The many lives of Anne Frank

Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin

One has to admire the courage—or perhaps the foolhardiness—of any author aiming to research the life and times of Anne Frank and hoping to discover something new in a story so renowned globally; especially when one considers that this is a story adopted and appropriated to boost the agendas of various political and social justice constituencies around the world. For example, her diary comforted anti-apartheid activists on Robben Island, including Nelson Mandela; her statue stands adjacent to a memorial to Hiroshima’s dead; and Anne’s image draped in a keffiyeh has accompanied pro-Palestinian marchers.

Clearly, Anne belongs to the world, and her story of Jewish suffering in Amsterdam during the Second World War has generated a plethora of universal meanings. But it is the Jewish particularities of her situation that constitute a challenge for an author venturing anew into this contested field, just as it challenged Anne herself and especially her father, Otto, who wanted the gentile world to identify with Anne and, at the same time, hoped her story would address and diminish the evils of antisemitism. It is these two opposing themes, the particularity of Anne’s Jewish identity and her experience of Jew-hatred and the traumas that entailed, and the universality of her experience as a global symbol of suffering and hope for a better world, that are the somewhat antagonistic issues at the core of this propulsive biography.

Ruth Franklin has grappled with these major contradictions of the particular versus the universal; and her analysis is always cogent, her interpretation persuasive and her narrative skills impressive. The very title of this book, The Many Lives of Anne Frank, sounds implausible, if not controversial. We all know that Anne, severely weakened by hardships and deprivation in Auschwitz, lived one short life. She died of typhus, aged 15, in Bergen-Belsen, one week after the death of her beloved sister Margot and only a few months before liberation. At that point in her brief life, she knew her mother, Edith, was dead, and she mistakenly and tragically believed her father, too, had died. A friend, who knew Anne, stated that had she known her father was still alive, she might have fought harder to survive.

Given the tragedy of Anne’s truncated life, the reader might well ask what the title’s ‘many lives’ allude to overall.  Biographer Ruth Franklin reveals impressive originality in extending our understanding of Anne’s multifaceted existence during her lifetime and her transformation internationally after her death into multiple and diverse symbols of social justice and humanitarian causes. Franklin’s chapter headings clarify her particular perception of Anne’s ‘many lives’: Child, Refugee, Target, Witness, Lover, Artist, Prisoner, Corpse, Author, Celebrity, Ambassador, Survivor and Pawn.

Franklin outlines Anne’s childhood from 1929 to 1934, in Frankfurt and Amsterdam; reviews Anne’s life as a refugee in Amsterdam from 1934 to 1940; and presents Anne’s experiences of the Holocaust in the Netherlands from 1940 to 1942.  Her insightful portrait of Anne’s life in the Amsterdam Annexe, at Prinsengracht 263, and the complex interactions among its eight residents, from 1942 to 1943, constitute another stage in Anne’s existence. Franklin comments sensitively on Anne’s awareness of her own sexuality and, from 1943 to 1944, describes her romance with Peter. She dwells at some length on the period Anne spent on writing and revising the Diary, from 1943 to 1944. Anne’s authorial aspirations and endeavours ended abruptly and tragically with the betrayal of the family and the subsequent Nazi raid of the Annexe, on 4 August 1944, led by SS Sergeant Karl Josef Silberbauer, a member of the “Jew-hunting unit’, together with his henchmen, several Dutch policemen and a detective, The residents were transferred to Westerbork, the Dutch concentration camp and, on  3 September 1944, were deported to Auschwitz, a traumatising two-day train journey. Ten days later, they were compelled to watch a public execution in Auschwitz. Anne and Margot were transferred in November 1944 to Bergen-Belsen, where the sisters died in February 1945, only two months before the British Army liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945.

Anne was deeply invested in her identity as a diary writer. Her first version encompassed all the trivia of her life, her snide remarks about schoolfriends and her acerbic observations about her fellow residents in the Annexe. After hearing a radio broadcast by Gerrit Bolkestein, Education Minister in the government-in-exile in London, urging Netherlanders to document their wartime experiences for publication, Anne revised her Diary, as she realised it was too personal and did not testify sufficiently to Jewish suffering under the Nazis. As Franklin observes, ‘Rewriting her diary gave her an opportunity to present herself to the world exactly as she wished’.

Franklin states that men have written the vast majority of written accounts of life in Auschwitz and she speculates that, had Anne survived, her memoir of life in the camps with their gas chambers and crematoria would have reflected the distinct experiences of women. She notes that more women than men were deported and more women than men selected for death in the extermination camps, further victimised for their ability to procreate the Jewish race. As historian Ringelheim notes, ‘Jewish women carried the burdens of sexual victimisation, pregnancy, abortion, childbirth, killing of newborn babies in the camps to save the mothers….For Jewish women, the Holocaust produced a set of experiences, responses and memories that do not always parallel those of Jewish men.’

Franklin’s biography of Anne probes deeply beneath the surface and prompts profound reflection on Anne’s experiences and their significance for Jewish people and, indeed, for the wider world. Of particular value are the documented words Anne spoke to friends who met her in the camps. Her friend Hannah Goslar met her in Bergen-Belsen and noted that Anne had no warm clothes, only rags. ‘Why do they want us to live like animals?’, Anne asked, and wept as she said, ‘They took my hair’.  Had Anne survived, her memoir of life in the concentration camps might be read today alongside seminal texts by writers such as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and Samuel Pisar.

The final third of this memorable biography concerns the afterlife of the Diary and its popularity worldwide. It was Otto’s magnificent obsession to amplify his beloved daughter’s voice and make her a posthumous spokesperson against Jew-hatred and the proponent of a more peaceful world. ‘The book should be read as widely as possible, because it should work for people and for humanity,’ Otto wrote. The complexity of that process and the history of the Diary’s commercialisation make for riveting reading, as does the saga of its scripting for the Broadway stage, with substantive changes of the original text, and its further modification as a screenplay.

Critical opinion of the stage version of the Diary was divided. Franklin quotes Cynthia Ozick, who criticised Diary playwrights Goodrich and Hackett ‘for downplaying the Jewish aspect of Anne’s story and transforming her into a figurehead against prejudice’. Ozick saw the play as a crucial component in the campaign ‘to dumb Anne down for mass audiences’. Nevertheless, the first Broadway production was a great success and ran for 717 performances.

For contemporary readers and, in particular, Jewish readers, it is of crucial importance that the subjects of persecution in the Diary are Jewish. As Franklin notes, ‘Our current world is one in which people can still be killed simply for being Jewish. To consider Anne Frank today to be a Syrian girl…is to risk losing sight of the real threat that antisemitism still poses—and always will—to Jews everywhere. Franklin states definitively, ‘an Anne Frank who is everywhere will ultimately be nowhere’. In this lucid and well-researched biography, Franklin has revived and put on the record the many contentious issues that swirled around the Diary both before and after publication, all of which make fascinating reading. At the heart of Franklin’s superb biography is her disarming, touching and vivid portrait of a young Jewish girl attempting to make sense of cruelty, isolation and genocide. Over the years, Anne has undoubtedly transformed into everyone’s symbol for social justice, for eradicating hatred and upholding ideals of universal peace. It is a tribute to Franklin’s skill that she succeeds in evoking Anne ‘as a teenager behind a locked door, pen and paper at the ready, watchful, indomitable, alive’, and thus restoring her to us as a young Jewish girl coping as best she might in a satanic world.

The Many Lives of Anne Frank

By Ruth Franklin

Yale University Press and the Leon D Black Foundation,

Jewish Lives 2025