Anne Frank’s Friends: The Girls Who Lived

[Gerald]

Some stories, in their telling, are so hard to believe and, at their ending, are so hard to bear that, if they were not historically, demonstrably real, readers might be forgiven for dismissing them out of hand as over the top. Stranger than fiction. Too fanciful, and dreadful, by half.

And yet anyone who has made it past, say, the eighth grade in virtually any school system anywhere in the world knows at least the rudiments of Anne Frank’s terrible, indelible story — and what’s more, knows it to be true.

The narrative elements that form the framework of Anne’s Diary of a Young Girl, as readers of the book know, are as prosaic and as grotesque as those that animate the very darkest of fairy tales.

A young girl, wise and compassionate beyond her years, and her family go into hiding in Amsterdam during the Second World War, desperate to evade the Nazis who occupy their adopted country; the girl and those in hiding with her are eventually betrayed (by a person or persons still, to this day, unknown) and are sent to concentration camps; most of her former companions die — or rather, are murdered by Nazis and their willing proxies — along with millions of other Jews and “undesirables” in the coming years; Anne Frank herself is only 15 years old when she dies at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945 — one month before Allied troops liberate the camp.

These and other wrenching elements of Anne’s tale, imparted in the clear, unsentimental prose of her famous diary, are now integral markers in the shared memory of cultures the world over.

http://life.time.com/history/anne-fr...paul-schutzer/