By the time they were arrested, the occupants of the “Secret Annexe” no longer seriously thought that they would be discovered. Although they had been frightened at the beginning, they had become used to their situation and hoped to continue in that way until the war ended. The news from the various war fronts was very good, and it was obvious that the Nazis would be defeated. If the discovery had only come a little later, if the group had not been included in the last shipment of people to leave Westerbork, if Anne had not been sent first to Auschwitz, and then to Belsen, who knows what might have happened?
When Anne’s father returned to Amsterdam after the war had ended, Miep and Elli (the young workers in the office where the “Secret Annexe” was located) gave him the notebooks and papers in Anne’s handwriting which they had found strewn over the floor of the “Secret Annexe” after the Gestapo police had left. At first, Otto Frank had copies of the diary circulated privately, as a memorial to his family, but he was finally persuaded by a Dutch professor to publish it. After the Diary’s initial appearance in Dutch in 1947, it quickly went through several editions and was translated into dozens of languages. The Diary was dramatized, and the play was presented on Broadway, winning the Pulitzer, Critics Circle, and Antoinette Perry Prizes for 1956. It has been made into a movie and has been adapted for television. The Anne Frank Foundation, founded by Otto Frank, maintains the building on the Prinsengracht Canal where the Franks hid for twenty-five months as a museum and memorial to Anne Frank. Each year, the house is visited by thousands of people from all over the world. The Foundation is trying to promote better understanding between young people from every part of the world, and it has established the International Youth Center, which serves as a meeting place for young people and holds lectures, discussions, and conferences covering a wide range of international problems.
The Montessori School in Amsterdam is now renamed the Anne Frank School, and there are other memorials to her in Germany, Israel, and elsewhere. But, above all, it is Anne’s Diary, in which her unique, yet representative, voice is preserved, that constitutes the most eloquent memorial of all.
