seeing. calling up friends and reading two versions and saying, it's this what i think it is they would say, yeah it has to be -- it is what you think it is. so really, it seemed quite extraordinary to me. so i'll read a few more sections to give you a sense of what -- this is -- this is a description. some of you may have seen this because it's -- you can see it at holocaust memorial a description of the little ten-second film clip of anne frank, which exists. i first saw it on the internet and this is the description. a flicker of a home movie, june 20, 1941, the whole thing lasts ten seconds. the bicycle slipping by provide the only indication that we are in holland. the brick apartment block looks like married students housing on an american state campus and the

quaint city houses we associate with amsterdam. the camera waits outside a door, peering up a stairwell. in search of something to focus on it pans up the side of a building. in the open windows, neighborhood residents, girls and young women, elbows propped on the sills waiting. the women at the windows alter the look of street so the scene begins to look more like a village in southern europe. the newlywed couple appears arm in arm, the groom in a top hat, cane, formal wear the bride in a flattering pale suit, fedora and gloves, she carries a bouquet. they pause like movie stars avoiding the papparazzi. passersby staring. the camera zooms towards the sky and finds anne frank watching from her window. she turns and speaks to someone inside the apartment. she looks back at the couple, then away. the camera appears to lose interest, it glances at a few more spectators and returns to

the amsterdam street. on the website at the united states -- for the united states holocaust memorial museum, you can watch those few seconds of anne on film in blurred and grainy close-up. anne's body language is quick, electric. a breeze or maybe the motion of her body lifts her harass she turns, and her eyes smudgened dark oval as she gazes down at the bridal couple. as familiar as we are with the images of anne frank, as inured as we may think we are to the sight of her beautiful face the film pierces whatever armor we imagine we have developed. it's always shockingly short, and always the same. and yet you are never entirely sure what you have or haven't seen. it's less like watching a film clip than having one of those dreams in which you see a long lost loved one or friend. in the dream the person isn't really dead. you must have been mistaken. you wake up and it takes a few moments to understand why the

dream was so cruelly deceptive. the film was shot by a friend of the groom who still had the footage when he was interviewed for anne frank, a portrait in courage the groom identified only as dr. k. showed it on the screen with a home movie projector. dr. k. didn't know his wife and the bride knew her from anne's girlhood days on railroad climb as one knows the children of the neighbors from seeing them on the street and greeting them in the early morning. the friend who had filmed their wedding also did not know anne and the doctor guesses there was a small strip of film left on the reel, not enough to do anything with and so his friend simply taken a shot into the blue. so there's a section about the life of anne frank. i discovered there's so much. i can't begin to tell you. i discovered many things i hadn't known, maybe you all know them, about the frank family

where they came from, the helpers, the lives of the helpers, the way in which the hiding place was discovered. it's all out there scattered in all sorts of books. i went to the anne frank house in amsterdam and did research there. i have to tell you, everything i found was really a revelation to me. so i'll read you another section. this is the beginning of the second about the book and it's about -- it's about the franks' arrest. amsterdam on the sunny and otherwise quite morning, friday august 41944, a car pulled up in front of the warehouse at 263. that is all one needs to write. already the reader knows who is hiding in the attic and the fate about to befall them. we know it more than 60 years later at historical moment when it is often noted how little history we remember. we know the reason why we know,

but it bears repeating less we take it for granted that we know because a little girl kept a diary. of all of the roundups, the deportations murders committed during that time, this arrest is the one that has been investigated most closely. the one about which memories have been most thoroughly searched with the one we knee about, if we know about any at pull the car arrived without sirens without haste, upstairs in the attic otto frank correcting peter van pell's english decktation. no one the office below alarmed by the until the fat man ordered everyone to be quiet. one of men who got out of the car wore the uniform of the sergeant in the jewish affairs section of gestapo in holland. an austrian, subordinates dutch, employed by the nazis. they entered the warehouse and went up to the office. they demanded to know who was in

charge, victor replied that he was. police pulled aside the book case that covered the door to the attic where they had obviously been informed jews were hiding. the gueestapo officer and his m entered the secret annex and found the jews but would not have known as we do now whom they would find. three men, two women, a young man, a young woman, a girl. in a few more years, no one alive will have witnessed the scene of a nazi arresting a jew. there have been, and will be, other arrests and executions for the crime of having been born into a particular race or religion or tribe. but the scene of nazis hunting down jews is unlikely to happen again, though history teaches us never to say never. this will be the arrest that future generations can visualize like a scene in a book. they will have to remain themselves that it happened to real people, though these people have survived and will live on as characters in a book. in fact, the scene is not in the

book but the book's existence is why we know about the arrest. we know that the austrian officer's name was karl joseph silverbauer disturbed by the detail of otto frank's illinomi trunk, meant he would have been a sergeant, superior when both fought in the german arm during world war i. silver bauer couldn't help asking how all of the people libbed like that crowded together behind a book case. two years, one month. as proof at toe frank pointed to the doorway marked with pencil to record his daughter's growth. look, he said his younger daughter had grown beyond the last mark. you can still -- those who have been to the anne frank in amsterdam can see the mark on the doorway. all right. then i mean, it's an interesting story. i wouldn't read it all. after the war, austria, impriso

for having roughed um communist during ann interrogation in the '30 and was let go and rejoined the police force. he was found by -- who tracked him down through a series of events partly looking in the vienna phone book. there's an amazing conversation that's recorded in which he asks, silverbauer read the diary and le said i looked through it to see if i was in it but i wasn't. as if anne could have gone on writing and describing the arrest from auschwitz and bergen-belsen and he says, i suppose i should have picked it up off the floor but i didn't. what happened was, was anne's diary, as i've said, was very

much on the minds of the people in the annex and after much discussion, it was decided that it -- when an emergency happened if they had to leave the annex quickly the diary would be one of the things they took with them. so again, they took it seriously, they knew this was important. they kept the diary and anne's papers in a briefcase that belonged to otto and when the nazis came to arrest them, always an element of what i want to say thievery, pillage in arrests and they knew there were probably some money or jewels somewhere. he instructed his men to look for money and jewels and he found some. he hadn't brought anything with him to carry them with. he said pick up that briefcase and dump it out. they dumped out the briefcase on the floor and filled it with what little money and jewels the franks left. of course the valuable thing, the precious thing, was the thing that got dumped out on the floor. he never knew.

and the little bit of money was the thing that they took with them. so after the war, of course otto frank came back, the only survive of from the attic. when he returned to amsterdam he went and lived with miep and her husband and miep saved after at rest she gone up to the attic and saved what was -- she had saved anne's direry. of course she and everyone else hoped that the girls were still alive. so she put them in her desk drawer. the bravery of these dutch helpers was extraordinary. she knew perfectly well if someone read the diaries they'd be implicated for what they had done to help the franks and the van pels. she put it in her desk drawer. first she locked it up then she became concerned that someone would wonder why anyone would think that a little girl's diary was worth keeping locked up so she unlocked it and kept it there. after otto came back she held on to it. when they finally got the news

that anne and margot had been murdered she gave the diary to otto. otto read it, he typed up a few pages, he translated them into german. he sent them to his mother in switzerland and then he began to type up the manuscript. when he became convinced that anne had wanted the book to be published he started bringing it around. there are heartbreaking descriptions of otto -- what the descriptions of this kind of -- he was very handsome, this tall, handsome guy who is described as looking like an officer in the prussian arm with his eyes red from weep, tears streaming down his face, giving the diary to people, begging them to read it but no one would publish it end the end of the publication history. i'll read you, speaking of publication history, which finally happened, at least what finally happened to have it published here. in the united states, anne

frank's diary was initially rejected by nearly every major publishing house. quote, it is an interesting document admitted in the american branch of the international form based in amsterdam but i do not believe there will be enough interest in the subject to make publication a profitable business. earnest kuhn, a friend of otto's who worked in new york took on the challenge of trying to find the diary an american home. just as in europe the book was viewed as being too narrowly focused, too jewish, too boring, too likely to remind readers what they wanted to forget. you cannot publish a book with war as a background. alfred turned down the manuscript on the grounds it was, quote, very dull. quote dearry record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent

emotions. sales would be small because the main characters were neither familiar to americans nor appealing. if the work had come to work five years ago and the subject timely i don't see there would have been a chance for it. while recognizing that, quote, so few contemporary books or documents as genuine or spontaneous as think once, he decided it was a moment for the dire troy appear. quote if times were normal i would do an edition and translation but times are not normal. great britain the reaction was similar. it was fell that, quote, the english reading public would avert eyes from painful a story which would bring back to them all evil events that occurred during the war. in one of her letters from paris, it appeared in the new yorker, janet flanner referred to the popularity of a book by quote a precocious, talented frankfurt jewess. despite the book's reception in france, anne's diary in the reject pile in the office of

frank price, the director of double day's foreign bureau when the young assistant named judith jones, who would become a legendary editor, working with authors including julia child, found it. in her memoir the tenth muse, jones recalls. one day, when frank, that's frank price had gone off to heart of paris for a lunch i went to work on a pile of submission his wanted rejected. i was drawn to the face on the cover of a book that he was about to publish. the french edition of anne frank, diary of a young girl. i started reading it and pie couldn't stop. all afternoon i remained curled up on the sofa sharing anne's life in the attic until the last light was gone and i heard frank's key at the door. surprised to find me there, he was more surprised to find it was anne frank who kept me. he was persuaded by my enthusiasm and let me get the book off to double day in new

york, ushrging hem to publish i. it didn't take much urging. we were given the go-ahead to offer a contract. the editor in new york was a young woman barbara zimmerman, jut out of college. her first out of college job. she had gone to work at double day, essentially the first man u skipt, first job she got was editing anne frank's diary. she became close to otto frank and later go on to be barbara epstein, editor of new york review books. the book became an instant best-seller. so forth and so on. the story of the play, i wish i could read it to you, but it's insane and goes on for so long and has so many twists and turnize can't summarize it because it's so strange and awful in many ways. but i thought, instead, i would read you a second, like many of you i went to the house of anne

frank and did research there. kind of settled something for me, that a complicated dilemma that i didn't -- i didn't quite know how to deal with it it had been bothering me the whole time i was work on the diary, some of you may know there was a famous essay, enraged essay in which she suggested ironically although, many people seem not to have gotten the irony the diary, it would have been better if the diary had been burned, because the diary, she said, had been distorted, the truth of anne's story which was that she was murdered at bergen-belsen had been left out of the diary and in fact the diary had been turned into this message of tolerance and hope and freedom and justice and goodwill and human rights and so forth, which she found abhorrent. and while it's true, that in many cases you know, for example the ending of the movie and the

play the famous line, i still believe people are good at heart was in many ways a distortion of anne'sy and her fate. there was a question how to look at all of these other things. certainly you know it seemed to me that if anyone did read anne's diary and was moved by it and did understand the holocaust and did -- had not understood it but had some beginning of knowledge about it, and had some sense of the terrible tragedy and the loss of this young life that could be a good thing. i was still, as i said, uncertain. and then i went to the anne frank house in amsterdam, and i interviewed a lot of people, young people really who were working there, and what they're doing is one of the programs, they have many programs, it's a human rights foundation, but one of the programs they take the diary -- the diary and a kind of photo exhibition, related to the diary, to various places around

the world and they get people to read the diary and they get people to talk about it. so, for example, one young man brought the diary -- was bringing the diary to the ukraine in an effort to make the ukrainians be less anti-semitic. i mean i have to say that what i couldn't help thinking and wrote in the book the idea of making them less anti-semitic seemed like trying to teach cogger spaniels to fly. he was hopeful and i was glad that he was doing it. i want to read you one of the most, to me, extraordinary experiences i had, which was going to the house and -- let's see if i can find this. and talking -- here, here's a young woman i talked to. again, in 2006 they brought the diary, the foundation, brought the diary to 177 sites

worldwide. and this is from an interview with a young woman named mary ella, who is argentinian. i'll read you a piece of it. as a teenager, who is this fantastic young woman, just this fireball of energy and spirit and -- as a teenager, she was drawn to the diary in the shocked aftermath of 1994 bombing of the amia jewish community center which killed 85 people in her buenos aires neighborhood. she began to write, e-mail the anne frank foundation, she helped to bring the anne frank exhibition to argentina, followed it back to am tsterdam she made us realize we had no choice to hire her. a quote, the moment that young people in latin america become emotionally involved with anne frank's story, they start to reflect about themselves. they say, okay, in europe there

happened something like what happened in our country. it's like opening a pandora's box, you never know the consequences of the work you were doing but you know you were touching people's hearts. the curriculum at the police academy left over from the time of the dictatorship very authoritarian. they have the feeling they no longer a human but a god. anne frank's story makes them more human. the cadets want to protect anne frank as if she were their own child, as if she's their best friend. they're mad because anne frank was killed but when they see some poor guy working on the street, they might want to kill him. the important thing is to make a connection between this poor guy and anne frank. maybe there parents were also police during the dictatorship, but they've never talked about it. now they say they're going to talk to their parents. they have lunch with the university students and for the first time start to discuss who is the other, how do you see the other? they are human beings, too.

in some cases the children and grandchildren of the disappeared are among the trainers. it brings a lot of very emotional things to the surface. it was hard for police cadets to listen to the stories of the dirty war, but anne frank's story allows them to be inside someone else's shoes it allows young people in latin america to raise their voices and to flower. one more paragraph. similar programs have taken place in guatemala and chili, a former torture center under the regime and current memorial to victims in both countries and able to confront their troubled past and in guatemala, discuss the ongoing violence that is still part of daily life. i mean, i have to tell you that when i was interviewing these people i would be sitting at lunch and sitting at lunch in the cafeteria of the anne frank house museum and tears pouring down my face because they were so moving, beautiful and so inspirational and, really, they'd given their entire lives

to this. that's what they were doing and, again, i was struck by the fact that this was because of a book that a child had written. you know, a little book, a diary revised very carefully and all these years later amazing things were happening around the world. so i'll just -- conclude the readings part and then i can talk more, answer questions with reading a little section abo about -- about my class at barge. and what happened. i'll just read the beginning of the very end. late in the fall of 2007 i taught the diary of anne frank to a class at bart college. a course in close reading in which we'd studied the works of readers from hans christian andersen to leonard michaels to grace paley. my students were not only intelligent, passionate and engaged but intuitive and well-read.

i was surprised and delighted by the leaps of imagination and association that led them from literature to the visual arts or music. the discussion of ba laonio led to others. i was eager to hear what they would said about anne frank but wasn't, nor they, prepared for the intensity of responses. thinking and writing about the benefits and the risks of identifying with anne frank. my students demonstrated all the former and none of the latter. long after her death they felt as if she were speaking to them, were one of them. they identified with her humanity, sympathy, humor, impatience, alienation, adolescent struggles without ever losing sight of the gap between their comfortable and privileged lives and the circumstances that had driven her into hiding. keenly aware of the gap of what

anne endured and what contemporaries found unendurable. i couldn't resolve how she kept resuming to be heavier, writes a lot about joy. even in extremes managed to maintain the psyche of a normal girl. today such things turn people into basket cases and go on prozac because they can't pay their credit card bills. so sweet, these -- it's hard to believe she manages to maintain so much of herself. she can look out over amsterdam on a sunny day and still be transfixed by beauty. finally a student wrote a long essay i won't read but part of it was, his sense that if he knew anne frank -- i mean, he wanted to know her and he said, i just felt like we would be friends if i knew her. this is the end. listening to him i thought, they would have been friends. she was a 15-year-old girl. she saw herself as both ordinary and special, growing up under

circumstances that were in no way normal even as her parents insisted on going through the motions of everyday life. what was certain was that anne frank did not grow up believing she was going to be sent to auschwitz and die at 15 and bergen-belsen. i listened to my students as fresh and eager as she had been, only a few years older than she was when she died. i asked one to read aloud from the diary, he chose the final entry. the passage in which anne imagine pd the person she could have been there there weren't any other people living in the world. when he finished, the class was silent. in the hush, i thought about anne's wish to go on living after her death. and it was clear to me as it has been throughout the writing of this book that her wish has been granted. i remembered how more than 50 years ago the first time i read the diary i kept reading until the light faded in nigh bedroom as it had now in this classroom.

for those few hours during which my students and i talked about her diary it seemed to me that her spirit or in any case her voice had been there with us fully present and utterly alive, audible and yet another slowly darkening room. thank you. [ applause ] >> i'd be happy to answer questions. i realize i left so much out, but i'm sure there are many things you still want to know. yeah? >> probably in the book i was wondering what your impression of her, the collection of staples -- [ inaudible ] i'm surprised to see the section of that as well. >> her short collection of fables which has been published

at tales from the secret an nex. there are scene, put into the diary. for example, the famous potato peeling scene in the diary. one of those sections. she was also at work on a novel called "katie's life." a number of the themes preoccupying her, themes like adolescent girls and their mothers or religion or spirituality make their way into the stories. the stories obviously aren't at polished as the diary is, and for one thing, she didn't have time to revise the stories, but she was so talented. i mean, people often say, oh, you know, imagine the writer, she would have become? but she was such an amazing writer. but the stories are terrific. from people who read the diary and can't get enough, the stories are a whole other source of her work.

yeah? >> i had read that the family of the dentist -- [ inaudible ] highly critical of her saying her portrayal in this was not fair and so forth. i was wondering if you -- whether that's covered in the book and if you had any reaction to that. >> yeah. well, he a very interesting life. you know -- i mean, again, so much -- the portrayal in the play and the portrayal in the diary are quite different. i mean, anne -- you know, for whatever reason, basically, i think, intensetivety, he was anne's roommate. so the idea of putting, you know, this guy as the roommate of a teenage girl was not that smart an idea. so many things i think would have irritated her far less were tremendously irritating to her because they were living in such close proximity. he was -- he was very different.

again, i mean it was supposed to be incredibly charming. described by having a sort of maurice-shavalue-like personality. not the image coming across. he lived with a christian woman. they came to -- they lived first in germany. they came to holland under the idea that they could get married in holland. by the time they got to holland it was too late already. and she waited for him. she married him posthumously after he died. what she really objected to was the portrayal of him in the play. because the diary was not quite so upsetting to her but the play in which he's portrayed as just this kind of bouffoon was unbearable to her. in fact, when the play was being written and produced, the things otto most objected to were things he felt would hurt the