Sarah Collins

Prof. Wertz-Orbaugh
UWRT 1102-044
April 14th, 2015
Perspectives on Anne Frank the Diary of a Young Girl: A Research Review
This research review covers all of the inquiry work I did as I learned about Anne Frank
and her diary. Most people know about Anne Frank and her diary but they dont know any
understanding and different views on the book and her writing. I learned a lot from my four
different sources. I reread most of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl written by Anne
Frank to review what I learned in the past since the last time I read the book I was in 8th Grade. I
also found a book that helps me get a deeper look into Anne Frank and her life called Anne
Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife by Francine Prose. When I did research for an article
on JSTOR I found a great article debating on whether the diary was real or not, this article was
called Anne Frank and the What If? School of Fiction written by Sanford Pinsker. The last
source I found through my research was a book from our library called Understanding Anne
Franks The Diary of a Young Girl: A student casebook to issues, sources and historical
documents by Hedda R. Kopf; this book has a lot of great information in it but there is one
section called Authenticity of the Diary that I really enjoyed reading and can connect it to
Pinskers article.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young girl was about a young Jewish girl in the Holocaust.
Her family went into hiding to avoid getting sent to a concentration camp or killed. Eventually
the Nazis found them and everyone in her family died except Annes dad. Anne Frank got given
a diary on her birthday before they went into hiding and Anne wrote in this diary a lot since it
was like her best friend. In the book you read about all of the awful experiences and how they

manage to stay alive as long as they did. As Anne talked about the gun fires they always hear
outside she wrote, The gunfire troubled us no longer, our fear was banished!(95) They were so
used to hearing gun fires and been in hiding for so long that the fear of death was no longer
there. Annes diary got left behind in the secret annex, the place they were hiding, when they got
taken away to go to a concentration camp. Annes dad found the diary after he got out of the
concentration camp and published Annes diary which is where the book came from.
Another thing I noticed in Anne Franks diary was that on the inside cover she wrote I
hope I will be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone
before, and I hope you will be a great support and comfort to me.(9) At first I was really
confused by this but after thinking about it for a while I figured it out. Anne is writing this to her
diary; later on in her diary she named her diary Kitty so this means she is asking Kitty to be her
friend and to be able to confide in Kitty. I learned from reading her diary that she never had
many friends. Her best friend was her cat, Moortje, which is why she wanted to find comfort and
support in her diary.
The last thing that I really took from going back and re reading Anne Franks diary is
that her diary isnt just a historical artifact, it is more than that. I always thought of her diary as
something that I have to read so I could learn about the Holocaust but in her writing there is great
meaning and emotions. She writes in the last entry of the diary, I cant keep up (with being
criticized for being in a bad mood and being accused for being sick): if Im watched to that
extent, I start by getting snappy, then unhappy, and finally I twist my heart round again so that
the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside and keep on trying to find a way of
becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if there werent any other people
living in the world.(291-292) These are the last words Anne wrote before she was taken away to

concentration camp 3 days later. Some people might use her diary just as history but her diary to
me is a piece of art. Going back and reading parts of this book has really helped me understand
things I did not know or have forgotten, I have learned a lot from this book for my research.
In the next source, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife by Francine Prose, I
found some really interesting information about Anne Frank and her life. Since her book was
written by herself and was a diary, some important stuff about Annes life was left out. In this
book you get to learn about so many details of Anne Frank and how she wanted her writing to be
noticed in the future. Prose wrote, Anne wanted her work to be noticed, to be read, and she
spent her last months of relative freedom desperately attempting to make sure that her wish
might someday be granted.(10) Which her wish was granted when her father published her
diary. I found this very interesting because I always thought that the diary was written by a really
young girl and that Anne never even thought of the potential that her journal had also I never
knew she went back to edit it. Starting in the spring of 1944, Anne went back and rewrote her
diary from the beginning. These revisions would cover 324 loose sheets of colored paper and fill
in the one year gap.(10)
Another thing that I read and absolutely love was this quote from Anne Frank in April
1944, four months before the attic, If I havent any talent for writing books or newspaper
articles, well, then I can always write for myself I want to go on living even after my death!
And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself
and of writing of expressing all that is in me!(6) This is just so inspiring and touches my heart. I
never knew that she always wanted to be a writer. I thought that her diary was just something
that she enjoyed to do since she had nothing else to do. After reading pieces from Proses book, I
have gotten a lot more understanding on Annes passion for writing.

Anne Frank and the What If? School of Fiction, by Sanford Pinsker is my third source
and was extremely important in finding more research because this article brought up the
discussion of whether the diary/ book is authenticate or not. In the article Pinsker said Not
everyone has been happy about this development (of Anne being the poster child of the
Holocaust), and the diary has been surrounded by controversynot only of the sort that once
attached itself to slave narratives, but also by those who squabbled that the Anne Frank portrayed
on Broadway was too universalized, too sanitized, and that her essential Jewishness had been
airbrushed away. Some people believe that Anne Frank was made up for fame and publicity.
This is a very sensitive topic since we are talking about the Holocaust where people lost their
lives just because they are Jewish, but there is actually several articles and reviews on her diary
in a negative way. It is very shocking to me that people would write so negatively towards such a
topic. It is interesting to read their thoughts on the subject and to read to see if there is any
evidence on whether the diary is true or not.
The article also says that, Cynthia Ozick made this astonishing admission: she would
have much preferred that the pages of Annes diary, strewn on the floor of her attic hiding place,
had been burned rather than discovered. This is a very unique thought. I have never read this
anywhere else except here. If the book had been burned it would have been very tragic in my
option because the diary is such a great resource from the Holocaust. I think it is crazy for
someone to have preferred the diary being burned, its just crazy.
The last thing I want to bring up from this article is that he says that Anne Frank only
has cultural significance by being dead. The power, the very grip, of her diary depends on this. I
think they are trying to say that if Anne did not die then her diary wouldnt have been as popular
and powerful. I disagree though. She still went through the Holocaust, if she survived and wrote

in the journal after she got out of camp, I think her diary would have been even stronger not
weaker.
The final source I am going to writing about is the book, Understanding Anne Franks the
Diary of a Young Girl: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. One
thing I really enjoyed reading was the section titled Authenticity of The Diary. This section
really caught my attention because it was so detailed and had evidence. Rosner Kopf wrote Otto
Frank and, later, Bep (Elli) Voskuijl and Miep and Jan (Henk) Gies were called to testify on
behalf of the diary. In addition, the diary was analyzed by experts for consistency of style and the
authenticity of handwriting. The experts concluded that the diary was definitely written by Anne
Frank.(7) This was so fascinating to me; first I read the article about people questioning its
authenticity then I got to read the proof of why the diary is authenticate.
Another thing I took from this book was how humorous Anne Frank was. There is a
whole chapter just on who Anne Frank is and her relationships to different people. I never knew
that Anne Frank was humorous. She described staying in the secret annex as being on vacation
in a very peculiar boardinghouse.(32) Although she had a great sense of humor, her writing
moved back and forth from optimism to depression quite a bit.
I also learned from Chapter 5: Children in the Holocaust that the children that went into
hiding suffered badly from after the war. Hidden children had heartbreaking circumstances to
confront. Many did not have their parents return for them. Some did not know for certain what
had happened to their mothers and fathers, and so it was difficult to put closure on their
losses.(110) I never really thought about this before. I always think about the 1.5 million

Jewish children (that) did not survive.(109) I usually dont think about the children that did
survived and suffered from trauma and loss. It is just all so sad and an awful time in our history.
Through finding these resources and reading about all this stuff I never knew before, I
feel that I have learned a lot this semester. For an example, I learned not only on Anne Frank and
her diary but on children in the Holocaust and the different debates on the diary. I have also
learned a great deal on how to research books and articles, also how to document them in a
paper. Some new information I am taking away with me from Anne Franks diary is the
realization that Anne isnt just telling her story, she is telling us, the audience, about the many
lives that were lived like this in the Holocaust. She is representing all the Jewish children in the
Holocaust since we have her diary which is a great resource. I really enjoyed learning all these
great sources and being able to reflect them in this Research Review Paper.

Work Cited:
Frank, Anne. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. New York: Bantam Books, 1993. Print.
Kopf, Hedda R. Understanding Anne Frank's the Diary of a Young Girl: A Student Casebook to
Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1997.
Print.
Pinsker, Sanford. "Anne Frank and the What If?: School of Fiction." Sewanee Review. 122.2
(2014): 340-344. Print.
Prose, Francine. Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife. New York: Harper, 2009. Print.