Anne Frank, Amsterdam

Yup, that's a no-camera icon in the upper right hand corner, but those bright spots aren't the reflection of a flash. I snapped this without a flash, but I snapped it nonetheless because I just had to take a picture of the actual diary of Anne Frank, the very book she kept. Me and tons of others, by the way. The actual diary of Anne Frank is not sacred, but somehow it's hard to believe that the manuscript itself is not alive.

It's not difficult to determine just why the crowds outside the Anne Frank House are so long, even though the first edition of her diary came out so long ago, in 1947. The Anne Frank story is a love story--love of life at least--and it's lined up against a gargantuan human tragedy and horror: a girl, barely more than a child, goes to war in her own way against Nazi jackboots. She dies, after an immense fight, but Hitler loses when the girl who dies wins, big time.

What is difficult, even today, is to get one's mind around what Hitler actually did. Have a look at the plans for Auschwitz someday. Look closely. It's an immense engineering and construction project, undertaken by hundreds, if not thousands of workers of all kinds, all of designed for one sure-as-death purpose, to kill, to exterminate.  Exterminate is what one does to roaches, to grease ants, to whatever unwelcome bug one finds in a cupboard. We exterminate.

How on earth could people sign up to construct such a place? They had to know. So many simply drank the kool-aid.

Just one of the 100,000 Dutch Jews who never returned from the camps in Germany was a slight, dark-haired child who grew up in "the annex," the hiding place behind her father's factory, where she hid with her family, hoping to outlive the war.

Someone turned them in--the entire Frank family. Even today no one knows who. Only the father returned from the camps after the war, and then was he given the diary Anne Frank kept by a woman named Miep Gees, who'd been one of the righteous Gentiles to help the Frank family.

Mr. Frank said he couldn't believe his daughter had written what she did, as if the daughter on the pages of that diary was someone other than the daughter he thought he knew, having lived in that cramped upstairs hiding place for as long a time as they had. It was as if some other young woman had been set loose on those pages.

Maybe it was another girl. "The nicest thing about writing down all my thoughts and feelings," this child wrote, "is that otherwise I'd suffocate."

Writing in her diary was therapy for her, but it's been much more for the hundreds who, once again, line up in front of that otherwise indistinguishable Amsterdam address every day, children and old men and women, families, singles, every color of skin imaginable, all to visit Anne's secret annex.

She could never have known, never have guessed that her diary would become one of the world's best sellers. When I visited there, that upstairs attic seemed just as crowded as it must have felt for her before the Nazis came one morning  and the Frank family was shipped out to Westerbork, then, finally, Germany. 

"How wonderful it is," Anne Frank wrote in that diary, "that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

Maybe the most beautiful thing I saw in the Netherlands on my last trip there was a room where a girl dreamed of blue skies and a walk in a park and yet told the rest of us how much she hoped we were loving what she couldn't. Hers was the darkest days of Dutch history, not the Golden Age.

William of Orange is more important to Dutch history, but Anne Frank is the very heart of the human story.

I know exactly how I'd like to be, how I am...on the inside [...] I'm guided by the pure Anne on the inside, but outside I'm nothing but a frolicsome little goat tugging at its tether [...]  If I'm being completely honest, I'll have to admit that it does matter to me, that I'm trying very hard to change myself, but that I'm always up against a more powerful enemy [...] if I'm quiet and serious, everyone thinks I'm putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke [...] I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if ... there were no other people in the world.

Yours, Anne M. Frank.

On July 31, 1944, 76 years ago, Ms. Anne Frank, once again, poured out her heart in these words, the very last words of that most famous--because most human--diary.