Page 394 - The Secret Museum

He hesitated to publish his daughter’s diary, but he finally decided to fulfil her

wish.

Before long, the diary was a sensation. Across the world, people got to know
Anne Frank intimately through her own words, and everyone was moved by the story
she told. A Broadway play based on her diary opened in 1955, and was shown in
Germany the following year. A reviewer wrote, ‘In Berlin, after the final curtain, the
audience sat in stunned silence. There was no applause. Only the welling sound of
deep sobs broke the absolute stillness. Then, still not speaking and seeming not to
look at each other, the Berliners filed out of the theatre.’

Otto Frank wanted Anne’s diary to be a message to humanity: ‘I hope Anne’s book

will have an effect on the rest of your life so that, insofar as it is possible in your
own circumstances, you will work for unity and peace.’ This was also his motivation
for making the secret annexe into a museum.

At the museum’s opening ceremony, he could not finish his speech: ‘I ask
forgiveness because I can no longer speak of the events that took place here during
the war. It’s too hard for me. I can’t.’ He hoped that the house would be ‘an earnest
warning from the past and a mission of hope for the future’.

Today, over a million people a year visit the Anne Frank House. I was very
moved when I went there and walked through the secret annexe. The events of 70
years ago seem so immediate. Anne’s words are written on the walls of the rooms;

her feelings pervade the space. The pictures she pinned on her bedroom wall are still
there: beautiful brunette film stars, sweet blonde girls and reproductions of paintings.
Next door, in her parents’ room, are the pencil lines they made to mark how tall Anne
and Margot were at various ages. I was surprised by how high the top lines were
drawn. I hadn’t imagined Anne as a tall teenager, but of course, six years had passed
since she wrote in the friendship book kept in storage.

Anne died, tragically, a month before the Allies liberated the Bergen-Belsen
camp. Margot had already died, and Anne had no idea whether their parents were

still alive.

Hanneli Goslar – a schoolfriend of Anne who is also in that tenth-birthday
photograph and also wrote a verse in the album in the archives was one of the last of
Anne’s friends to see her, in the camp. Hanneli said after the war, ‘I have always
thought that if Anne had known that her father was still alive, she would have found
the strength to go on living.’

Anne Frank’s story is one of the best-known stories of anyone who lived through
the Second World War. She has become a symbol for the lost Jewish children of her
generation. But she is only one of over a million children who, like her, were

wrenched from happy childhoods, into hiding, into exile, or to their death.
I wondered what had become of her dear schoolfriend Juultje Ketellapper, the
owner of the poesiealbum. Erika told me. It was not a happy tale.