Anne Frank Read Free

and her consolation. She wrote it for companionship, for the pleasure of writing, for a way to help fill the long hours during which she and the others were required to keep silent and nearly motionless while business was being transacted in the Opekta office downstairs. She wrote to help make sense of herself and the people around her. As Philip Roth notes in The Ghost Writer, the diary “kept her company and it kept her sane.”
    But now, at this hopeful juncture, when it had begun toseem that the war might end and that people might want to read about the lives of its victims and its survivors, the attic residents agreed that Anne’s diary was exactly the sort of thing the exiled Dutch minister meant. Anne took his speech as a personal directive. By the morning after the broadcast, she was envisioning a bright career for her book, a future more glamorous than what Minister Bolkestein proposed: posterity in the archive that would become the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation.
    “Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the ‘Secret Annex.’ The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story. But, seriously, it would be quite funny ten years after the war if we Jews were to tell how we lived and what we ate and talked about here.” The title Anne had in mind, Het Achterhuis —literally, “the house behind” or “the annex”—refers to the fact that the rooms in which she and her family hid were above Otto Frank’s former workplace and concealed from the street by the buildings around it. Many old Dutch houses had annexes of this sort, a maze of extra rooms added onto the back of the house, meant to extend the cramped space dictated by the structure’s narrow facade.
    A few days later, Anne lay on the floor and sobbed until the idea of herself as a writer lifted her out of despair. “I must work, so as not to be a fool, to get on to become a journalist, because that’s what I want! I know that I can write, a couple of my stories are good, my descriptions of the ‘Secret Annex’ are humorous, there’s a lot in my diary that speaks, but—whether I have real talent remains to be seen….”
    On April 14, she had serious misgivings about her abilities. Even so, she was imagining the Dutch ministers as her potential audience, and her critics: “Everything here is so mixed up, nothing’s connected any more, and sometimes I very muchdoubt whether anyone in the future will be interested in all my tosh. “The unbosomings of an ugly duckling’ will be the title of all this nonsense; my diary really won’t be much use to Messrs. Bolkestein or Gerbrandy.”
    In May she again wrote that she wished to become a journalist and a famous author—only now she had a sense of the book that might make her reputation. “Whether these leanings towards greatness (insanity!) will ever materialize remains to be seen, but I certainly have the subjects in my mind. In any case, I want to publish a book called Het Achterhuis after the war. Whether I shall succeed or not, I cannot say, but my diary will be a great help.”
    The most important result of this new sense of vocation was that Anne began to refine and polish her diary into a form that she hoped might someday appear as Het Achterhuis. On May 20, she wrote, in a passage her father deleted, “At long last after a great deal of reflection I have started my ‘Achterhuis,’ in my head it is as good as finished, although it won’t go as quickly as that really, if it ever comes off at all.”
    In The Ghost Writer, Roth’s hero, Nathan Zuckerman, remarks that the diary’s dramatic scenes seemed to have gone through a dozen drafts. The truth is that many of them did go through at least two.
    Returning to the earliest pages, Anne cut, clarified, expanded her original entries, and added new ones which in some cases she predated, sometimes by years. Thus the book is not, strictly speaking, what we think of as