![]() Weakened by brutality, chaos, and hunger, fifty thousand men and women-insufficiently clothed, tormented by lice-succumbed, many to the typhus epidemic.Īnne Frank’s final diary entry, written on August 1, 1944, ends introspectively-a meditation on a struggle for moral transcendence set down in a mood of wistful gloom. In a cold, wet autumn, they suffered through nights on flooded straw in overcrowded tents, without light, surrounded by latrine ditches, until a violent hailstorm tore away what had passed for shelter. ![]() ![]() She and her sister, Margot, were among three thousand six hundred and fifty-nine women transported by cattle car from Auschwitz to the merciless conditions of Bergen-Belsen, a barren tract of mud. The precise date of her death has never been determined. ![]() One month before liberation, not yet sixteen, she died of typhus fever, an acute infectious disease carried by lice. Zyklon B, the lethal fumigant poured into the gas chambers, was, pointedly, a roach poison.Īnne Frank escaped gassing. The military and civilian apparatus of an entire society was organized to obliterate her as a contaminant, in the way of a noxious and repellent insect. Her fault-her crime-was having been born a Jew, and as such she was classified among those who had no right to exist: not as a subject people, not as an inferior breed, not even as usable slaves. She was designated to be erased from the living, to leave no grave, no sign, no physical trace of any kind. The atrocities she endured were ruthlessly and purposefully devised, from indexing by tattoo through systematic starvation to factory-efficient murder. Anne Frank was discovered, seized, and deported she and her mother and sister and millions of others were extinguished in a program calculated to assure the cruellest and most demonically inventive human degradation. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived!” But she could not shake off her capture and annihilation, and there are no diary entries to register and memorialize the snuffing of her spirit. “When I write,” she confided, “I can shake off all my cares. Yet any projection of Anne Frank as a contemporary figure is an unholy speculation: it tampers with history, with reality, with deadly truth. Het Achterhuis, as she called her manuscript, in Dutch-“the house behind,” often translated as “the secret annex”-was hardly intended to be Anne Frank’s last word it was conceived as the forerunner work of a professional woman of letters. In her last months, she was assiduously polishing phrases and editing passages with an eye to postwar publication. She had already intuited what greatness in literature might mean, and she clearly sensed the force of what lay under her hand in the pages of her diary: a conscious literary record of frightened lives in daily peril an explosive document aimed directly at the future. This was more than an exaggerated adolescent flourish. “I want to go on living even after my death!” she exclaimed in the spring of 1944. As an international literary presence, she would be thick rather than thin. We can be certain (as certain as one can be of anything hypothetical) that her mature prose would today be noted for its wit and acuity, and almost as certain that the trajectory of her work would be closer to that of Nadine Gordimer, say, than to that of Francoise Sagan. It is easy to imagine-had she been allowed to live-a long row of novels and essays spilling from her fluent and ripening pen. At thirteen, she felt her power at fifteen, she was in command of it. And even if she had not kept the extraordinary diary through which we know her it is likely that we would number her among the famous of this century-though perhaps not so dramatically as we do now. If Anne Frank had not perished in the criminal malevolence of Bergen-Belsen early in 1945, she would have marked her sixty-eighth birthday last June.
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