Happy 86th Birthday to Anne Frank: On Choosing Kindness
Portraits of Anne Frank in 1941. (Photo: Anne Frank House/Frans Dupont)
Exactly a year ago, I was in the city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, waiting in line to visit the Anne Frank House, the house-turned-museum that once hid Second World War diarist Anne Frank’s family from Nazi persecution. The long, meandering line was a strange mixture of high school students on a tour, googly-eyed lovers à la The Fault in Our Stars, and young women like me, standing alone with a book to pass the three-hour wait to get into the museum. The elegant townhouse building was located on the banks of the picturesque river, which seemed especially cruel considering that Frank couldn’t be near windows while she was in hiding. Today would have been Frank’s 86th birthday, and since her death, The Diary of Anne Frank has been published in over 60 languages and has inspired movies, plays, and generations of girls and boys for whom keeping a diary wasn’t a cliché but a means to survival.
Frank, only age 15 at her death from typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, inspired a legion of young men and women who dreamed bigger than they were allowed to. While she was in hiding in the Secret Annex of the house in Amsterdam, she kept multiple diaries and notes written on scraps of paper that eventually became compiled together after her death. Frank wrote about growing pains, sexuality, womanhood, and following her dreams — and for millions of schoolgirls who have read her diary since, Frank was a hero. In one of my favorite passages, Frank wrote: “Women should be respected as well! Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn’t women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?” She was only 13 when she wrote this.
Our English teachers would tell us, “Frank didn’t survive the Holocaust but her book is studied and revered as a historical artifact,” but for many of us growing up, Frank was a peer and a keeper and sharer of secrets. She was curious about body parts (hers and others). She wanted to be a star. She still believed in goodness. In her diary, Frank wrote, “Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!” When choosing between kindness and cruelty, the easier choice is cruelty: to harden your heart and disengage your humanity from the rest of society. Choosing kindness isn’t the weaker option — keeping your empathy when the world has been cruel to you is difficult because it requires keeping your heart open to vulnerability.
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