'Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation' by Anne Frank, adapted by Ari Folman, illustrated David Polonsky

 

From the BLURB:

The graphic adaptation of one of the world's most-loved books

'June, 1942: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.' 

In Amsterdam, in the summer of 1942, the Nazis forced teenager Anne Frank and her family into hiding. For over two years, they, another family and a German dentist lived in a 'secret annexe', fearing discovery. All that time, Anne kept a diary. The Diary of a Young Girl is an inspiring and tragic account of an ordinary life lived in extraordinary circumstances that has enthralled readers for generations. Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Novel is a stunning new adaptation of one of the greatest books of the last century.

‘Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation’ by Anne Frank, adapted by Air Folman and illustrated by David Polonsky, came out with Penguin Random House in 2018. As of this month – the book is removed and banned from some Florida schools. Because a group of parents linked to the Republican Party, who complained over its ‘sexually explicit’ material, and a suggestion that it minimizes the events of the Holocaust. 

I’ve owned this edition for a long time, as someone who read Anne Frank’s diary when I was about the same age Anne was – 13 – when she started writing it. It’s one of those books that I think fundamentally changed me, and opened up the history of World War II in such a way as to hammer home the horrors of it, for regular people. I’ve seen most of the film and TV adaptations, and can vividly remember being shown the Elizabeth Taylor 1959 film in school. Anne Frank’s Diary, her story, remains one of those that remade me as a human-being, and set my moral compass from an early age. I have deep wells of joy, respect and grief for this book and its author, and I always will. 

I even visited the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam in 2008, a truly remarkable experience I’m privileged and grateful to have marked – because it had been something I’d longed to do since I was a young girl reading this other young girl’s thoughts, feelings, and memories for the first time. While there, I replaced my battered childhood copy with the 60th anniversary edition.  

When I heard that there was a graphic novel coming out, I thought it was a wonderful idea. A way to bring Anne Frank’s story to a new generation – and in vivid, visual colour. Yes, it would be interpreting Anne’s words with images she herself did not draw – but it would add new dimensions to her very personal diary, and make it accessible in an entirely new way and for even more readers; something I think Anne (a great lover of movies and magazines, who cut out images and posters and stuck them to her annexe wall) would have delighted in. 

And this graphic novel is – it must be said – stunning. I should really stop being surprised at how the graphic format elevates and opens up a text; the way it makes for a deeper, more critical intertextual reading because it’s asking you to marry text with images (something we all do on the daily) but the ways your brain has to fire up to connect what you’re reading and seeing, to sometimes realise that the images bely the text … that’s especially true here, and done masterfully. 

For one; David Polonsky is illustrating a great deal of rumour, imagination, and heady cocktails of fear informed by fantasy on behalf of Anne, both before she goes into hiding with her family and after. For instance; when her uncle arrives in Amsterdam from Hamburg, bringing word of how horrific life is for Jews in Germany now. Because this scene and its panels are Anne listening to her uncle recounting his first-person and firsthand experiences of the night of Kristallnacht, and the mass book-burnings; the drawings do reflect what we’ve seen in history books, and from photographs of the time. But very cleverly when the same uncle mentions rumours of a labor camp in Dachau (which he hasn’t seen, only heard about) and where people who are “not German enough,” are being sent - Anne says she can only imagine. And here Polonsky draws on and interprets that imagination – he uses Anne’s Jewish background to fill in the aspects of this horrific rumour that her mind can barely comprehend; and we see a call back to time before the Biblical story of Exodus, with modern-day Jews building a pyramid in the image of The Reichsadler ("Imperial Eagle") being overseen in their slavery by an SS guard. It’s a clever encapsulating of Anne’s currently childlike understanding of the bounds of human cruelty … looking at it with our modern knowledge though; of how truly barbaric Dachau was, part of a Nazi plan to solve ‘the Jewish question’ – this image is also working to signal that people in Amsterdam, upon the German invasion in 1940, really had no idea what was coming. 

This happens again, when one of the ‘annexe angels’ – Miep Gies – who helped the families in their hiding, recounts seeing one of her Jewish neighbours being taken away by soldiers. She also says that she met someone who’d managed to escape from a concentration camp – who tells her that the neighbour has probably been herded into one of the cattle trains to Westerbork … again; at this point, Anne and her family have no knowledge of what happens once these Jews go to the transit and concentration camps. She writes in her diary of them getting little food and water, of the poor lavatory conditions – alongside these musings, Polonsky has drawn an image of people snaking off one of these cattle trains, and lining up for food being served by white-hat chefs – this is as far as Anne’s knowledge and imagination can go, conceiving of terrible conditions. And to see this page is a gut-punch, because it’s so clearly the imagination of a girl who has no idea how bad things can get, will get. Polonsky has put a small dent in Anne’s too-innocent interpretation of what these “camps” can be – by placing gas tanks in the corner, with hoses running to the innocuous bunk houses. But it’s just off the page – in the corner – a creeping sense of dread and foreshadowing. 

Ari Folman and Polonsky has done a brilliant job of condensing Anne’s diary into the quicker pace necessary for a graphic novel – for instance, Anne’s many passages and pages feeling inadequate in comparison to her older, kinder, smarter, more beautiful (to her mind) sister Margot, are eloquently and silently rendered in a page of comedic comparisons between the two – the silence, the absence of text, here also works for the annexe setting, where Anne says they spend much of their day paranoid about not making a noise (and even her pen scratching in her diary sets the other residents on-edge, for fear that they’ll be found out because of it – and even worse, that the diary exists as tangible proof and account of their subterfuge, and that of their co-conspirators and saviours). 

Something else that Folman and Polonsky do exceedingly well here is mapping Anne’s evolution of girlhood and womanhood. Yes, they’ve edited the original diary text and they haven’t included *everything* (because to do so would equate from a text-only of 400 or so pages, to roughly double that becoming 800 pages if they had to diligently interpret all of that and transpose text plus images …)  but they’ve kept in what is most crucial. And Anne’s maturing and explorations of her body, her feelings, and her mind are incredibly intrinsic to the spirit of the Diary, and Anne herself. So they have kept in the passages of her recounting asking her friend Jacque if they could show each other their breasts, and her desire to kiss her – of her saying that she finds statues of female nudes, throw her into ecstasy … they also include her developing a close friendship and romance with fellow annexe-dweller, Peter – while also pining for the boys she used to flirt and go with before the war. 

Why? Why is Anne’s budding sexuality and this sense of self so important to the story? 

the same text, from the 60th Anniversary edition of the Diary

I’d argue because it makes her human. Not some out-of-reach martyr but a regular girl with perfectly normal and relatable thoughts and feelings – who desired to spend a year in London and Paris one day, more than she yearned to settle down and get married … but who died in February or March of 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, at the age of 15.

And this is the true beauty and tragedy of Anne Frank’s Diary. What I first discovered it as a teenage girl, roughly the same age Anne was when she wrote it – the knowledge that a girl who sounded like me; who had the same thoughts, fears, frustrations, curiosities, worries, and desires as me, despite us living decades apart – that that same girl could be vilified and died, all because of her faith … it hits so much harder. She was one person amongst the six million European Jews, and at least five million prisoners of war, Romany, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and other victims of the Holocaust – and to get to know her via the diary, was to lose her. To feel the loss of someone so vibrant and funny, bratty and capricious, talented and brave. It’s almost too much to think of what – and who – was lost in the Holocaust, who was brutally taken and what the world would look like today if this travesty had been avoided. We compartmentalise, to a degree, and think of Anne Frank – one among millions – taken too soon, and what a loss to humanity that is. ‘Anne’s diary ends here,’ are among some of the most tragic words in modern literature. 

Otto and Anne Frank knew the power of her own words too. He knew that his daughter’s diary was one way to put a human face on the tragedy of the Holocaust – because that became Anne’s intention too. In my 60th anniversary edition, the foreword mentions that one night in the annexe and using their secret radio – the families heard Gerrit Bolkestein (a member of the Dutch government-in-exile, broadcasting from London) spoke about wanting to gather eyewitness accounts of the suffering of the Dutch people under German occupation. All eyes turned to Anne (and she recounts this in her diary) – to which she starts going back and adding in passages to what she’s already written, tidying up certain sections, and crossing-out more mundane entries. This creates a second diary, effectively, so we have Diary A and Diary B. 

When Otto Frank returns to Amsterdam – the sole survivor of the annexe – he discovers that Miep Gies has saved Anne’s diaries, never having read them. Otto decides to honour Anne’s wishes, and edits the diaries with the intention of sending them to a Dutch publisher – he particularly edits out real names of people who don’t wish to be included, he doesn’t transpose certain pages about Anne’s mother (whom she had a fraught relationship with) and the more vicious takes she had on the likes of Mrs Van Daan and Albert Dussel (a combination of Anne’s signature quick-wit and quicker temper, made more volatile by living in close-quarters). And because this was a conservative time still, Otto edits out the more sexually-charged passages – since it’s really not the fashion to mention sex at all (don’t be shocked by this – there’s literally a British obscenity trial held in 1960, over the publication of ‘Lady Chatterley's Lover’ by D. H. Lawrence). The version that Otto collates becomes ‘version C’ of the diary. 

The Dutch version is published in 1947, but it’s not translated into English until 1952 (if you want some idea of what a slow-sensation it was, it definitely had a slow-burn, word-of-mouth and rose in popularity). But it absolutely made an impact once it was translated more widely – again in my 60th anniversary edition, a quote from Martin Gilbert (one of the world's pre-eminent historians of the Holocaust); ‘Her story came to symbolize not only the travails of the Holocaust, but the struggle of the human spirit in adversity … Bergen-Belsen was liberated by British troops in April 1945. One of them wrote to me recently: “I was too late to save Anne Frank.” That shows the impact that her story has made, and will continue to make.’ 

And make no mistake; there was power in releasing the Diary, not least because antisemitism and post-war propaganda abounded, and this somewhat combatted it. As much antisemitism as existed in the years leading up to, and during World War II, it didn’t just evaporate with VE Day. And post-war lies started as soon as Germany fell; the idea that regular Germans didn’t know what was happening to Jews and other minorities and intellectuals targeted by the Nazis? A post-war lie. Heck, even upon publication, rumours began that Anne Frank’s diary was a hoax; to the point that when he died in 1980, Otto Frank willed his daughter’s manuscripts – the diaries – to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, who ordered a thorough investigation into their authenticity … and found them to be the real deal. And in fact from the versions a, b and c a new edition – ‘The Critical Edition’ was released, which also contains biographies of the annexe families and the Frank’s in particular. And it has become a legacy of both the Anne Frank Foundation, and Anne Frank Museum to spread the word of Anne Frank’s life and Diary, to ensure the text is as widely accessible as possible, for all time. 

So imagine my horror when I hear that Jennifer Pippin, the chair of the Indian River chapter of "Moms for Liberty," opposed the graphic novel in Florida school libraries for ‘sexually explicit,’ material and – my blood boiling at this point – an accusation that it “minimizes” the Holocaust. 

Such accusations are baseless and cowardice. It suggests a lack of literacy and common-sense that could only be course-corrected by listening more, and speaking less. But to be clear; Moms for Liberty is a conservative nonprofit that portrays itself as a grassroots parent organisation, but in reality has numerous ties to the Republican Party – and ulterior motives galore. 

This banning and the accusations heaped on the text are not about preserving young, innocent minds or ensuring a robust education about the horrors of the Holocaust. You know how I know it’s not about that? Because after ‘Adolf Hitler,’ Anne Frank’s name is probably the most-associated with the true horrors of WWII and the human travesty and shame of the Holocaust. Anne Frank and her diary have done more to spread awareness about antisemitism (that still rages to this day) and put a human face to the unfathomable grief and horror of that war, than anyone else in human history … It’s not about this graphic novel. There is nothing shameful or sinister in Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s version. 

Moms for Liberty – when that word means; ‘the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behaviour, or political views.’ What a noxious and pathetic lot they are. The only shame here exists for Jennifer Pippin and “Moms for Liberty,” who have more in common with Anne Frank’s captors and tormentors, than with Anne herself. 

The graphic novel is a glorious read that delights in showing the funny, robust, capricious and captivating life of Anne Frank during the darkest of times in human history – bringing her to life for a whole new generation, and in a newly accessible, visual format. ‘Anne’s diary ends here,’ but the lessons of it continue and will reach far and wide – if we fight for it. 

5/5