Ruud van der Rol

How it broke my heart to see an image of the red-checked cover of Anne's famous diary. It's so very sad that so much ephemera survives the girl who disappeared into the maw of Hitler's war machine.

Reading Anne's diary when I was a girl left me feeling like a citizen of the world, a person with the opportunity to choose to be one of the people who were really good at heart. It felt like something that I could do for her, back when I was a romantic young teen myself. I knew that I could never show more be part of any religion that believed that all others can go only to hell. And I have never changed my mind about that. show less

This books succeeds by constantly putting the human faces in front of us as it retells the story of the Frank family, the Van Pels, and Pfeffer in hiding.

This photographic remembrance of Anne Frank appears at first like any family album. Translated from the Dutch, this photobiography, like the famous diary, captures the ordinariness of Anne and her family's life. Individual photos are mostly informal snapshots and are a bit blurry at times. But this photobiography chronicles a far-from-ordinary life, and the Association of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam sets Anne's story in a larger context, examining Hitler's rise to power, developing her show more family history, and the larger fate of the Jews during WWII. The establishment of the Anne Frank House in 1960 is also described.
The photographs are well captioned and the book is handsomely designed, with short essays in easily readable text. A facsimile of her last diary entry has also been included, as well as maps, interviews, chronology, and notes on different versions of her famous diary. This is a poignant, respectful tribute to Anne Frank. show less

Speaking as someone who has yet to read the diary (I will, I will!) this was still a great overview of what became the phenomenon that is Anne Frank. It adequately personalizes her story and places her as one among many victims and diarists of German atrocities during WWII. Of course hers is the one that became most famous, and only a reading of the diary itself will demonstrate why. This book, meanwhile, also offers a good overview of general events of the time, while providing the Anne show more Frank timeline and wonderful supplemental photographs. show less