Product Description

For people all over the world, Anne Frank has become the "human face of the holocaust". Drawing on interviews with family and friends, Melissa Muller creates a subtle portrait of Frank, tracing her life from idyllic childhood in Frankfurt to her passionate adolescence in occupied Amsterdam.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #556948 in Books
• Published on: 1999-12-13
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
One of this book's great strengths is writer Melissa Muller's ability to situate Anne Frank's famous diary within a larger historical and biographical context--more than half of it covers the years before the Franks went into hiding. Equally important is her discovery of the existence of five pages Otto Frank removed from his daughter's original diary and entrusted shortly before his death to Cor Sujik, International Director of New York's Anne Frank Centre. Sujik showed these pages to Muller, who accurately notes in the biography that they "enhance our understanding of the diary's author."

Until now, readers have known the eight people sequestered in the secret annexe through Anne's eyes only. Muller reveals everyone's correct names (they were changed for the diary's publication) and tactfully corrects a teenager's skewed perceptions when necessary, always reminding us of the claustrophobic closeness and material deprivation that sometimes fuelled Anne's uncharitable comments about, for example, the middle-aged dentist with whom she was forced to share a room. Muller also plausibly identifies the Dutch informant who betrayed the secret annexe's inhabitants to the Gestapo. Horror suffuses Muller's grim recap of the Franks' ordeal at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, though there is some comfort in survivors' reports that Anne, her mother and her older sister formed "an inseparable trio," all former quarrels forgotten in their fierce struggle to save each other. They failed and Muller does not gloss over that tragedy. But she reminds us that: "In the end, the Nazi terror could not silence Anne's voice, which still rings out for all of us."

Review
Given the popularity of the Diary of Anne Frank ever since its publication more than 50 years ago, it is perhaps surprising that it took so long for anyone to attempt a biography of its author. Now there are two. This one by Muller, an Austrian journalist, has a more literary style, with interviews with many of the surviving people who knew Anne or were involved in her life in some way. Their testimony does much to bring out the realities of this one young girl's life and restore personalities. (Kirkus UK)