After the manuscript had been turned down by 10 publishers, Doubleday publishers decided to acquire the rights. The publication of Anne's diary in America in had a cautious start.
Five years after the book was first published in the Netherlands, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was launched in a modest edition of 5, copies. Doubleday did not hold high expectations and hardly spent any money on additional advertising. Sales did not go well. A second print run of 15, copies was issued, followed within days by a third of 45, copies.
Before long, print run after print run sold out in rapid succession and millions of Americans read the book. Meyer Levin turned into a fervent advocate of the book and insisted on the production of a play and a film based on the diary.
He even wrote a script, but that was rejected by Otto Frank. September 3, The eight prisoners are transported in a sealed cattle car to Auschwitz on the last transport ever to leave Westerbork. At Auschwitz, the men are separated from the women. October Anne, Margot, and Mrs. Edith Frank remains in the women's subcamp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. January 6, Edith Frank dies at Auschwitz-Birkenau. January 27, Otto Frank is liberated from Auschwitz by the Russian army. He is taken first to Odessa and then to France before he is allowed to make his way back to Amsterdam.
March Anne and Margot Frank die at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp within days of each other. A song to life? The diary is incomplete, truncated, broken off—or, rather, it is completed by Westerbork the hellish transit camp in Holland from which Dutch Jews were deported , and by Auschwitz, and by the fatal winds of Bergen-Belsen. That same night, five hundred and forty-nine persons were gassed, including one from the Frank group the father of Peter van Daan and every child under fifteen.
Anne, at fifteen, and seventeen-year-old Margot were spared, apparently for labor. The end of October, from the twentieth to the twenty-eighth, saw the gassing of more than six thousand human beings within two hours of their arrival, including a thousand boys eighteen and under.
But Soviet forces were hurtling toward Auschwitz, and in November the order went out to conceal all evidences of gassing and to blow up the crematoria. Tens of thousands of inmates, debilitated and already near extinction, were driven out in bitter cold on death marches. Many were shot.
In an evacuation that occurred either on October 28th or on November 2nd, Anne and Margot were dispatched to Bergen-Belsen. Margot was the first to succumb. A survivor recalled that she fell dead to the ground from the wooden slab on which she lay, eaten by lice, and that Anne, heartbroken and skeletal, naked under a bit of rag, died a day or two later.
These are notions that are hard to swallow—so they have not been swallowed. There are some, bored beyond toleration and callous enough to admit it, who are sick of hearing—yet again! The more common response respectfully discharges an obligation to pity: it is dutiful.
Or it is sometimes less than dutiful. It is sometimes frivolous, or indifferent, or presumptuous. But what even the most exemplary sympathies are likely to evade is the implacable recognition that Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, however sacramentally prodded, can never yield light.
It is the shamelessness of appropriation. Who owns Anne Frank? The children of the world, say the sentimentalists. Wilson, then twelve-year-old Cara Weiss, was invited by Twentieth Century Fox to audition for the part of Anne in a projected film version of the diary. She felt the way I did. I identified so strongly with this eloquent girl of my own age, that I now think I sort of became her in my own mind. I was miserable being me. I was on the brink of that awful abyss of teenagedom and I, too, needed someone to talk to.
Ironically, Anne, too, expressed a longing for more attention from her father. At home, he was too tired or too frustrated to unload on. I had something else in common with Anne. We both had to share with sisters who were prettier and smarter than we felt we were. Despite the monumental differences in our situations, to this day I feel that Anne helped me get through the teens with a sense of inner focus.
She spoke for me. She was strong for me. She had so much hope when I was ready to call it quits. That the designated guru replied, year after year, to embarrassing and shabby effusions like these may open a new pathway into our generally obscure understanding of the character of Otto Frank.
His responses—from Basel, where he had settled with his second wife—were consistently attentive, formal, kindly. But his letters were also political and serious. Never mind that the intellectual distance between Wilson and Anne Frank is immeasurable; not every self-conscious young girl will be a prodigy.
Did Otto Frank not comprehend that Cara Wilson was deaf to everything the loss of his daughter represented? A protected domestic space, however threatened and endangered, can, from time to time, mimic ordinary life. The young who are encouraged to embrace the diary cannot always be expected to feel the difference between the mimicry and the threat. And like Cara Wilson most do not.
Otto Frank, it turns out, is complicit in this shallowly upbeat view. If the child is father of the man—if childhood shapes future sensibility—then Otto Frank, despite his sufferings in Auschwitz, may have had less in common with his own daughter than he was ready to recognize.
As the diary gained publication in country after country, its renown accelerating year by year, he spoke not merely about but for its author—and who, after all, would have a greater right? The surviving father stood in for the dead child, believing that his words would honestly represent hers. He was scarcely entitled to such certainty: fatherhood does not confer surrogacy. Margot was born in and Anneliese Marie, called Anne, in His characteristically secular world view belonged to an era of quiet assimilation, or, more accurately, accommodation which includes a modicum of deference , when German Jews had become, at least in their own minds, well integrated into German society.
From birth, Otto Frank had breathed the free air of the affluent bourgeoisie. She was not yet four when the German persecutions of Jews began, and from then until the anguished close of her days she lived as a refugee and a victim.
In , the family fled from Germany to Holland, where Frank had commercial connections, and where he established a pectin business. The building where she hid draws over a million visitors each year. But how did the diary go from a pile of discarded papers to an international publishing phenomenon that still shapes modern historical memory?
This photo is one of the last pictures taken of Anne Frank in The following summer, as Nazi oppression grew worse, the Franks went into hiding. Anne Frank received her diary as a gift on her thirteenth birthday in At first, it was her place to record observations about friends and school and her innermost thoughts.
But when she and her family went into hiding the month after the diary began, it became a war document. And she increasingly thought about her work as a potential book. In March , Anne heard a radio broadcast from the Dutch minister for education, art and science, who was in exile in London along with other members of the Dutch government. By the time of her capture, Anne had rewritten much of her diary.
She edited for content , length and clarity and made a list of suggested pseudonyms for the people in her life. Her future as a writer was snuffed out when she was betrayed, deported and murdered.
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