The Diary of Anne Frank: A Play

“I never thought I’d live to see the day a man like Mr. Frank would have to go into hiding.”

Although Mr. Frank has lost all power over his business and in the community, Mr. Kraler respects him with all the stature he once had. The Franks are vulnerable, and the power balance has swapped between Mr. Frank and his former employee, but none of that is apparent in their interactions. This speaks to both Mr. Frank as a person worthy of esteem and Mr. Kraler’s selflessness.

“Now I don’t have to be branded. […] The day they made us wear the star was the worst day of my life.”

Peter rips the Star of David badge off his clothes in a symbolically rebellious act. He wants to separate himself from his Jewishness, but that isn’t possible under the Nazis. Outside, he is registered as Jewish, and taking off the badge would only result in punishment for refusing to make that Jewishness visible. Inside, his Jewishness is defined by having to hide for his life. In the end, after they are arrested, Peter will receive a literal brand in the form of a concentration camp tattoo on his forearm.

“Don’t worry. We’re here now. They can’t take you away.”

Anne comforts a terrified Margot but doesn’t seem to acknowledge yet that hiding does not mean that they are safe. Margot was the first member of the family to receive a direct threat when she was ordered to report for deportation to a work camp in Germany. The entire family went into hiding 10 days early to keep her from being taken, but if they’re caught, Margot will be sent away.

“It’s the silence that frightens me most. Every time I hear a creak in the house, or a step on the street, I’m sure they’re coming for us. I wander from room to room, feeling like a songbird whose wings have been ripped off and keeps hurling itself against the bars of its dark cage. ‘Let me out, where there’s fresh air and laughter!’ But then I remember the Jews who are not in hiding, and I know we live in a paradise. We’re as quiet as baby mice. Who would have dreamed, two months ago, that quicksilver Anne would have to sit still for hours, and what’s more, could?”

After two months of hiding, Anne’s perspective has changed drastically. Silence is miserable for Anne, who is, for the first time in her life, unable to fill that silence. Now that her life and her family’s lives depend on it, she fights her nature to stay quiet, even as it makes her feel trapped and helpless. She is also now acutely aware that danger could come at any time.

“Just because someone’s young doesn’t mean they don’t have anything to say, Mr. van Daan.”

Margot is defending Anne from Mr. van Daan, who sneered at Anne’s constant writing because he sees her as a child. On a higher level, Margot is defending Anne’s diary as a significant document. Even though she is young, Anne’s voice is important and worthy of attention.

MR. VAN DAAN: Talk, talk, talk! Chatter, chatter, chatter! It’s a wonder we haven’t been discovered and shot. Why do you have to show off all the time? Why can’t you be quiet like your sister Margot? Be a good girl?

ANNE: Not me! (Dancing past him with the milk.) I’m going to be remarkable. I’m going to Paris.

The adults in Anne’s life are always telling her to be like Margot. Margot is quiet, obedient, and easy to get along with. Anne wants to make her own way in the world and define herself as a distinct person. Anne’s dreams aren’t fulfilled in the way she expects, and she doesn’t live to be remarkable or go to Paris. But she will become remarkable after her death, and her diary will be translated into French and her words will make it to Paris.

“I can’t even remember how life used to be.”

Mrs. Frank is frustrated that Anne can’t seem to avoid conflict with the van Daans and that her husband won’t acknowledge that the van Daans are rude and difficult to deal with. In two months, this has become their version of normal, and she doesn’t know how they can keep living this way. They will continue living like this for over two years, but Mrs. Frank will finally reach the end of her rope and try to take matters into her own hands and kick the van Daan’s out of the Annex.

“Every time we come, we try to bring a bit of good news. Up here, you can’t realize how bad things have become outside.”

Mr. Kraler acknowledges that he has been shielding the Franks and van Daans from the reality of how things have deteriorated during their two months of hiding since fear and anxiety will only make them more miserable while hope might help them to survive. However, to ask them to take in Mr. Dussel, he has to give them an idea of the danger outside.

“If we can save even one person we must.”

Mr. Frank agrees to take in Mr. Dussel without asking the others, even though they don’t have enough space or food for themselves. Mr. van Daan is less willing, but Mr. Frank makes an important point about their responsibility to do everything they can. This moment demonstrates the difference between their characters. Mr. Frank is selfless and sees it as his duty to help others, even as they struggle to survive themselves. Mr. van Daan is worried about his own survival, which makes him seem selfish, even though self-preservation is a common instinct. During a moment of crisis, the standards of goodness are raised.

“It’s all very exciting… and totally nerve-racking. What if they get caught? Those last few hours on the way to safety are the most dangerous for a Jew going into hiding.”

Anne and the rest of the Annex dwellers are excited for Mr. Dussel to arrive. He is a new face and a novelty, which is something they’ve been deprived of in hiding. They will lose their excitement quickly as Mr. Dussel becomes one more person crowding the Annex and Anne’s annoying roommate, but in this moment, there is drama in Mr. Dussel’s journey and the thrill of his survival.

MIEP: We’re not heroes.

MR. FRANK: Miep, you are too modest.

MIEP: We just don’t like the Nazis. Anything about them.

The real Miep Gies maintained that she was not a hero, and she was not as brave as the people who had to go into hiding. She and Mr. Kraler took great risks to their lives by harboring the people in the Annex, but to stand back and do nothing, sitting on the privilege of not being targeted by the Nazis, would make them complicit. The horrors of the Holocaust forced ordinary people to become heroes.

“All over Amsterdam, Jews are disappearing… some are torn out of bed in the middle of the night… My God, the screams. Children come home from school to find their parents gone, women come back from shopping to find their families vanished. It’s impossible to escape unless you go into hiding. Thousands are being deported.”

When Mr. Dussel comes to the Annex, those who have been in hiding are excited to hear about the outside world, which they’ve been missing. But they discover that Miep and Mr. Kraler have been protecting them from knowing the worst while they’re helpless to do anything about it. Mr. Dussel has experienced the next level of persecution, which the Annex inhabitants just avoided. This dose of harsh reality gives Anne nightmares.

“I couldn’t sleep tonight, even after Father tucked me in and said my prayers with me. I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed when my friends are at the mercy of the cruelest monsters ever to walk the earth. And all because they’re Jews. We assume that most of them are murdered. The BBC says they’re being gassed. Perhaps that’s the quickest way to die. Fine specimens of humanity, those Germans, and to think I’m actually one of them! No, that’s not true. Hitler took our nationality away long ago. […] No matter what I’m doing, I can’t help thinking about those who are gone. All we can do is wait for the war to end. The whole world is waiting, and many are waiting for death.”

As Anne is becoming more aware of what is happening to Jews on the outside, her response reveals more of who she is as a character. Anne is immediately aware of her own privilege in hiding and much more worried about what is happening to her friends than about being caught and meeting the same fate. She still, however, imagines that Jews are at least being killed humanely, which is very far from the truth. It’s notable that Anne sees her Jewishness as an indelible part of her identity while her nationality is mutable.

“I’m trying to change. I have another side, a better finer side. But it’s as if I’m split in half. What’s good, what’s bad, Pim? I don’t know. I want to be a better person, but not if it means shutting myself off. Hiding how I feel.”

Anne is struggling with a common quandary of young people who are going through puberty and hormonal changes. At heart, she is a kind and caring person, but she is also tangling with her normal adolescent angst. Without other teens to develop alongside, her feelings seem unique and abnormal, and she worries about whether she is a good person. Her sense of self is in flux, and she is afraid that being a good person will mean masking her real feelings. By the end of the play, Anne has moved past that phase and developed into kind, caring young adult, who is still very much herself.

“I see the eight of us in the Annex as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds. The clouds are moving in on us, and the ring between us and the approaching danger is being pulled tighter and tighter. We’re surrounded by darkness and danger, and in our desperate search for a way out we keep bumping into each other. We look at the fighting down below and the peace and beauty above, but we’re cut off by the dark mass of clouds and can go neither up nor down. It looms before us, an impenetrable wall, trying to crush us, but not yet able to. I can only cry out and implore, ‘Oh ring, ring, open wide and let us out!’”

At the end of the act, after the fright of the burglars downstairs, Anne feels the danger closing in on them, foreshadowing what will happen at the end of the play. Her use of the blue sky as a metaphor is notable, since they haven’t seen a real sky in six months.

“Sometimes, when I lie in bed at night, I feel a terrible urge to touch my breasts and listen to the steady beating of my heart. Once when I was spending the night at Jopie’s, I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she always kept hidden from me. I asked her whether, as proof of our friendship, we could touch each other’s breasts. She refused. I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did. Every time I see a female nude, such as the Venus in my art history book, I go into ecstasy. Sometimes I find them so exquisite I have to struggle to hold back tears. (A pause.) And there’s something else. Peter… Whenever he looks at me with those eyes, I get this feeling –”

This passage, in which Anne talks about her developing feelings of sexual desire, was cut from the original printing of the diary—understandably, since it would have been considered inappropriate and much harder to publish, and it makes sense that Otto would have felt that this was far too personal to share with the world. It has often been held up as evidence that Anne was bisexual or even a lesbian, but given that she was still a child when she wrote this, and she didn’t survive to become an adult or make her own conclusions about her sexuality, it’s impossible to know what these feelings would have meant, and it’s problematic to assign sexual orientation or identity posthumously.

“There’s no hope to be had. I know that… I knew it the night Hitler came to power, when that voice came screaming out of the radio. I sat there paralyzed. And now in London, what is the Dutch queen doing? What are they all doing? Nothing. They’re not even mentioning the word Jew. The trains are still leaving. Why don’t they bomb the tracks?”

Mrs. Frank confides to Miep that she is feeling hopeless, but she feels obligated to remain stoic around the others, especially for the sake of her family. She expresses her worries quietly to Mr. Frank about whether their hiding situation is the best or if they are making the right choices. The Annex dwellers argue about whether the Allied powers are doing enough, and Mrs. Frank articulates the frightening possibility that they aren’t even noticing Jewish suffering or that they don’t care enough to do something.

“I… I’ve never really had a friend. Not someone I could confide in.”

Anne demonstrates that she has become much more mature than she was at the start of the play. Before hiding, Anne had many friends, and based on her story about asking to touch her friend’s breasts, they likely shared secrets. However, now that Anne is growing up, she’s realizing that Peter is having the similar experience of living through the confusion of adolescence alone.

“History cannot be written on the basis of official documents alone. If our descendants are to understand what we as a nation have endured during these years, we need simple, everyday pieces – a diary, letters from a forced laborer in Germany…”

Anne is ecstatic when she hears the Dutch Cabinet Minister for Education Bolkestein on the radio, calling for people to save documents that will eventually be publishable after the war. For Anne, this is affirmation that her voice and perspective are legitimate and have value, that people will want to read what she writes. It also gives her something to work toward with the promise that the war will end eventually.

“Unless you write yourself, you can’t know how wonderful it is. When I write I shake off all my cares. But I want to achieve more than that. I want to be useful and bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death!”

Anne loves writing, and it helps her to endure the endless days and fears of being in hiding, but sharing her writing with the world means something bigger. It’s a way for Anne to do something with her life that has a positive effect on the world. This passage is often quoted because Anne’s writing did achieve what she hoped, and it even gave her the immortality of going on after her death, but she didn’t expect her death to occur so soon or for her influence to happen in quite the way it did. Ironically, she probably became exponentially more famous in death than she would have become if she had lived.

“My life before seems so unreal. I see myself then as an utterly superficial girl, who has nothing to do with who I am now. I wouldn’t go back to being her for the world.”

When Anne first went into hiding, she was young and appropriately childish, but as the only child in the Annex, she was given little leeway to act like a child. Before hiding, Anne was a friendly and popular girl, who was always talking and joking. Certainly, maturity comes with age, but for Anne, maturity has also come with living in abnormal and perilous circumstances. While maturity undoubtedly makes it easier for Anne to relate to the others in the Annex, there is also an aspect of lost childhood and innocence that makes her maturity a bit sad.

“Are you still alive? I keep seeing your enormous eyes. I keep seeing myself in your place. You’re a reminder of what my fate might have been. What will we do if we’re ever… no, I mustn’t write that down. But the question won’t let itself be pushed to the back of my mind. All the fear I’ve ever felt is looming before me in total absolute horror.”

Anne is haunted throughout the play by the imagined specter of Hanneli after learning from Mr. Dussel that her friend was taken away. She knows that Hanneli is likely dead. Anne has no way of knowing yet what suffering in the camps looks like, but she imagines Hanneli thin and sickly. She sees the image she conjures as the fate she was spared, a vision to invoke pity and guilt. She doesn’t know that the prescience of the vision is her own future. Hanneli will survive the war, but first she will spot Anne when she is near death, bearing witness to Anne’s pitiful condition that eerily echoes the way Anne imagines Hanneli. 

“I’d never turn my back on who I am. I couldn’t. Don’t you realize, Peter, you’ll always be Jewish… in your soul.”

Anne is shocked when Peter says that he plans to stop acknowledging his Jewishness after the war, to keep it a secret and possibly even convert to Christianity. Peter’s negative feelings about his religion seem to be centered on the experience of persecution, not issues with the religion itself. Anne sees Judaism as essential, inextricable from her identity, and to deny it is to deny herself. Their suffering is inflicted solely because they are Jewish, but Anne doesn’t see Judaism as a choice of faith. One is born as one of the Chosen People, and faith or lack of faith doesn’t change that. This line in the 1997 revival text is pointedly saying that Anne’s Jewishness cannot be sublimated in her story.