![]() ![]() Documents accumulated, scattered over decades among dozens of archives. ![]() The Dutch government launched two investigations, from 1947 to 1948 and again from 19, but did not pinpoint a single culprit. She was forever memorialized for the line, in the last pages of her diary, that she still believed that “in spite of everything, people are good at heart” while it was conveniently forgotten that she also wrote: “There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill.” These adaptations and representations sanded over German culpability and virulent antisemitism while also failing to grasp that in the annex that housed Anne between the ages of 13 and 15, there was constant silence, no privacy and a 10-hour window in which the toilet could not be flushed, lest it alert those waiting to pounce.Īs Anne Frank became a symbol, the question at the heart of that first betrayal - who tipped off the Gestapo to the secret annex? - was never satisfactorily answered. The international success of the book led to a Broadway play, a film, untold other books and documentaries, museums, and multiple agencies staking their claim to and profiting off “Anne Frank,” the brand. As Cynthia Ozick wrote in 1997, half a century after the original publication of “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” Anne’s story has been “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized falsified, kitschified, and in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.” ![]() Once a person becomes a story, their life is no longer their own. But because Anne left behind a diary, one that she intended for publication, and because it was saved by Miep Gies, one of the key helpers of those trapped in the secret annex, and because Miep gave it to Anne’s father, the group’s lone survivor, a tragic life cut far too short was transformed into a powerful narrative - leading to a betrayal that is more familiar to us. That betrayal would have been too much, because every individual and collective betrayal of Jews to the Nazis was more than could be borne. They were arrested, taken to various concentration camps, and - in all instances but one - died gruesome deaths, be it through execution by shooting or in gas chambers or, in Anne’s case, from typhus. 4, 1944, when the Nazis discovered Anne, her sister Margot, their parents Edith and Otto, the van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer in the secret annex, nestled within the warehouse on Prinsengracht 263, that had been their forced home for the previous two years. Anne Frank’s betrayal has been an ongoing project. ![]()
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