Have you ever read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl? If yes, what do you remember about it? I read it as a kid, maybe eleven or twelve, and haven’t revisited it since. The main part I remember is her crush on Peter, which probably speaks to the state of my pre-adolescent preoccupations more than anything.
Curiously, and somewhat hauntingly, I also remember thinking Anne survived the Holocaust when I read the Diary as a kid. I don’t know if I read the explanatory notes that were presumably in my, as any, edition, sharing what happened to her, and maybe blocked it out. Maybe I read that she died of illness rather than being directly murdered, and then misremembered when and why she died of illness, not recognizing the direct cause.
I reflect on my own misremembering and selective memory of the Diary and my understanding of Anne Frank’s life as I read Ruth Franklin’s The Many Lives of Anne Frank (2025). The book is a biography, history, historiography, and intertextual analysis of Anne Frank’s life, diary, Diary, and the many adaptations and references it inspired.
Part I chronicles Anne’s life, providing biographical and historical context as well as literary analysis of the diary’s many versions, making the essential distinction between her diary and the Diary as a published work, and how Anne understood the work even in her lifetime as a testimony to something much bigger than herself. In it we get a picture of Anne’s maturing, condensed in her extraordinarily truncated life and even more truncated account of it. Ruth also gives us an understanding of what Anne actually did experience in the six months after being captured when the Annex was raided, until her death in 1945. Part II traces the life of Anne’s story and of the Diary and its subsequent adaptations, and responses from the world as her audience—most poignantly, her father Otto, the only immediate family member who survived the Holocaust.
During the two years she lived in the Annex, when Anne’s life had become impossibly small, the diary was “not just the record but also the instrument of her day-to-day survival.
Anne’s own understanding of herself as a writer was crucial to her growth, to her “assertion of value” and to her own sense of “autonomy.” During the two years she lived in the Annex, when her life had become impossibly small, the diary was “not just the record but also the instrument of her day-to-day survival.” It also provided some distance from her situation. Ruth describes how she was able to achieve “the detachment of the novelist, who must step outside herself to experience and portray the perspectives of others.”
There was a moment, likely inspired by a radio speech given by the Dutch minister of education who was in exile in London, when Anne began to think of the diary as something that could not only be published but also represent an experience far beyond her own. She began to think of the diary as a “coherent testimonial narrative,” Ruth writes, and to revise and rewrite as such.
After Anne’s death, Anne’s father Otto had to complete the editing process, which he tried to do “how Anne would have done it.” Ruth’s book brings into focus the absence of Anne herself in the publication of the work, because she died so young and so soon after penning the diary. At the same time, Anne’s death itself is part of how her work is solidified as literary canon and as historical text. “Anne doesn’t have to die in order to become a writer,” Ruth writes, “But the extraordinary effect of the Diary depends on her death, in a way readers intuitively grasp.”
Anne Frank’s voice is solidified forever on the world stage, and yet her voice is also written over by the adaptations’ many successive voices. Ruth’s book attempts to bring back some of the autonomy that Anne sought.
By necessity, some of the autonomy that Anne Frank attempted to create for herself in writing her experiences, and performing the early stages of preparing them for publication, is lost; “Dead, however, there is nothing she can say to interfere with the Diary’s message. Anyone may interpret it however they wish.” Anne Frank’s voice is solidified forever on the world stage, and yet her voice is also written over by the adaptations’ many successive voices. Ruth’s book attempts to bring back some of the autonomy that Anne sought.
Ruth observes how both the play and film adaptations of Anne Frank center Otto, Anne Frank’s father, who was the sole survivor in the immediate Frank family. She also details Otto’s own reactions to the transformation of Anne’s life into a cultural touchstone, and the many emotions mixed in that. The excruciating empathy Otto inevitably inspires reminds me of something my friend Iona observed about going to the funerals of people we aren’t close to, or people whom we won’t miss in an immediate sense. In these cases, one is struck by empathy for the grief of the people who loved the person who died, by proxy. At the same time, you’re hit by the grief for the person who died—“She’d be so pissed to know she died at twenty-two,” my friend said about a peer who had passed away in a freak accident.
“Grief is weird” is a phrase I say a lot. What I mean by it is, in part, the constant reframing that happens in grief and grief by proxy. There is the self-awareness of projecting one’s own experiences of losing someone. There is the awareness that the person who passed away isn’t there to see the mourning, to react to their own death and legacy, even though they are the subject of so much conversation. And this is part of the “weirdness” of grappling with Anne Frank’s own story, the “many lives” of which have occurred after her own death. She never got to complete the process of bringing her story into the world and seeing how her audience responded.
Ruth documents many of the artistic and documentary works that were inspired by Anne Frank and her Diary—Carson McCullers’s work inspired by Anne Frank’s fairy tales; Neutral Milk Hotel’s album In the Airplane Under the Sea; the 2003 film Anne B. Real (about a female Latina rapper whose biggest creative inspiration is the Diary). Ruth explores what happens when Anne Frank’s experience, which was necessarily only possible because she was Jewish, can be applied in other contexts. “If something is lost” in the re-contextualizing of Anne Frank’s story in other situations and other identities, she writes, “can something else be found?”
Ruth further explores this tension in the fact that adaptations for stage and screen also create “an uncanny sense of resurrection,” putting into stark focus how Anne Frank-as-Icon has been treated as both saint and ghost. Ruth recounts a recurring dream that Miep Gies — one of the Annex residents’ protectors — had throughout her life after the Holocaust: a dream “that the arrest had not taken place. Instead, the war ended and she [Miep] threw open the door to the Annex, gesturing to the occupants that they were free and announcing, ‘Now go home!’ Invited to countless productions of The Diary of Anne Frank, Miep found herself wondering each time, as the curtain was about to rise, if the story might somehow end differently.” This dream reminded me of lyrics in Hadestown, the Broadway musical retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice: how we keep retelling the tragedy, knowing how it ends but still hoping it will be different this time.
Theatre by its nature involves the repetition of a story, and the audience’s and on some level even the actors’ suspension of disbelief in feeling, in some way, that maybe the ending isn’t inevitable, that it’s fresh every night. It makes me think again of my own false memory of Anne Frank’s life, my imagining that she didn’t actually die in the Holocaust. Reading the Diary and reading The Many Lives of Anne Frank, there’s a part of me that hopes, ludicrously, to find out Anne didn’t actually die, or at least that her suffering was somehow less than the historical record shows it to have been. In taking the reader through that dissonance, Ruth’s book is a stunning tribute to Anne’s suffering and humanity, as well as to the many people and communities who have been inspired and transformed by her words.
I am so pleased that I was able to attend NYC’s SWAN Day 2026 program celebrating the life of Anne Frank, and so honored that I was asked to write this post in anticipation of Anne’s 97th birthday. Regardless of the tragic details of how and where she died, Anne Frank achieved the goal she set for herself in her diary and this fact should never be forgotten, not only because Anne is now immortal, but also because it speaks to the importance of literature in human life.
“I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death!” (April 5, 1944)
© Amelie Lasker (6/9/26) – Special for FF2 Media
Amelie’s essay is published in conjunction with iSWANs’ Zoom celebration of Anne Frank’s 97th birthday on June 12th. (Click here for the event link)
FF2 EIC’s UPDATE: What happened to the book?
AAUW Minneapolis member Kay Kessel hands the signed copy of The Many Lives of Anne Frank – along with a wrapped DVD copy of Anne B. Real – to Tyler (in Governor Walz’s office). This photo was taken at the request of Jan Lisa Huttner by Kay’s friend Emily and is now copyrighted property: © FF2 Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
LEARN MORE/DO MORE
Read Park School’s proud tribute the their alumna!
Read Ruth Franklin’s The Many Lives of Anne Frank.
Hear an interview with Ruth Franklin about her book.
Learn more about FF2’s SWAN Day 2026 event, which honored Anne Frank’s legacy in a modern context.
Watch Lisa France’s Anne B. Real, the featured film of SWAN Day 2026 (tragically not on streaming but only available as a DVD), which is discussed in Ruth Franklin’s book.
CREDITS & PERMISSIONS
Featured Photo: “Award-Winning Author Ruth Franklin ’91 Publishes New Book about Anne Frank” with gratitude to The Park School (Photoshopped for WordPress by Jan Lisa Huttner.)
Middle Photo: Cover of the original 1952 edition of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl found on the page of a used book store via Google. (Photoshopped for WordPress by FF2 EIC Jan Lisa Huttner.)
Bottom Photo: Composite of photos taken on SWAN Day 2026 by Rob Copeland for FF2 Media & photoshopped for WordPress by FF2 EIC Jan Lisa Huttner. Note that Amelie Lasker appears in the photo on the right side of the composite, just above Ruth Franklin’s left shoulder. © FF2 Media (3/28/26)
Exit Photo: Photo of Ruth Franklin signing a copy of her book for Governor Walz taken by Rob Copeland for FF2 Media & then photoshopped for WordPress by FF2 EIC Jan Lisa Huttner. This copy of The Many Lives of Anne Frank – along with a wrapped DVD copy of Anne B. Real – was later hand-delivered to Governor Walz by a member of AAUW Minneapolis and her friend (who is a member of the Minnesota chapter of the League of Women Voters). Thank You, Kay! (Note that the package also contained a letter from Jan Lisa Huttner thanking Governor Walz and explaining the context of the gift.)
Composite of photos taken by Rob Copeland for FF2 Media & photoshopped for WordPress by FF2 EIC Jan Lisa Huttner are the property of FF2 Media LLC. They are authorized for responsible use by FF2 Media as long as a link to this post is included.
