Reading Anne Frank as a Mother and Scholar of Trauma

What Anne's Diary teaches us about evil, bravery, and hope

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

Back when I was a child, my dad gave me a copy of Anne Frank’s diary. He taught English in a high school in Queens, and he often brought home hardcover books from the department closet. They were always covered in contact paper. The pages were worn and sometimes torn, and occasionally there were notes scribbled in the margins. They were often too mature for a young child, but that never bothered me. To me, these books weren’t gifts but an invitation to grow up a little with every page.

This summer, it was my eldest daughter’s turn to learn about Anne. We read a new novel about Anne’s life before the war, and then we listened to an Audible version of the diary I read as a child.

Listening to Anne’s diary as an adult, I was struck again by the horror of what she and others experienced during World War II. But I also observed things that I didn’t catch when I was a kid: Anne was funny. She was snarky. She showed remarkable self-awareness as she came of age, and her wisdom—oh, did she have wisdom beyond her years. I found myself wondering who she would have grown up to be and how she would have edited her diary had she lived. I also wondered what she would have thought of people like me and my daughter listening to her teenage words while we sat in Atlanta traffic, more than 80 years after she wrote them.

It's in one of Anne’s final entries that she writes her most famous statement:

“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

My daughter and I were at a traffic light when the narrator read it, and I backed up a bit so we could hear the section in its entirety:

“It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

I’ve heard these words shared as a kind of saccharine reflection on human nature, but taken in their full context, there’s nothing saccharine going on here. Anne is blunt about the horrific reality of the world. She looks it straight in the eye and names it for what it is. Yet, she also looks ahead in time and believes in a future that’s unlike the present. Even though she can’t see it or feel it, and she has no evidence that it exists, she believes it will come to be.

A biblical scholar might say this way of seeing the world mirrors the worldview of ancient apocalyptic texts, in which those who were oppressed believed God would right injustice and vanquish evil. A psychologist might say Anne was exhibiting a helpful coping mechanism.

As for me—reading this text as a mother, a person of faith, and a scholar of trauma—I see Anne’s bravery. It takes courage and faith to name the evil in front of you, to name the thunder and the wilderness and the destruction. Oftentimes, people are so afraid to acknowledge it that they’ll go so far as to deny it’s even there. It also takes courage and faith to believe in a future like the one Anne envisions, especially given the lack of evidence that it will come to be. It takes the ability to have a wider, longer timeline than what’s in front of you. It takes humility to believe that what you see isn’t all that’s true.

Anne wanted people to read her diary—she hoped to publish it after the war. When my dad brought home a copy for me, he hoped I’d read it to honor her memory. Decades later, my daughter and I did the same thing. Across time and space, across life and death, Anne spoke to us directly. She reminded us that we must look at the world as it is. We must name what we see. We have an obligation to speak the truth. And at the same time, despite all evidence, and as impossible as it may seem, we can hope for a different end to the story.

What does it mean to you to believe in the goodness of people in a world where evil is still so powerful? And how do you nurture the kind of hope Anne writes about? I’d love to hear more of your thoughts, so please join the conversation by leaving a comment, message, or by joining the chat.