but it bears repeating lest we take it for granted that we know because a little girl kept a diary. Of all the roundups, the deportations, the murders committed during that time, this arrest is the one that has been investigated most closely, the one about which memories have been most thoroughly searched. It is the one we know about, if we know about any at all.
The car arrived without sirens, without haste. Upstairs in the attic, Otto Frank was correcting Peter van Pels’s English dictation. No one in the office below was alarmed by the appearance of the car until a fat man appeared, and, speaking in Dutch, ordered everyone to be quiet.
One of the men who got out of the car wore the uniform of a sergeant in the Jewish Affairs Section of the Gestapo in Holland. The officer was an Austrian, his subordinates Dutch civilians employed by the Nazis. They entered the spice and pectin warehouse, then went up to the office, where they found the Opekta staff. They demanded to know who was in charge. Viktor Kugler replied that he was. After searching the storerooms, the police pulled aside the bookcase that covered the door to the attic where, they had obviously been informed, Jews were hiding.
The first to climb the narrow, nearly vertical stairs, Kugler told Edith Frank, “The Gestapo is here.” She stood still and said nothing.
The Gestapo officer and his men entered the secret annex and found the Jews, as they had expected, though they would not have known—as we do now—whom they would find. Three men, two women, a young man, a young woman, a girl.
In a few more years, no one alive will have witnessed the scene of a Nazi arresting a Jew. There have been, and will be, other arrests and executions for the crime of having been born into a particular race or religion or tribe. But the scene of Nazis hunting down Jews is unlikely to happen again, though history teaches us never to say never. This will be the arrest that future generations can visualize, like a scene in a book. They will have to remind themselves that it happened to real people, though these people have survived, and will live on, as characters in a book.
In fact this scene is not in the book, but that book’s existence is the reason we know about the arrest. We know that the Austrian officer’s name was Karl Josef Silberbauer. And we know that he was disturbed by the detail of Otto Frank’s military trunk, labeled as the property of Lieutenant Otto Frank, which meant he would have been Sergeant Silberbauer’s superior when both fought in the German army during World War I.
Later, Otto Frank would recall that Silberbauer seemed to snap to attention. For the Austrian, the Jew’s former military rank created a troubling disruption in the simultaneously adrenalinized and business-as-usual theater of arrest.
In a photo from that period, the thirty-three-year-old Silberbauer looks younger than his age. Posed stiffly, with slicked-back hair and a lumpy jaw, as if he has tobacco wadded in both cheeks, he wears a tie and a jacket with a tiny swastika pinned to one lapel. Miep Gies described him as looking neither cruel nor angry, but “as though he might come around tomorrow to read your gas meter or punch your streetcar ticket.”
Silberbauer couldn’t help asking Otto Frank how long all those people could have lived like that, crowded together in an attic behind a bookcase. He was taken aback by the answer: two years and one month. As proof, Otto Frank pointed to the doorway marked with pencil to record his daughters’ growth. Look, he said, his younger daughter had already grown beyond the last mark.
A heartbreaking gesture, maybe less odd than instinctive, since his daughters, Margot and Annelies, were the center of Otto Frank’s life. Those marks, which can still be seen on the wall of the Anne Frank Museum, were what he had to show for the two years in hiding. Possibly, Otto Frank imagined that the pencil lines would kindle, in the Nazi officer, a flicker of humanity.
As we know, they did not.
After the war, Silberbauer returned to Austria, where he was jailed for fourteen months on charges of having roughed up some Communists in 1938. Later he was rehired as a junior inspector on the Vienna police force. In 1963, Simon Wiesenthal tracked him down with the aid of a 1943 telephone directory that listed the names and numbers of all the Gestapo officials who had served in occupied Holland.
Guided by a hunch that Silberbauer might again be working for the Viennese police, Wiesenthal found his quarry when the official newspaper of the Austrian Communist Party reported that Silberbauer was alive and well and, indeed, a cop in Vienna. The Austrian officials launched an investigation to determine the criminality of Silberbauer’s wartime activities. Otto Frank’s statement—that Silberbauer had “done his duty and acted correctly,” that he had been businesslike and even cordial—virtually ended the inquest, which was dropped for lack of evidence, though one might question the ruling that sending eight Jews to a concentration camp, seven of them to their deaths, would be criminal only if performed in an unprofessional manner.
Silberbauer remembered telling Otto Frank that he had a lovely daughter. He recalled her as prettier and older than she looked in the photo that, by the time Wiesenthal found him, was known all over the world. Given that Silberbauer went unpunished, it’s mildly satisfying to imagine the moment he found out that the little girl he’d arrested had become a star.
The suddenly notorious Silberbauer complained to a Dutch reporter that his temporary suspension from the police force was making it hard to pay for the new furniture he’d bought on the installment plan, and that he could no longer use the pass that let him ride the streetcar for free. Asked if he had read Anne Frank’s diary, Silberbauer replied that he had bought it to see if he was in it. Why did he think he might be? He knew what had happened to Anne after he flushed her out of the attic. Did he imagine that, ill and starving, she could have kept up her diary in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, pausing from her labors to record her impressions of Silberbauer?
The reporter suggested that Silberbauer could have been the first to read the book that had been read by millions. To which the Austrian replied, “I never thought of it. Maybe I should have picked it up from the floor.” Wiesenthal concludes this chapter in his memoir by saying of Silberbauer, “Compared to the other names in my files, he is a nobody, a zero. But the figure before the zero was Anne Frank.”
WHAT could Anne have thought when her father directed the Gestapo sergeant to the marks on the doorway? The normally attention-loving girl would doubtless have preferred that her father not focus the policeman’s attention on her. Had she been able to describe this scene, and to make Silberbauer, as he seems to have wished, a character in her book, she might have recorded what came next, the detail of the briefcase, an event that would have caused her more pain and grief than anyone else in the room.
Whatever Silberbauer believed about his job, he would not have wanted to think that his military service involved state-sponsored murder and theft. The search for the valuables must have been a simultaneously uncomfortable and titillating part of his work. Naturally, there was curiosity. How much did the hidden Jews have? But it was also a matter of duty. The money seized in this way was sensibly being used to finance the Jews’ own transportation to new lives, or death, in the east.
The police asked the Jews where their valuables were, and Otto indicated the cupboard where his cash box was kept. Better thieves, professionals, would have brought a bag for the stolen goods. But how would it have looked if the enforcers of Nazi justice carried duffel bags for the swag? We can only be grateful that Silberbauer, forced to improvise, grabbed a briefcase stuffed with papers.
The Jews and their Dutch helpers watched. All of them knew that the briefcase was where Anne kept her diary.
On April 9, there had been a break-in downstairs. The intruders had knocked a hole in the door before being frightened away. Afraid that the police might investigate, the families discussed what to do if capture seemed imminent. Worried that Anne’s diary might be found, and that their helpers would be incriminated, the annex residents briefly considered the possibility of burning the diary. This, and when the police rattled the cupboard door, were my worst moments; not my diary; if my diary goes, I go with it!”
A month later, Anne thought that an overturned vase of carnations had soaked through her papers. Nearly in tears, she was so upset that she began to babble in German and later had little memory of what she had said. According to Margot, she had “let fly something about ‘incalculable loss…. ’” The damage was not so severe as she’d feared, and she hung the damp sheets of paper on a clothesline to dry. Incalculable loss is a phrase that any writer might have used in response to the possibility that a manuscript could have been ruined, yet another indication of how seriously Anne took her work.
Eventually, it was decided that the briefcase containing the diary would be among the things the family took with them if a fire or some other emergency necessitated a hasty escape from the attic. But now the briefcase was being put to a different use. Silberbauer dumped out the papers, along with some notebooks, and handed the satchel to his colleagues to stuff with jewels and cash.
The detail of the briefcase could have come from one of those fairy tales that counsel reflection, patience, morality—lest one wind up like the thoughtless, greedy man or woman (usually the wife) who mistakes the rhinestones for diamonds or cooks the magic fish for dinner. Eventually, Silberbauer realized he’d filled the briefcase with pasteboard and scattered rubies across the attic floor.
But how could he have imagined that what he had discarded—loose sheets of paper, exercise books—was not only a work of literary genius, not only a fortune in disguise, not only a record of the times in which he and its author lived, but a piece of evidence that would lead to the exposure of his role in the Nazis’ war against the Jews, even as so many like him slipped back into their old lives and kept up their furniture payments?
There was no way he could have known what the briefcase contained. How could anyone have suspected that a masterpiece existed between the checked cloth covers of a young girl’s diary?
ALMOST three hours elapsed between Silberbauer’s arrival and that of the closed truck that transported the Jews and two of their Dutch coconspirators to the headquarters of the Security Police.
Only Miep Gies remained. For more than two years, she had brought food and supplies to the Jews and kept up their spirits by helping them maintain some semblance of contact with the outside world. Now, just when the progress of the Allies’ invasion had begun to offer hope, the catastrophe they’d feared had occurred.
In Jon Blair’s documentary, Anne Frank Remembered, Miep comes across as a sensible, dignified woman, overly modest about her English. We intuit that it would never occur to her to boast about the heroism that, for two years, was ordinary life for her and her husband. Her memoir, Anne Frank Remembered, begins, “I am not a hero.” She writes that she was only one person in the “long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did or more—much more.”
Heroic or not, the work took its toll. The bouts of illness—a gastric hemorrhage, fainting, fevers—that plagued the Franks’ helpers are a recurrent motif in the diary, as is the theme of their unflagging good humor: “Never have we heard one word of the burden which we must certainly be to them, never has one of them complained of all the trouble we cause. They all come upstairs every day, talk to the men about business and politics, to the women about food and wartime difficulties, and about newspapers and books with the children.” After Miep attended a party at which two policemen were among the guests, Anne wrote, “You can see that we are never far from Miep’s thoughts, because she memorized the addresses of these men at once, in case anything should happen at some time or other, and good Dutchmen might come in useful.” That Miep and the others were heroes is a fact that should not be overshadowed by the accusation—one of many controversies that have surrounded the diary—that the focus on the Franks’ helpers has served to distract attention from the less-than-stellar record of the Dutch people’s resistance to the Nazis’ anti-Jewish campaign.
During one scene in Anne Frank Remembered, an off-screen voice, presumably the filmmaker’s, reads a letter in which Otto Frank, who had died in 1980, thanks the Dutch friends who saved him. Perhaps for added drama, the voice announces that this is the first time Miep has heard the letter. It’s a touching acknowledgment, but certainly this intelligent woman must have known that her former employer realized that neither he, nor his daughter’s writings, could have survived without Miep.
AFTER the Jews and the two Dutch office workers were taken away, Miep found the checked diary that Anne had kept from June until December 1942. Also scattered about were the exercise books in which she wrote subsequent volumes, the account book in which she composed the stories, essays, fairy tales, reminiscences, and novel fragments that would be collected and published as Tales from the Secret Annex, and finally, the hundreds of colored sheets of paper on which she had been revising the diary since the spring of 1944.
Just before he was arrested with the Jews, Johannes Kleiman told Miep Gies that it was too late to save him and the others, so she should try to save what could be salvaged from the attic. Together with Bep Voskuijl, Miep gathered up Anne’s journals and the loose pages and brought them downstairs to the office. There she put them in the bottom drawer of her desk for safekeeping until, she hoped, Anne would return to reclaim them. Cannily, she left the drawer unlocked. The Nazis had had no interest in a child’s papers, but, if they came back, they might wonder why someone would think a girl’s diary worth locking up.
Of course, Miep was not merely guarding Anne’s privacy, but protecting herself and her coworkers. Later, she would say that if she had read the diaries, she might have felt compelled to burn them, out of concern for her colleagues. It would have been safer for her to destroy the diary, just as it would have been safer not to hide eight Jews, and certainly safer for her not to go to the police headquarters on Euterpestraat on the Monday after the arrest. Even by the standards of the previous two years, Miep’s attempt to bribe Silberbauer into freeing the prisoners was extraordinarily brave, an almost recklessly dangerous act that demonstrated the strength of her attachment to the Franks.
When the Opekta sales representatives were told that the Franks had been taken away, one of them (a man who was, in fact, a member of the Dutch Nazi party) took Miep aside and reminded her that the war was nearly over, the Germans were exhausted, and they would want to leave Holland with their pockets full. He himself would take up a collection from among the many friends and business associates who had been fond of Otto Frank, and Miep could go to the police and make the arresting officer, her fellow Austrian, an irresistible offer.
When Miep phoned Silberbauer, he instructed her to come on Monday, but when she did so, he told her to wait until the next day. On Tuesday, he said that he lacked the authority to make such a decision and sent her upstairs, where some officers were listening to English-language radio, an illegal act. Presumably they were monitoring the bad news about the Allies’ progress. They ordered her out of the room. But in any case, there was nothing that Miep could have done. The prisoners had already been taken to the jail on Weteringschans in preparation for their transport to Westerbork.
Before the movers arrived to strip the upper floors of 263 Prinsengracht of furniture that could be shipped to needy German families whose own possessions had been lost in the war, Miep told one of the warehousemen—the same worker several helpers suspected of having betrayed the Franks—to pick up any papers still left on the floor. All of this was done in haste. There is no way of knowing if any, or how much, of Anne’s writing was lost.
ALONG with Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler was taken to the SS headquarters on Euterpestraat. The two men were briefly interrogated, then transferred to the prison on Amstelveenseweg, and later to the Amersfoort transit camp. In mid-September, Kleiman suffered a stomach hemorrhage and was released when the Red Cross interceded on his behalf. Kugler was sent to a series of labor camps. After escaping in the spring of 1945, he remained in hiding until the war’s end.
When Kleiman returned to the office, Miep refused to let him or Bep read the diaries. The books and papers remained in her desk drawer for almost a year.
In June 1945, Otto Frank made his way back to Amsterdam. Liberated from Auschwitz, he had traveled by train to Russia and then by boat to Marseilles, and eventually reached the Netherlands by train and truck. He moved in with Miep and her husband. A month after his arrival in Amsterdam, Otto, who had already learned of his wife’s death from a prisoner he’d met on the train to Odessa, was informed that his daughters were also dead—first by the Red Cross and then by a Dutch woman who had known the girls in Bergen-Belsen.
In the film, Anne Frank Remembered, Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper recalls giving Otto Frank the sad news:
He stood on the porch and rang the bell. He said, “Are you Janny Brandes?”…Because he was a very polite gentleman, he came into the hallway and remained standing there and said, “I am Otto.” I could hardly speak, because it was very difficult to tell someone that his children were not alive any more. I said, “They are no more.” He turned deathly pale and slumped down into a chair. I just put my arm around him.
Like Otto, Miep had hoped that Anne might have survived. Planning to give the diary back to Anne upon her return, Miep concealed its existence from Otto until the day he learned that the girls had died at Bergen-Belsen.
The scene in which Otto Frank first read his daughter’s diary is painful to imagine. Even when children have grown into thriving adults, a scrap of paper covered with childish writing can induce, in parents, a stab of nostalgia for those years that, parents may think later, were the happiest in their lives. How much more grief such pages must have occasioned when they had been written by a child so recently murdered?
In Miep Gies’s memoir, she recalls that Otto Frank went to his former Opekta office and closed the door. A short time later, she brought him the papers and the checked book.
I could tell that he recognized the diary. He had given it to her just over three years before, on her thirteenth birthday, right before going into hiding. He touched it with the tips of his fingers. I pressed everything into his hands; then I left his office, closing the door quietly.
Shortly afterward, the phone on my desk rang. It was Mr. Frank’s voice. “Miep, please see to it that I’m not disturbed,” he said.
“I’ve already done that,” I replied.
Over the next months, Otto Frank tried, with little success, to reestablish himself in business. Meanwhile, he sorted through the diary, and the exercise and account books in which Anne had recorded her secrets and in which, he would say later, he met a daughter he had never really known. The same words that had consoled Anne may have provided some comfort for her father, or at least distraction, as he typed up sections of the manuscript, translated them into German, and sent them to his mother in Switzerland.
Relying mainly on the draft that Anne had revised but also borrowing from the original version and from the stories and occasional pieces that would appear as Tales from the Secret Annex, Otto Frank typed up a second and much longer manuscript of the diary. By now he was persuaded that Anne had wanted her diary to be published as a book entitled Het Achterhuis. Once the idea occurred to him, he was obliged to read the diary as something other than a personal record and with a view to how it might be read by strangers. Otto changed the names, as Anne had directed. But he kept his own family’s real names, though Anne had wished the Franks to become the Robins: Frederik and Nora, and their daughters, Betty and Anne. He retained the first name of Peter van Pels, though Anne had specified that her young upstairs neighbor should appear in Het Achterhuis as Alfred van Daan.
Over the last half century, Otto Frank has been accused of prudishness, of being too ready to forgive the Germans, of censoring and deracinating Anne, of anti-Semitism, of sentimentality and cowardice, of greed and personal ambition. In fact, what seems most probable is that his editing was guided by the instincts of a bereaved father wanting to give the reader the fullest sense of what his daughter had been like. Otto cut a number of Anne’s sharpest criticisms of her neighbors, either because of a desire to make her seem like a nicer person, or to protect the sensitivities of the living—for example, the dentist’s sweetheart, Charlotte Kaletta, who was made unhappy enough by the passages that remained. (She was even more upset when the Broadway play of the diary portrayed her husband as a buffoon so unfamiliar with his religious heritage that the meaning of Hanukkah had to be explained to him.)
It’s true that Otto chose to remove Anne’s rare flashes of meanness and to tone down her impatience with smallness and hypocrisy. But if we search for the point at which her character was reduced from that of a young person with a complex, mature view of politics, history, and human nature to that of a cheerful teen, if we seek out the juncture at which her awareness that she was being made to suffer because she was a Jew became a more generalized identification with all of suffering humanity, we discover that those changes were not the result of Otto Frank’s editing but rather of the ways in which the Broadway play and the Hollywood film of her diary chose to represent its author. On stage and screen, the adorable was emphasized at the expense of the human, the particular was replaced by the so-called universal, and universal was interpreted to mean American—or, in any case, not Jewish, since Jewish was understood to signify a smaller audience, more limited earnings, and, more disturbingly, subject matter that might alienate a non-Jewish audience.
NEWLY widowed, still in mourning for his wife, Otto Frank was understandably reluctant to see his marriage publicly judged and found wanting by his daughter. Later, Anne’s speculations about her parents’ relationship would become major news when the “suppressed” five pages of the diary were discovered. And yet the controversial conclusion that Anne reached—that her parents’ union was neither passionate nor romantic—was probably evident to the Franks’ relatives, to their friends in Amsterdam, and to anyone knowledgeable or even curious about how men and women behave in the presence or the absence of love and desire. Certainly, those questions were of great interest to Anne. In photographs of the Franks, charismatic, handsome Otto and his relatively plain wife appear to have accidentally wound up in the same frame. Otto’s snapshots of his daughters vastly outnumber those of Edith.
But though Otto cut Anne’s most bitter references to Edith, to his marriage, and to his wife’s contentious relationship with their younger daughter, he chose not to excise Anne’s accounts of her own darkest moments. He retained her pessimistic observations about the murderousness of her fellow creatures, as well as her most enraged and despairing protests against the anti-Semitism that had forced her and her family into hiding. Likewise, he left in the passage in which Anne asks why God has singled out the Jews to suffer. “If we bear all this suffering, and there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.”
After he had completed the preliminary editing, Otto asked a friend, the playwright Albert Cauvern, to check the manuscript for grammatical errors and mistakes in diction. The extant typescript suggests that at least someone besides Cauvern gave it a critical close reading. Also among its early readers was Kurt Baschwitz, a lecturer in psychology and journalism, who, in a letter to his daughter, called the diary “the most moving document about that time that I know” and “a literary masterpiece.”
People who encountered Otto Frank during this period recall a handsome, distinguished man with the bearing and reserve of a Prussian officer—but whose eyes were perpetually red from weeping. He carried the manuscript with him wherever he went, and, at times, tears flowed down his face as he read a few pages aloud, or urged friends and strangers to read it.
The edited typescript was passed from hand to hand and across desks that included those of Jan Romein and his wife, Annie, two prominent Dutch intellectuals who thought the book should be published but were unable to convince anyone who had the power to do so. The manuscript was rejected by every editor who read it, none of whom could imagine that readers would buy the intimate diary of a teenage girl, dead in the war. In addition, the Dutch had no desire to be reminded of the suffering they had so recently endured, and, regardless of what the Dutch cultural minister in exile had promised in his radio broadcast, it was assumed that there would be little interest in a first-person account by one of the Nazis’ young victims.
Luckily, the book had tenacious supporters. In April 1946, Jan Romein wrote about the diary in the daily newspaper, Het Parool, formerly the underground paper of the Dutch Resistance. Romein’s essay, entitled “A Child’s Voice,” was at once impassioned and restrained. More than all the evidence presented at the Nuremberg trials, he wrote, the diary is an indictment of the “witless barbarity” of fascism, and of crimes that, only a year after the end of the war, his countrymen were already forgetting. Romein praised Anne’s gifts—“an insight into the failings of human nature—her own not excepted—so infallible that it would have astonished one in an adult, let alone a child”—and eloquently described the way that literature can affect us.
“When I had finished it was nighttime, and I was astonished to find that the lights still worked, and we still had bread and tea, that I could hear no airplanes droning overhead and no pounding of army boots in the street—I had been engrossed in my reading, so carried away back to that unreal world, now almost a year behind us.”
After Romein’s essay appeared in Het Parool, Otto Frank was approached by several publishers, among them Contact, located in Amsterdam. Its managing director was interested in the book but objected to passages in which, he felt, Anne wrote too freely about sex and about her body. Otto agreed to their deletion. Perhaps he was relieved to omit those entries, which Anne herself had left out when she revised her diary. Excised from the Dutch, these sections would be reinstated when the English-language edition appeared.
In the summer of 1946, five selections from the diary were published in a journal with which the Romeins were associated. The editing continued. On the request of the Dutch publisher, roughly twenty-five pages were cut from the manuscript, including a reference to menstruation and another to Anne and a girlfriend touching each other’s breasts.
Het Achterhuis was published in the Netherlands in 1947 in an edition of 1,500 copies and with a subtitle that read: Diary Letters June 12, 1942-August 1, 1944. Annie Romein’s introduction featured a somewhat more moderate estimation of the book’s merits than the rave, by her husband, that helped arrange its publication. Her preface was the first of many responses to the diary that praised the book while dismissing it as the unaffected, unpolished scribblings of an unusually gifted child.
This “diary of a normal child growing up in exceptional circumstances…will disappoint anyone who hopes to experience a ‘wonder ’…this diary is not the work of a prodigy.” The diary “is not the work of a great writer, but the awakening of a human soul is drawn so purely, precisely, and uncompromisingly that one seldom sees the like in the memoirs of the greatest writers.” Like the children in Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, wrote Romein, Anne Frank sees the world and especially herself “with a candid frankness, unjudgemental and down to earth.”
Without knowing that she was weighing in on a soon-to-be controversial question—the issue of whether or not Anne’s diary was, strictly speaking, a Holocaust document—Romein observed, “This diary is also a document about the war, about the persecution of the Jews. The life of those in hiding is beautifully described by this child who had in any case that one essential quality of a great writer: to remain unbiased, to be unable to get used to, and therefore blinded by, the way things are.”
The other thing Romein seems not to have known was how carefully Anne revised her diary, nor does she seem to have taken seriously Anne’s reflection, in the aftermath of the Dutch minister’s radio broadcast, on how interesting it would be if the romance of Het Achterhuis were published.
“The diary is pure conversation with herself. There’s not one disturbing thought about future readers, not one faint echo of…the will to please.”
Favorably reviewed, Anne’s book did moderately, if not extremely, well in the Netherlands. It was reprinted again at the end of the year, twice in 1948, once in 1949, and not again until 1950—after which it went out of print until 1955, when its success in the United States created new demand. However modest, the book’s reception in Holland helped interest editors elsewhere in Europe. The Dutch edition was in its sixth printing when Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank was published in Germany in 1950.
In an attempt to capture Anne’s voice, the German translation made mistakes in tone, and, for fear of alienating its projected audience, omitted references to the anti-German sentiment in the secret annex. The prohibitions against listening to German radio stations and speaking German—a problem for Mrs. Frank and Mrs. Van Pels, who had never become entirely fluent in Dutch—appear nowhere in Das Tagebuch, and a reference to the hatred between Jews and Germans was changed to read “these Germans.”
In an April 1959 interview in Der Spiegel, the original Dutch-into-German translator, Anneliese Schütz, explained. “A book intended after all for sale in Germany cannot abuse the Germans.” This reluctance to offend readers in a country whose leaders had murdered the book’s author was one gauge of the speed at which the diary had already become a commodity that the public might, or might not, choose to buy. Despite the editing changes, the first printing was not a commercial success in Germany.
IN THE United States, Anne Frank’s diary was initially rejected by nearly every major publishing house. “It is an interesting document,” admitted an editor in the American branch of the international firm Querido, based in Amsterdam, “but I do not believe there will be enough interest in the subject in this country to make publication over here a profitable business.”
Ernst Kuhn, a friend of Otto’s who worked at the Manufacturers Hanover Bank in New York, took on the challenge of trying to find the diary an American home. Just as in Europe, the book was viewed as being too narrowly focused, too domestic, too Jewish, too boring, and, above all, too likely to remind readers of what they wished to forget. Americans did not want to hear about the war. “Under the present frame of mind of the American public,” an editor at Vanguard wrote Kuhn, “you cannot publish a book with war as a background.”
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. turned down the manuscript on the grounds that it was “very dull,” a “dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions.” Sales would be small because the main characters were neither familiar to Americans nor especially appealing. “Even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject was timely…I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it.” While recognizing that “so few contemporary books or documents (are) as genuine or spontaneous as this one,” Viking decided that it was an infelicitous moment for the diary to appear. “If times were normal I would do an edition and translation,” wrote one editor, “but times are not normal.”
In Great Britain, the reaction was similar. At Secker and Warburg, it was felt that “The English reading public would avert their eyes from so painful a story which would bring back to them all the evil events that occurred during the war.” As proof, an editor there noted that The Wall, John Hersey’s novel about the Warsaw ghetto uprising, was “not doing as well as expected.”
In one of her “Letters from Paris” that appeared in the New Yorker, Janet Flanner referred to the current popularity of a book by “a precocious, talented little Frankfurt Jewess.” Yet despite the New Yorker mention, and despite the book’s reception in France, Anne’s diary was in the reject pile in the office of Frank Price, the director of Doubleday’s foreign bureau, when a young assistant named Judith Jones—who would go on to become a legendary editor at Knopf, working with authors including Julia Child—found it. In her memoir, The Tenth Muse, Jones recalls:
One day, when Frank had gone off into the heart of Paris for a literary lunch, I set to work on a pile of submissions that he wanted rejected. As I made my way through, I was drawn to the face on the cover of a book that Calmann Lévy was about to publish. It was the French edition of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. I started reading it—and I couldn’t stop. All afternoon, I remained curled up on the sofa, sharing Anne’s life in the attic, until the last light was gone and I heard Frank’s key at the front door. Surprised to find me still there, he was even more surprised to hear that it was Anne Frank who had kept me. But he was finally persuaded by my enthusiasm and let me get the book off to Doubleday in New York, urging them to publish it.
It didn’t take much urging, and we were given the go-ahead to offer a contract.
Among those who, early on, recognized the book’s importance was Robert Warshaw, an editor at Commentary, a highly regarded Jewish-interest magazine that printed excerpts from the diary in advance of its American publication. “Let me say again,” Warshaw wrote Otto Frank, “that I have read no document of the Jewish experience in Europe that seemed to me so expressive, so moving, and on so high a literary level as your daughter’s remarkable diary.”
But despite the enthusiasm of Warshaw and other early readers, Doubleday’s ambitions for the book were modest. The publisher agreed to pay Otto Frank a $500 advance, and a small print run was ordered
The book’s American editor was a young woman named Barbara Zimmerman, later Barbara Epstein, later still a founder of the New York Review of Books, who was then around the age that Anne Frank would have been had she lived. Her correspondence with Otto Frank is a model of personal affection, professional savvy, and faith in the importance of the project on which they were collaborating. On November 5, 1951, Zimmerman wrote Otto Frank, “I love the book and feel that it has a value for me beyond matters of business.”
Every decision concerning the packaging and the launch of The Diary of a Young Girl, which was published on what would have been Anne’s twenty-third birthday, turned out to have been an inspired one. Good fortune and serendipity appeared, at every stage, to arrange Anne’s diary’s American success.
Some of the credit is Doubleday’s, and some is Otto Frank’s, who rather quickly caught on to the publishing business and to the business of publicity in particular. He realized that his daughter’s diary was not in fact the relic of a saint, not the sanctified remains of what Ian Buruma, writing in the New York Review of Books, called the “Jewish Joan of Arc,” but simply a book. Pained at first by the unpleasant side effects of commercialization, Otto learned to steel himself to the discomfort of having his daughter talked about as if she were a fictional character. As always, he was determined to support his family, which would soon include his second wife, Elfriede “Fritzi” Markovits Geiringer, whom he married in November 1953.
When it became clear to Otto that the diary was becoming not merely a commodity but a lucrative one, he decided to channel some of the profits it generated into the human-rights causes that would become, to him, as much of a religion as the Reform Judaism he practiced after the war. As soon as Otto saw what the diary could accomplish, he became quite single-minded—practical, focused, and at least partly immune to second thoughts or distractions.
IT MUST have been an obvious choice to put Anne’s face on the cover, and Otto Frank sent his publishers a photograph of his photogenic daughter. Before the war, he had been a passionate amateur photographer. With his Leica camera, one of the first to be sold commercially, he documented births, birthdays, family holidays, and vacations, marking each stage of his daughters’ development with dozens of formal portraits and snapshots of the girls brushing their teeth, combing their hair, playing with friends, sunbathing, building sand castles. Scores of photos survived the war, striking visual images that would contribute to Anne Frank’s celebrity.
For the American edition, Otto selected a picture taken in 1939. In the photo, among the most sedate of Anne’s portraits, her beautiful face conveys a wistful intelligence and a piercing sweetness. It was the picture that Anne had pasted in her diary, with a note remarking that such a portrait might improve her chances of getting into Hollywood. In real life, she added, she often looked quite different. She was probably correct, if we assume that the majority of her photos—in which she is shown laughing or smiling impishly, more animated and funny faced than conventionally pretty and composed—provide a more accurate likeness. But she preferred to be seen as a serious, lovely girl, and in choosing the picture that she herself picked, Otto may have felt that he was again fulfilling her wishes. In later versions of the diary, the current paperback edition, and other books about Anne, more cheerful images have been used.
In a review in the New Statesman in May 1952, Antonia White responded, as so many have, to the photo: “What she has left behind is a book of extraordinary human and historical interest, as living as the mischievous, intelligent face in the photograph which confronts the middle-aged reader with the same shrewd pertness that must so often have been turned on her parents and the Van Daans.”
It’s impossible to overestimate the power that Anne Frank’s image has had. She is instantly identifiable, whether we see her face on a book or projected (to coincide with a visit of the Anne Frank traveling exhibit) on a tower in Great Britain where Jews were tortured during the Middle Ages. It is an understatement to say that she is the single most commonly recognized and easily recognizable victim of the Nazi campaign against the Jews, or of any genocide before or since. The passions that she has invoked cannot be separated from the fact that we know what she looked like.
Anne’s author photo was a publisher’s dream. At Doubleday, Donald B. Elder wrote to thank Otto for the “very charming” picture. Pleased by the portrait, Barbara Zimmerman must have felt her hope for the book take another quantum leap when she managed to secure a brief introductory essay from Eleanor Roosevelt.
Over fifty years later, this preface still introduces the book, even though Americans have since learned and forgotten that many Jews—including Otto Frank’s family—failed to find refuge in the United States in part because of the policies of Mrs. Roosevelt’s husband. Meanwhile, the teenage author’s fame may have outdistanced that of her introducer; by now, it seems likely that more American schoolchildren have heard of Anne Frank than of Eleanor Roosevelt.
The essay of just over a page begins, “This is a remarkable book. Written by a young girl—and the young are not afraid of telling the truth—it is one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read.” The prologue stresses the triumph of the spirit that the diary documents and the ways in which its author’s concerns resemble those of teenagers everywhere. “Despite the horror and humiliation of their daily lives, these people never gave up…Anne wrote and thought much of the time about things which very sensitive and talented adolescents without the threat of death will write—her relations with her parents, her developing self-awareness, the problems of growing up.”
The words “Jew” or “Jewish” are never mentioned. It has been remarked that Eleanor had grown up in a milieu pervaded by what Roosevelt biographer Geoffrey C. Ward termed a “kind of jocular anti-Semitism.” After a friend of the Roosevelts caught a large jewfish on a 1923 fishing expedition, Eleanor quipped, to her husband’s amusement, “I thought we left New York to get away from the Jews.”
Moved by the former first lady’s preface, Otto Frank wrote Mrs. Roosevelt, thanking her for her kind words: “Reading your introduction gives me comfort and the conviction that Anne’s wish is fulfilled: to live still after her death and to have done something for mankind.”
Like so much else about Anne’s diary, this preface has been the subject of controversy, in this case involving the charge that the book’s American editor wrote the introduction for the former first lady and asked Mrs. Roosevelt to sign it. But if that were true, Barbara Zimmerman didn’t say so to Otto Frank, to whom she conveyed her delight in Mrs. Roosevelt’s foreword. And Otto’s letter of thanks to Mrs. Roosevelt (who would encourage him to allow a stage or film version to be made from the diary, so that Anne’s message could reach a wider audience) was purely sincere. He described his sense of “mission in publishing her ideas, as I felt that they help people to understand…that only love not hatred can build a better world.” It’s a touching correspondence, as is a later exchange in which Otto declines an invitation to meet the first lady during her stay at the Park Sheraton in Manhattan on the grounds that he has recently suffered a nervous breakdown and needs to take a little rest.
Less sweet was Mrs. Roosevelt’s readiness to believe the charges in a letter she later received from a writer who accused Otto of, among other things, having moved to Switzerland to avoid paying high Dutch taxes. The writer of that letter was an American novelist named Meyer Levin, who had given the diary a rave review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.
THE BOOK was an instant sensation. Meyer Levin’s review sold it.
Not since Zelda Fitzgerald critiqued (pseudonymously and negatively) a book by her husband had there been a literary review assignment—given, accepted, or, in this case, requested—in which questions of conflict of interest so blatantly arise. Meyer Levin was not only a close friend of Otto Frank’s, but he was acting as Otto’s adviser, and, informally, as the diary’s agent. In addition, he was convinced that he was the perfect choice to adapt the play for the stage.
Nevertheless, he asked permission to write the essay, and Francis Brown, the assigning editor, agreed, then later gave him more space for line after line of praise: “For little Anne Frank, spirited, moody, witty, self-doubting, succeeded in communicating in virtually perfect, or classic, form, the drama of puberty.” While acknowledging the painful subject matter, Levin anticipated his readers’ reservations, which he preemptively dispelled, assuring them that “this is no lugubrious ghetto tale, no compilation of horrors…Anne Frank’s diary simply bubbles with amusement, love, discovery…These people might be living next door; their within-the-family emotions, their tensions and satisfactions are those of human character and growth, anywhere.”
The variant versions of the diary, including Anne’s revisions, would not be available in English for another thirty years, and Levin perpetrated the most common myth—or partial truth—about Anne’s work: “Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment.”
Other critics were equally enthusiastic. Time magazine called Anne’s book “one of the most moving stories that anyone, anywhere, has managed to tell about World War II.” On the same page as a review of Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood, the Catholic journal Commonweal praised the diary as “extraordinary for its writer’s candor and sensitivity, both to her environment and her interior development.”
The official publication date was June 12, and on June 23, Barbara Zimmerman wrote Otto Frank that the first edition had sold out; a second and third printing of ten thousand copies each had been ordered. The house had decided to go all out on ads and promotion. She was certain that the book would be a huge best seller, and the warm public response had renewed her faith in the American people. “ANNE FRANK is a tremendous success…,” wrote Zimmerman. “It is one of the biggest books that has been published in America for a long while. Simply working on this book has been a most wonderful experience for me because I am quite frankly in love with it! And it is so nice to find so many hundreds of others who agree!”
Part of what makes Barbara Zimmerman’s letters to Otto Frank so sympathetic and so touching is that they make it possible to imagine what it was like to be in your early twenties and get your first real publishing job in New York, and one of the first books you are assigned to edit happens to be The Diary of a Young Girl.