One could call this a simple mistake, except that it echoed a similar incident the previous year, when visitors noticed a discrepancy in the museum’s audio-guide displays. Each audio-guide language was represented by a national flag—with the exception of Hebrew, which was represented only by the language’s name in its alphabet. The display was eventually corrected to include the Israeli flag.

  These public-relations mishaps, clumsy though they may have been, were not really mistakes, nor were they even the fault of the museum alone. On the contrary: these instances of concealed Jewish identity are the key to the runaway success of Anne Frank’s diary and fame. This sort of hiding was an essential part of the diary’s original publication, in which several direct references to Jewish practice were edited away. They were also part of the psychological legacy of Anne Frank’s parents and grandparents, German Jews for whom the price of admission to Western society was assimilation, hiding their differences by accommodating and ingratiating themselves to the culture that ultimately sought to destroy them. That price lies at the heart of Anne Frank’s endless appeal. After all, Anne Frank had to hide her identity so much that she was forced to spend two years in a closet rather than breathe in public. And that closet, hiding place for a dead Jewish girl, is what millions of visitors want to see.

  Surely there is nothing left to say about Anne Frank, except that there is everything left to say about her: all the books she never lived to write. For she was unquestionably a talented writer, possessed of both the ability and the commitment that real literature requires. Quite the opposite of how the influential Dutch historian Jan Romein described her work in April of 1946, in his article in the newspaper Het Parool that spurred her diary’s publication—a “diary by a child, this de profundis stammered out in a child’s voice”—Frank’s diary was not the work of a naif, but rather of a writer already planning future publication. Frank had begun the diary casually, but soon sensed its potential. Upon hearing a radio broadcast in March of 1944 calling on Dutch civilians to preserve diaries and other personal wartime documents, she immediately began to revise two years of previous entries, with a title (Het Achterhuis, or The House Behind) already in mind, along with pseudonyms for the hiding place’s residents. Nor were her revisions simple corrections or substitutions. They were thoughtful edits designed to draw the reader in, intentional and sophisticated. Her first entry in the original diary, for instance, begins with a long description of her birthday gifts (the blank diary being one of them), an entirely unself-conscious record by a thirteen-year-old girl. The first entry in her revised version, on the other hand, begins with a deeply self-aware and ironic pose: “It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I—nor for that matter anyone else—will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.”

  The innocence here is all affect, carefully achieved. Imagine writing this as your second draft, with a clear vision of a published manuscript; this is hardly the mind of a “stammering” child. In addition to the diary, Frank also worked hard on her stories, or as she proudly put it, “my pen-children are piling up.” Some of these were scenes from her life in hiding, but others were entirely invented: stories of a poor girl with six siblings, or a dead grandmother protecting her orphaned grandchild, or a novel-in-progress about star-crossed lovers featuring multiple marriages, depression, a suicide, and prophetic dreams. Already wary of a writer’s pitfalls, she noted, “It isn’t sentimental nonsense for it’s modeled on the story of Daddy’s life.”

  “I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work,” she wrote a few months before her arrest. “I know myself what is and what is not well written.”

  What is and what is not well written: it is likely that Frank’s opinions on this subject would have evolved if she had had the opportunity to age. Reading the diary as an adult, one sees the limitations of a teenager’s perspective, and longs for more. In one entry, Frank describes how her father’s business partners—now her family’s protectors—hold a critical corporate meeting in the office below the family’s hiding place. Her father, she, and her sister discover that they can hear what is said by lying down with their ears pressed to the floor. In Frank’s telling, the episode is a comic one; she gets so bored that she falls asleep. But adult readers cannot help but ache for her father, a man who clawed his way out of bankruptcy to build a business now stolen from him, reduced to lying facedown on the floor just to overhear what his subordinates might do with his life’s work. When Frank complains about her insufferable middle-aged roommate Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel, per Frank’s pseudonym) taking his time on the toilet, adult readers might empathize with him as the only single adult in the group, permanently separated from his non-Jewish life partner whom he could not marry due to antisemitic laws. Readers Frank’s age connect with her budding romance with fellow hidden resident Peter van Pels (renamed Peter van Daan), but adults might wonder how either of the married couples in the hiding place managed their own relationships in confinement with their children. More broadly, readers Frank’s age relate to her constant complaints about grown-ups and their pettiness, but adults are equipped to appreciate these grown-ups’ psychological devastation, how they endured not only their physical deprivation, but the greater blow of being reduced to a childlike state of dependence on the whims of others.

  Frank herself sensed the limits of the adults around her, writing critically of her own mother’s and Peter’s mother’s apparently trivial preoccupations—and in fact these women’s circumstances, not only their wartime deprivation but their prewar lives as housewives, were a chief driver for Frank’s ambitions. “I can’t imagine that I would have to lead the same sort of life as Mummy and Mrs. v.P. [van Pels] and all the women who do their work and are then forgotten,” she wrote. “I must have something besides a husband and children, something that I can devote myself to!” In the published diary, this passage is immediately followed by the famous words, “I want to go on living even after my death!”

  By plastering this sentence on Frank’s book jackets, publishers have implied that through her posthumous fame, the writer’s dreams were achieved. But when we consider the writer’s actual ambitions, it is obvious that her dreams were in fact destroyed—and that the writer who would have emerged from Frank’s experience would not be anything like the writer Frank herself originally planned to become. Imagine this obituary of a life unlived:

  Anne Frank, noted Dutch novelist and essayist, died this past Wednesday at her home in Amsterdam. She was 92.

  A survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Frank’s acclaim was hard-won. In her twenties, Frank struggled to find a publisher for her first book, The House Behind, a memoir of her experiences in hiding and in Nazi concentration camps. Disfigured by a brutal beating, Frank rarely granted interviews; her later work, The Return, describes how her father did not recognize her upon their reunion in 1945. Frank supported herself as a journalist, and in 1961 she earned notoriety for her fierce reporting on the Israeli capture of Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann, an extradition via kidnapping that the European elite condemned. After covering Eichmann’s Jerusalem trial for the Dutch press, Frank found the traction to publish Margot, a novel that imagined her sister living the life she once dreamed of, as a midwife in the Galilee. A surreal work that breaks the boundaries between novel and memoir, and leaves ambiguous which of its characters are dead or alive, the Hebrew translation of Margot became a runaway bestseller, while an English-language edition eventually found a small but appreciative audience in the United States.

  Frank’s subsequent books and essays brought her renown as a clear-eyed prophet carefully attuned to hypocrisy. Her reputation for relentless conscience, built on her many investigative articles on subjects ranging from Soviet oppression to Arab-Israeli wars, was cemented by her internationally acclaimed 1984 book Every House Behind, written after her father’s death. Beginning with an homage to her father’s unconditional devotion, the book progresses into a searing and accusatory work that reimagines her childhood hiding place as a metaphor for Western civilization, whose façade of high culture concealed a demonic evil. “Every flat, every house, every office building in every city,” she wrote, “they all have a House Behind.”

  Her readers will long remember the words from her first book, quoted from a diary she kept at 15: “I don’t believe that the big men are guilty of the war, oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind without exception undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and disfigured, and mankind will have to begin all over again.”

  Her last book, a memoir, was titled To Begin Again.

  The problem with this hypothetical, or any other hypothetical, about Frank’s nonexistent adulthood isn’t just the impossibility of knowing how Frank’s life and career might have developed. The problem is that the entire appeal of Anne Frank to the wider world—as opposed to those who knew and loved her—lay in her lack of a future.

  There is an exculpatory ease to embracing this “young girl,” whose murder is almost as convenient for her many enthusiastic readers as it was for her persecutors, who found unarmed Jewish children easier to kill off than the Allied infantry. After all, an Anne Frank who lived might have been a bit upset at her Dutch betrayers, still unidentified, who received a reward for each Jew they turned in of approximately $1.40. An Anne Frank who lived might not have wanted to represent “the children of the world”—particularly since so much of her diary is preoccupied with a desperate plea to be taken seriously, to not be perceived as a child. Most of all, an Anne Frank who lived might have told people about what she saw at Westerbork, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, and people might not have liked what she had to say.

  And here is the most devastating fact of Frank’s posthumous success, which leaves her real experience forever hidden: we know what she would have said, because other people have said it, and we don’t want to hear it.

  The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.

  Here’s how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank’s writings. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced.

  We know this, because there is no shortage of writings from victims and survivors who chronicled this fact in vivid detail, and none of those documents have achieved anything like Frank’s diary’s fame. Those that have come close have only done so by observing those same rules of hiding, the ones that insist on polite victims who don’t insult their persecutors. The work that came closest to achieving Frank’s international fame might be Elie Wiesel’s Night, a memoir that could be thought of as a continuation of Frank’s diary, recounting the tortures of a fifteen-year-old imprisoned in Auschwitz. As the scholar Naomi Seidman has discussed, Wiesel first published his memoir in Yiddish, under the title And the World Was Silent. The Yiddish book told the same story told in Night, but it exploded with rage against his family’s murderers and, as the title implies, the entire world whose indifference (or active hatred) made those murders possible. With the help of the French Catholic Nobel laureate François Mauriac, Wiesel later published a French version under the new title La Nuit—a work that repositioned the young survivor’s rage into theological angst. After all, what reader would want to hear about how his society had failed, how he was guilty? Better to blame God. This approach earned Wiesel a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as, years later, selection for Oprah’s Book Club, the American epitome of grace. It did not, however, make teenage girls read his book in Japan, the way they read Frank’s. For that he would have had to hide much, much more.

  What would it mean for a writer not to hide this horror? There is no mystery here, only a lack of interest. You have probably never heard of another young murdered Jewish chronicler of the same moment, Zalmen Gradowski. Like Frank’s, Gradowski’s work was written under duress, and discovered only after his death—except that Gradowski’s work was written in Auschwitz.

  Gradowski, a young married man whose entire family was murdered, was one of the Jewish prisoners in Ausch­witz’s Sonderkommando: those forced to escort new arrivals into the gas chambers, haul the newly dead bodies to the crematoria, extract any gold teeth, and then burn them. He reportedly maintained his religious faith, reciting the Kaddish (mourner’s prayer) each evening for the souls of the thousands of people whose bodies he burned that day—including Peter van Pels’s father, who was gassed upon the group’s arrival in Auschwitz on September 6, 1944. Gradowski recorded his experiences in Yiddish and buried the documents, which were discovered after the war; he himself was killed on October 7, 1944, in a Sonderkommando revolt he had organized that lasted only one day.

  “I don’t want to have lived for nothing like most people,” Frank wrote in her diary. “I want to be useful or give pleasure to the people around me who don’t yet know me, I want to go on living even after my death!” Gradowski, too, wrote with a purpose. But Gradowski’s goal wasn’t personal or public fulfillment. His was truth: searing, blinding prophecy, Jeremiah lamenting a world aflame.

  “It may be that these, the lines that I am now writing, will be the sole witness to what was my life,” Gradowski writes. “But I shall be happy if only my writings should reach you, citizen of the free world. Perhaps a spark of my inner fire will ignite within you, and even should you sense only part of what we lived for, you will be compelled to avenge us—avenge our deaths! Dear discoverer of these writings! I have a request for you: this is the real reason why I write, that my doomed life may attain some meaning, that my hellish days and hopeless tomorrows may find a purpose in the future.” And then Gra­dowski tells us what he has seen.

  Gradowski’s chronicle walks us, step by devastating step, through the murders of five thousand people, a single large “transport” of Czech Jews who were slaughtered on the night of March 8, 1944—a group that was unusual only because they had already been detained in Auschwitz for months, and therefore knew what was coming. Gradowski tells us how he escorted the thousands of women and young children into the disrobing room, marveling at how “these same women who now pulsed with life would lie in dirt and filth, their pure bodies smeared with human excrement.” He describes how the mothers kiss their children’s limbs, how sisters clutch each other, how one woman asks him, “Say, brother, how long does it take to die? Is it easy or hard?” Once the women are naked, Gradowski and his fellow prisoners escort them through a gauntlet of SS officers who had gathered for this special occasion—a night gassing arranged intentionally on the eve of Purim, the biblical festival celebrating the Jews’ narrow escape from a planned genocide. He recalls how one woman, “a lovely blond girl,” stopped in her death march to address the officers: “ ‘Wretched murderers! You look at me with your thirsty, bestial eyes. You glut yourselves on my nakedness. Yes, this is what you’ve been waiting for. In your civilian lives you could never even have dreamed about it. [ . . . ] But you won’t enjoy this for long. Your game’s almost over, you can’t kill all the Jews. And you will pay for it all.’ And suddenly she leaped at them and struck Oberscharfuhrer Voss, the director of the crematoria, three times. Clubs came down on her head and shoulders. She entered the bunker with her head covered with wounds [ . . . ] she laughed for joy and proceeded calmly to her death.” Gradowski describes how people sang in the gas chambers, songs that included “Hatikvah” (The Hope), now the national anthem of Israel. And then he describes the mountain of open-eyed naked bodies that he and his fellow prisoners had to pull apart and burn: “Their gazes were fixed, their bodies motionless. In the deadened, stagnant stillness there was only a hushed, barely audible noise—a sound of fluid seeping from the different orifices of the dead. [ . . . ] Frequently one recognizes an acquaintance.” In the specially constructed ovens, he tells us, the hair is first to catch fire, but “the head takes the longest to burn; two little blue flames flicker from the eyeholes—these are the eyes burning with the brain. [ . . . ] The entire process lasts twenty minutes—and a human being, a world, has been turned to ashes. [ . . . ] It won’t be long before the five thousand people, the five thousand worlds, will have been devoured by the flames.”