The Witness Who Was Thirteen
On the eighty-fourth anniversary of the day Anne Frank went into hiding
Image: The Prinsengracht canal in winter, Amsterdam, with the Westertoren (West Church tower) visible in the distance. The Westertoren stands directly beside the Anne Frank House at Prinsengracht 263; its bells — audible every fifteen minutes from inside the Achterhuis — were among the few sounds from public Amsterdam life Anne Frank could hear during the twenty-five months in hiding. Photograph by Kaz Alting (February 10, 2012) via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
— Anne Frank, diary entry, Saturday, July 15, 1944, three weeks before her arrest
Eighty-four years ago today, on the morning of Monday, July 6, 1942, the Frank family climbed the stairs of an Amsterdam canal house at Prinsengracht 263 and disappeared into the back rooms above Otto Frank’s pectin business.
The day before, Anne’s sister Margot, sixteen years old, had received a written call-up notice from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration ordering her to report for transport to a German forced-labor camp. Otto Frank had been preparing the hiding place quietly across the preceding months — supplies stocked, beds arranged, the entrance to be concealed behind a movable bookcase Otto’s trusted employees would mount over the doorway. Anne was thirteen years old. The family entered the Annex with what they could carry, walked the early-morning streets to avoid notice, and arrived at the back stairs of the canal house. They would not leave for twenty-five months.
Anne had received a diary three weeks earlier, on her thirteenth birthday — June 12, 1942. A red-and-cream checkered cloth-bound autograph album, of the kind sold for schoolgirls’ birthday gifts. She named it Kitty and addressed her entries to it as letters to a friend. She began writing in it on June 14. She continued writing through twenty-five months of hiding. The last entry is dated August 1, 1944. Three days later the apparatus the family had been hiding from arrived at the canal house and arrested all eight residents — the Franks, the van Pels family, and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer who had joined them in November 1942.
The Achterhuis — the back house, the Secret Annex the diary’s English title would later make familiar to readers around the world — was approximately five hundred square feet across two narrow floors. Eight people for twenty-five months. A converted office. Furniture from Otto’s living quarters. A bathroom they could use only when the workers in the business below could not hear. Curtains drawn permanently. Outside footsteps audible. The radio always at low volume. Days organized around the silence the hiding required.
This is where the diary was written.
The diary is one of the most-read books of the twentieth century. It has been translated into more than seventy languages. The building at Prinsengracht 263 receives over a million visitors a year. The line In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart, written by a fifteen-year-old girl three weeks before her arrest, is among the most quoted sentences ever composed in any language. It has been quoted at confirmations and graduations and funerals; at the openings of monuments and museums; at memorial services and political speeches and family dinners — sometimes accurately, sometimes naively, often without enough attention to what it cost the writer to compose it.
The line is not naive optimism. The line is the peace-witness signature move at its purest. It is the simultaneous holding of two facts that should logically cancel each other: the apparatus has decided to murder this writer, and the writer has decided that the apparatus does not get to determine what she believes about the people the apparatus is comprised of. The structural fact and the moral claim, both held at the same moment, neither denying the other. This is what the Peace Racket line of witness has been doing across every chapter the volume tracks. Smith in 1759 holds the structural reality of self-interest alongside the moral foundation that makes commerce livable. Douglass in 1852 holds the Founders’ work alongside the cost of slavery. Eisenhower in 1961 holds the apparatus he built alongside the warning against it. King in 1967 holds the prophetic register alongside the institutional cost the apparatus would extract from him within twelve months. Anne Frank in 1944, on a Saturday afternoon in the Annex, holds the catastrophe alongside the belief. Same move, different register.
She and Martin Luther King Jr. were born in the same year.
Anne on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt am Main. King on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta. They were exact contemporaries. In the summer of 1942 — Anne climbing the stairs to the Annex — King was thirteen years old, reading in his grandfather’s library on Auburn Avenue and skipping grades at Booker T. Washington High School. The line of witness this volume tracks closes at King’s death in Memphis in April of 1968. Anne Frank stands beside him as the parallel witness the line implicitly calls for — the witness from inside the catastrophe rather than from outside-but-inside the segregation regime, but the same witness across the same generation, with the same simultaneous holding the witness requires.
She was murdered at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in late February or early March 1945, at fifteen years and approximately eight months old. The exact date is unknown. The exact place she was buried is unknown. The only member of the Annex who survived was Otto Frank. He returned to Amsterdam in June 1945 and was given Anne’s diary by Miep Gies, the secretary who had retrieved it from the floor of the Annex after the arrest and kept it unread for eleven months in hope the family would return to read it. Otto read it. He arranged for its publication. Het Achterhuis appeared in Amsterdam in 1947, in a first print run of fifteen hundred copies.
Eighty-four years ago today the family climbed the stairs.
The diary is on the desk in the back room where she wrote it. The house at Prinsengracht 263 is open to visitors via the Anne Frank House, which maintains the museum and an extensive free public archive of Anne's life and the diary's history.
The peace witness this volume tracks includes the public-square witnesses — Butler’s pamphlet, Eisenhower’s televised address, King’s pulpit, Douglass at Corinthian Hall — and includes the private witnesses whose testimony became public because the witness demanded it. Anne Frank is one of the latter. The line of witness this project tracks runs through her.
Peace Racket, Volume I is available in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle. Volume II being written. The line of witness this project tracks runs from Adam Smith in 1759 to Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, with parallel private witnesses whose testimony reaches us by the courage of those who preserved it.