Dear Kitty,






Sometime in March, 1945

Mrs. Van Pel left today. She was transferred to Theresienstsdt via Buchenwald yesterday night. I am alone.

Margot died three days ago, falling from the bunk to the cold stone floor. With her fell any hope I possessed, and will to live. For if I did live, if the liberation came today, what would I have left? My precious father has been dead for almost nine months, I feel certain that mummy has succumbed, and now my beautiful sister Margot too has fallen.

They were so important to me, yet barely anyone knows of our plight, this terrible final chapter of our lives during the war, of the demise of the Frank family. And so I ask you why I would want to live. Should I desire freedom from here to be able to go back to bombed-out Holland, and sit out the rest of my days in a quiet misery that no one could possibly ever understand? Perhaps I would journey to America, live out all my dreams and become a famous writer and movie star. But I would still be unfulfilled, for my family has left too big of a hole in me. I am free now; I can be whoever I want to be, because no one has any preconceived notions of Anne. Where did she go? Where did the jovial, curious, creative Anne go? When did I become this shell of typhoid, doing nothing but screaming for them to please close the door, please close the door and let the cold stay where the cold ought to stay?

It has worn me down to much. Triumphant Anne, who rallies to every call has abandoned me and left me with the sad serious side of myself, the side I strove so hard to be. Well, now she is killing me. I have nothing left to live for, nowhere to go if I were released today. Maybe Meip is still in Holland, living her day-to-day life. What is it like for her? Does she sit by the window and stare at the sky, thinking that it is the same deep blue over us, wondering if she could’ve done more? How does she live with the fact that eight of her close friends whom she worked so hard to save have disappeared into the gaping German mouth, never to return? And what of Kramer? Does he regret his role in prolonging our lives and shortening his own?

I used to wonder who turned us in. Was it the cleaning lady, the workhouse man? What are the doing with the money? Did they spend it to keep themselves alive, in a wicked exchange of life for life? I used to think, Kitty, that we humans are good. No longer do I entertain this fantasy. Tucked away in an attic, lying together with Peter, it is easy to believe everyone is good and the world is not a hateful place. Lying now in a freezing cold bunk, surrounded by broken, diseased, and numbed people I see that. If it is possible for one human to degrade another so much, to take any shred of vitality they had and rip apart and stomp on it and wave it in front of their friends tauntingly, if this is possible then humans are horrible creatures. We’ve fallen from heaven, but instead of aspiring to climb back up we scoff at the memory and bury our faces in the dirt, glorying in the uncleanliness and entertaining worms. We, who used to stand over God himself, now prefer the grime of earth, the mud and the dirty selfishness.

Kitty, I think you will be glad to know that you have served your purpose well. I wrote that I hoped you would give me comfort and support, and you have, you have provided me with an outlet for my thoughts on my long fall from heaven to here, the pits of despair and apathy. I am still Anne, kitty, but don’t ask me which Anne I am: the playful, flirtatious Anne, or the serious, deep Anne, because I don’t know. I have lost something Kitty. No longer do I care who I have become, and no longer can I tell. What I am is what I am. I do know that whatever destiny was meant to unfold through me has done so; I have nothing left to give. If there is purpose in the short life of an unknown Jewish girl, trying to make sense of her world and those who put her there, I cannot see it but I do believe it does exist.

If nothing else, the world must stop being self-centered. It is the root of this horrible war, the reason why I am lying here with the memory of my sister’s fall from glory burned into my mind, the reason why everything is as it is. When we learn this lesson, we will finally have overcome our animal natures and be the creation God meant for us to be. Goodbye, Kitty.










~All my love, Anne