New Insight Into Anne Frank
At first glance it's just a yellowed police report on a stolen bicycle. Yet a researcher browsing through old Amsterdam police blotters last month found a piece of history. The complaint, dated April 13, 1942, was filed by a 12-year-old girl named Anne Frank.
"Taken between noon and 2 p.m. in front of her house. Worth 45 guilders," reads the scribbled entry. The Dutch marvel at Anne's brazenness. A young Jewish girl striding into a police station in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands to report her bike stolen, just six weeks before she and her family were forced into hiding.
The finding, like the crime, isn't exactly top news. But the heartbreaking ordinariness offers another glimpse into the voice of the Holocaust, and appeals to a world that can't help but wonder who she might have become.
Frank has come to symbolize the Nazi extermination of six million Jews in a way that has astonished even those in charge of her legacy. She would have turned 70 on June 12 and quite possibly retired as an acclaimed journalist, if the young Jewish diarist's youthful pluck and ambition were any measure of future greatness.
"You find yourself wanting to learn more about her, to look for any signs of life you can find," says Peter Romijn, a historian with the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, which publishes a scholarly edition of The Diary of Anne Frank. "You realize this is someone you really wish you could have met."
The diarist died of typhoid fever at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the spring of 1945, just weeks before its liberation and her 16th birthday.
The teenager's account of hiding from the Nazis with her family for nearly two years in the secret annex of an Amsterdam house is an international best seller in 58 languages. It has become required reading in schools worldwide and has inspired numerous books, films and a Broadway play.
Her hiding place is one of Amsterdam's top tourist attractions, drawing a record 822,000 visitors last year. Faded pinups of Frank's favorite movie stars and other mementos of her life fill the museum, but it's the diary that has held the world spellbound for more than 50 years.
"She was a child, and still unfulfilled," says James E. Young, chairman of the Judaic studies department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "Part of the appeal of wondering what she might have been is that we don't know. We fill in the blanks with our imaginations, and in that way we bond to her even more."