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The Red-Checkered Diary: Anne Frank's World Before the Bookcase
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On June 12, 1942, a thirteen-year-old girl received a red-checkered diary and began writing to an imaginary friend named Kitty — and the world she was writing from was already closing in. This episode follows Anne Frank from that birthday morning through the decision to disappear, the secret annex, the writer she was becoming, and the Tuesday morning in August 1944 when the Gestapo found the door behind the bookcase.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Most people feel they already know this story. A girl, a diary, a hiding place.
On June twelve, nineteen forty-two, Anne Frank turned thirteen. Her parents gave her several gifts that morning.
What forced the family into hiding wasn't a general raid or a sweep of the neighborhood. It was a single piece of paper addressed to Anne's older sister, Margot.
The physical reality of that hiding place is worth pausing on. The rooms were not comfortable.
What happened inside the annex, intellectually and personally, is one of the things that makes Anne's diary so unusual. She didn't just record what she ate and what she feared.
The raid happened on a Tuesday morning. German security police entered the building, found the concealed door behind the bookcase, and arrested all eight people in the annex.
From Amsterdam, the eight residents of the annex were transported to Westerbork, a transit camp in the northeast of the Netherlands. Westerbork held Jews awaiting deportation east.
Anne and Margot were not at Auschwitz when the Soviets arrived. In November nineteen forty-four, both sisters had been transferred west to Bergen-Belsen, a camp in northern Germany that had been transformed from a prisoner-of-war facility into a vastly overcrowded concentration camp.
Otto Frank learned of his daughters' deaths gradually, through other survivors who had been at Bergen-Belsen. He had survived Auschwitz.
The book's reach is sometimes hard to square with its origins. A teenager, writing in a small annex, not knowing whether she would survive, not knowing whether anyone would ever read these pages, produced a document that outlasted almost everyone who persecuted her.
The familiarity of Anne Frank's story is both its strength and its challenge. Because it's taught in schools, because the diary is widely read, there's a risk that it becomes comfortable.
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