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Reflection
Anne Frank�s Diary: Is It Authentic?
Perhaps the most famous personal account of the Holocaust, The Diary of Anne Frank was written in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, between 1942 and 1944 ("Diary of a Young Girl: Context"). Readers have cherished the story of Anne Frank for decades now, intriguing them with her "precise, confident, economical style stunning in its honesty" (M�ller xix). There are and were, however, those who denied that the Holocaust exists and took legal action against the publication of Anne�s diary, asserting that the diary was not genuine. Despite the attacks, Anne�s fame continued to rise and her story is now one of the best known in the world; with translations of her diary in almost every language.
In her diary, Anne speaks descriptively of her experiences, the persecution of Jews, and the Holocaust itself. An ecstatic Anne received the diary on her thirteenth birthday and decided that she could confide in it, as a sort of imaginary friend. At once, she began filling her diary with details of her life, including descriptions of her friends, boys she liked, and events at school. Less than one month after she began documenting her relatively carefree childhood, Anne and her family were suddenly forced into hiding (Frank 18). While in hiding (with the help of some Christian friends of theirs, the Van Daan�s) Anne wrote detailed descriptions of what she went through. She went from writing about her romantic feelings for a boy named Peter Van Daan, to writing about serious issues such as the fact that Jews were being forced to go to concentration camps and were dying. Anne Frank died in young of typhus, hunger, and maltreatment at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp � as did countless others.
When Anne�s father, Otto Frank, retrieved the diary from family friend Miep Gies, he saw how much Anne wrote in detail of her experiences, and decided to publish it, while omitting some personal parts of it. Ever since its publication, efforts have been made to discredit the diary, saying that it �was forged� and the Holocaust did not occur at all ("Anne Frank").
If this was so, then why was it that there are an abundant amount of sources that show the genocide of Jews do exist? The concentration camp that Anne was placed in, Bergen-Belsen, was in fact an actual concentration camp. Proof of this include the following: former prisoners giving detailed accounts of events during the Holocaust, bodies of those who could not escape fate in the camps, and artifacts such as pictures or pieces of writing (Weber 25).
As a result of these false accusations, Otto Frank took legal action in L�beck against Lothar Stielau, a school teacher and former Hitler Youth member who published a school paper that described the diary as a forgery. The court examined the diary, and in 1960 found it to be genuine ("Anne Frank"). Stielau took back his earlier statement, and Otto Frank did not pursue the case any further.
Also, group of protesters asserted that Anne Frank never even existed; another absurd idea. They demanded to see the man who arrested Anne, Karl Silberbauer. Simon Wiesenthal � a man well known for collecting information on Nazi war criminals � found Silberbauer in 1963. "When interviewed, Silberbauer readily admitted his role, and identifed Anne Frank from a photograph as one of the people arrested." ("Wikipedia: Anne Frank").
The controversy reached its peak in 1980 with the arrest and trial of two neo-Nazis, Ernst R�mer and Edgar Geiss, who were tried and found guilty of producing and distributing literature denouncing the diary as a forgery, following a complaint by Otto Frank ("Anne Frank"). During their appeal, a team of historians examined the documents in consultation with Otto Frank, and determined them to be genuine (da Silva).
The Holocaust is the �name given to the period of persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany� ("Holocaust"). Encyclopedias only state fact, and as far as you can tell, the genocide is clearly described in it. It is but by mere opinion that these antagonists go by. Therefore, their statements are invalid.
When Otto Frank died in 1980, the original diary, consisting of letters and loose sheets, were willed to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, who commissioned a forensic study of the diary through the Netherlands Ministry of Justice in 1986 ("Anne Frank"). Anne Frank�s diary was finally proven to be authentic:
They examined the handwriting against known exemplars and found that they matched, and determined that the paper, glue and ink were readily available during the time the diary was said to have been written. Their final determination was that the diary is authentic. On March 23, 1990, the Hamburg Regional Court confirmed its authenticity ("Wikipedia: Anne Frank").
Though her diary has been confirmed an authentic, there are still those who oppose the cold hard facts. Regardless of this, Anne Frank has become one of the most renowned and discussed of the Holocaust victims. Perhaps this is because readers can relate to her; even former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt said of Anne�s diary, "[It is] one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that [she] have ever read" (Frank xiii).
Works Cited
"Anne Frank." Logic Jungle Internet Directory & Encyclopedia. 2005. 29 March 2005 .
Da Silva, Teresien. "Denial of the Authenticity of the Diary."
Anne Frank House. 1999. Anne Frank Museum Amsterdam. 12 April 2005 .
"Diary of a Young Girl: Context." Sparknotes. 2005. 12 April 2005 .
Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.
"Holocaust." Columbia Encyclopedia. Sixth Edition. 2001. 5 April 2005 .
M�ller, Melissa. Anne Frank: The Biography. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998.
Weber, Mark. "Bergen-Belsen Camp: The suppressed story." The Journal of Historical
Review. May 1995: 23-30.
Wikipedia: Anne Frank." Wikipedia. 2005. 5 April 2005 .
Reflection
I wrote my research paper on the authenticity of Anne Frank�s diary. The reason for this is because I did not know that there are and were people who denied that what Anne Frank wrote was true, or that she did not even write the diary at all. Some claimed that it was her father, Otto Frank who wrote the diary after she died. Unlike the biographical narrative, which I liked writing, I found this paper to be a lot more confusing and had trouble even finding something to write about. I was so unsure about what to do that I chose my topic at the last minute, and it turns out that I was supposed to write about a piece of fiction. The diary, of course, was not fiction, but a non-fiction account of what a real-life girl wrote about herself and experience. I don�t know if I got points taken off for that mistake, but I was completely unprepared for this paper and deserve the grade that I got, which sad to say, was not even passing.
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