In the 1960s, Otto Frank recalled his feelings when reading the diary for the first time, "For me, it was a revelation. There, was revealed a completely different Anne to the child that I had lost. I had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings."[32] Michael Berenbaum, former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, wrote, "Precocious in style and insight, it traces her emotional growth amid adversity. In it, she wrote, 'In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.'"[32]
In 2009, the notebooks of the diary were submitted by the Netherlands and included in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.[59]
Criticism of popularity
Dara Horn, herself a descendant of Holocaust survivors, laments that Anne Frank's account ends with the thought that people are good at heart and the note that Frank died "peacefully" of typhus, shortly before Frank encounters very evil people who took her off at gunpoint to be murdered. Horn feels this allows readers to be absolved of responsibility, and that the popularity of the book derives from its lack of any depiction of the horrors of Nazi death camps. She points to accounts of victims who had more typical experiences, such as Zalmen Gradowski (reportedly one of the inspirations for the film Son of Saul), who was forced to strip his fellow Jews on the way into the gas chambers, with vivid accounts of their last words and actions, and watching the bodies burn during the forced cleanup process. Horn also points out the relative lack of international attention paid to the accounts of survivors of the Holocaust, speculating Frank's diary would not have been popular had she survived, and to ironic dismissal of living Jews, such as an employee of the Anne Frank museum who was told he could not wear a yarmulke.[60][61]
Vandalism
In February 2014, authorities discovered that 265 copies of the Frank diary and other material related to the Holocaust were vandalized across 31 public libraries in Tokyo.[62][63] The Simon Wiesenthal Center expressed "its shock and deep concern"[64] and, in response, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga called the vandalism "shameful." Israel donated 300 copies of Anne Frank's diary to replace the vandalized copies.[65] An anonymous donor using the pseudonym "Chiune Sugihara" donated two boxes of books pertaining to the Holocaust to the Tokyo Metropolitan Library.[66] Police arrested an unemployed man in March 2014.[67] In June, prosecutors decided not to indict the suspect after he was found to be mentally incompetent.[68] According to librarians in Tokyo, books relating to the Holocaust such as the diary and Man's Search for Meaning attract people with mental disorders and are subject to occasional vandalism.[69]
Bans
In 2009, the group Hezbollah called to ban the book in Lebanese schools, arguing that the text was an apology to Jews, Zionism and Israel.[70]
In 2010, the Culpeper County, Virginia school system banned the 50th Anniversary "Definitive Edition" of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, due to "complaints about its sexual content and homosexual themes."[71] This version "includes passages previously excluded from the widely read original edition.... Some of the extra passages detail her emerging sexual desires; others include unflattering descriptions of her mother and other people living together."[72] After consideration, it was decided a copy of the newer version would remain in the library and classes would revert to using the older version.
In 2013, a similar controversy arose in a 7th grade setting in Northville, Michigan, focusing on explicit passages about sexuality.[73] The mother behind the formal complaint referred to portions of the book as "pretty pornographic."[74]
In 2010, the American Library Association stated that there have been six challenges to the book in the United States since it started keeping records on bans and challenges in 1990, and that "[m]ost of the concerns were about sexually explicit material".[72]
