- Person
- Anne Frank
- Lived
- 1929–1945
- Field
- Writing
- From
- Dutch-German
The story
Anne Frank's diary has travelled far beyond the history of the Holocaust. First published in Dutch in 1947, it appeared in German and French in 1950 and in English in 1952, and over the following decades it found readers in places Anne could never have imagined. One of the most remarkable was a political prisoner in South Africa.
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for his struggle against apartheid, the system of racial segregation imposed by the South African state. He was held first on Robben Island, where he spent 18 years from 1964, often in a cramped concrete cell, and later in Pollsmoor and Victor Verster prisons. He was finally released in 1990, and on 10 May 1994 he was inaugurated as South Africa's first Black head of government.
That same year he received a humanitarian award from the Anne Frank Foundation and spoke to a crowd in Johannesburg. He told them that he had read Anne's diary while in prison and had derived much encouragement from it. He compared her suffering under Nazism with the struggle against apartheid, setting the two racist ideologies side by side. Such beliefs were false, he said, and because they would always be challenged by people like Anne Frank, they were bound to fail.
Mandela was not alone in finding his own struggle in her pages. Also in 1994, the Czech president and former dissident Václav Havel said that Anne Frank's legacy was very much alive and could speak fully to people living through the upheavals in the former Eastern Bloc. Hillary Clinton read from the diary that year when accepting the Elie Wiesel Humanitarian Award, linking Anne's warning about indifference to the suffering in Sarajevo, Somalia and Rwanda.
Simon Wiesenthal once observed that the diary had done more to make people aware of the Holocaust than the Nuremberg trials, because readers identified with a family like their own. Mandela's testimony shows the same power working across continents: a girl writing in a hidden annex in Amsterdam gave courage to a man in a cell thousands of miles away, decades later, in a different fight against the same kind of hatred.
Why it matters
A teenager's words written in hiding gave strength to a political prisoner who went on to lead his country from apartheid to democracy, and they still speak to people resisting injustice today.
About Anne Frank
Diarist of the Holocaust; her diary has become one of literature's most-read accounts of conscience and hope.
More about Anne Frank
- Anne Frank rewrote her diary to publish it after the warAfter hearing a 1944 radio appeal to preserve wartime diaries, Anne Frank, aged 14, began rewriting her diary as a book, creating pseudonyms and shaping it for readers.
- Anne Frank's birthplace opened a centre for learningIn 1997 the Anne Frank Educational Centre opened in Frankfurt's Dornbusch district, where Anne lived until 1934, as a place to learn about National Socialism and its lessons today.
- Anne Frank's hiding place became a museum in 1960The building where Anne Frank hid was saved from demolition by a foundation formed in 1957 and opened as the Anne Frank House museum on 3 May 1960.
- Saplings from Anne Frank's tree grow around the worldSaplings from the horse-chestnut tree Anne Frank watched from her hiding place have been planted at museums, schools and memorials, including Little Rock and a 9/11 memorial park.
Sources
- Anne Frank Wikipedia
- Nelson Mandela Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.