ANNE FRANK

 This is the best Constitutional Calendar Judge Hirsch has ever written. It is one the best things he has ever written. It is one of most poignant epistles we have recently read. 

Everyone with a spark of humanity should read it and think of Anne Frank every now and then. Because we need to never forget the humanity of a young girl becoming a young woman who was murdered because she was Jewish. 

As the forces of the Third Reich overran Holland, two Jewish families, the Franks and the Van Daans, were secreted by courageous Dutch friends in a cramped attic apartment in Amsterdam.  Their living quarters offered little by way of comfort. But they offered hope, and they offered life.
The youngest of the Frank family was Anne, just entering her teenage years.  Bereft of schoolmates, friends, children her own age, she resolved to keep a diary, and to confide in it her most intimate thoughts. The Franks would end the war in concentration camps, where Anne would die. But her father survived, recovered the diary, and was persuaded to permit it to be published. To date, over 30 million copies of The Diary of Anne Frank have been sold.  A theater version of the diary was first produced in New York City on October 5, 1955, and won the Tony Award, the Critics’ Circle Award, and other commendations. A film was then made from the play.

There have been, and continue to be, efforts to bowdlerize or ban The Diary of Anne Frank. Although many of Anne’s reflection are on the war around her, and the world around her, some of them are about the physical changes that she feels herself undergoing as she confronts puberty. She confided these thoughts to her diary because she had no one in whom to confide them.  She never imagined, and would have been horrified to imagine, that these most personal of diary entries would be read by millions.

In 1983, four members of the Alabama Textbook Committee called for removal of The Diary of Anne Frank from school curricula because it is, “a real downer,” and because of the references to the changes brought about by the onset of puberty.  In 1998 the book was temporarily removed from the Baker Middle School in Corpus Christi, Texas, after parents complained that it was pornographic. In January of 2010 officials of the Culpeper County Public Schools in Virginia stopped assigning the book after a parent complained that it included sexually explicit material and intimations of homosexuality.

But there may be reasons more profound than the squeamishness of the occasional school-board member or parent for the repeated attempts to ban or discredit the book.  The hatred and bigotry that enabled Nazi-occupied Europe to incarcerate and slaughter Jews, Roma, gays, the “physically defective,” socialists, and labor unionists, did not die in Hitler’s bunker.  The Swedish right-wing fringe magazine Fria Ord (“free words”) published allegations in 1957 that Anne Frank never existed, that the diary was written by one Meyer Levin, and that it was all a plot to engender sympathy, and profit, for the Jews.  The following year the famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal was attending a performance in Vienna of the play based on the diary when he was confronted by a group of protesters who demanded that he find the man who arrested Anne Frank, their position being that there was no Anne Frank and therefore no one who arrested her.

In 1963 Wiesenthal and his organization located Karl Silberbauer, who readily admitted that he led the arrest of the Franks and the Van Daans in Amsterdam. Silberbauer identified Anne from a photo, and recalled a stack of papers that may have been Anne’s diary. His version corroborated that of Otto Frank.

It seems a series of miracles that The Diary of Anne Frank ever survived to be published, then to be read by millions, then to become part of school curricula throughout the western world. It seems a series of tragedies that in our own time, with censorship recrudescent, the diary continues to be victimized by Comstockery and bigotry.  But even in the face of such a series of tragedies, Anne herself would have had an answer. In what is perhaps the most-quoted line of the diary – the penultimate line of the play – she insists, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

I don't know Anne... I just do not know. 

Rumpole.