Anne Frank, anti-Zionist?

What might the most famous victim of the Holocaust have thought about today's protests?

“If Anne Frank was a teenager today, would she be waving a Palestinian flag?” an acquaintance recently asked me.

The question isn’t as counterintuitive as it might seem. When Anne’s diary was first published in the United States in 1952, Otto Frank, her father, advocated for its message to be understood in the broadest sense possible—not just as a story about the persecution of Jews, but as a cautionary tale about the consequences of persecution for anyone, anywhere. As a result, Anne and her book have been invoked in the name of any number of political causes, from apartheid in South Africa to the recent immigration crisis in the United States. In 2007, a street artist named “T” created an image of Anne wearing a keffiyeh, apparently drawing a comparison between Jewish suffering during the Holocaust and the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. The image has been circulated around the world.

Photographed at Wits University, South Africa, in 2018. From the Jerusalem Post.

To answer my friend’s question, it’s important first to understand how Anne and her contemporaries felt about Zionism—the movement to establish an autonomous Jewish homeland in the biblical land of Israel. As antisemitism mounted in Europe in the 1930s, some Jews, believing that they could be free from persecution only in a land they governed themselves, immigrated to Palestine (then controlled by the British). But the Franks, who deeply identified as German, felt they belonged in Europe and would still be safe there. In 1933, when Anne was four, they decided to settle in Amsterdam.

With Hitler’s invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, that proved to have been the wrong choice. A new generation of young Jews embraced the Zionist cause as a potential lifeline from the Nazis. Hello Silberberg, Anne’s boyfriend in the summer of 1942, attended meetings of a Zionist club. So did Anne’s close friend Hannah Goslar, who immigrated to Palestine as quickly as she could after surviving Bergen-Belsen. While in hiding, Anne’s sister Margot talked about wanting to become a maternity nurse in Palestine, a typical occupation for female immigrants.

If Anne had survived, would she have joined them? While it’s possible to infer a belief in the need for a Jewish homeland from Anne’s comments on Jewish identity—“We can never become just Netherlanders or just English or any nation for that matter, we will always remain Jews,” she once wrote—she never made the connection explicitly. Rather than labor in the heat and dust, Anne had visions of “beautiful dresses and interesting people” in her future. “I want to see something of the world and do all kinds of exciting things,” she wrote. While in hiding, she read a book called Palestine at the Crossroads by historian and journalist Ladislas Farago, a 1937 account of “Jew and Arab … struggling for land which each feels to be rightfully his,” but she didn’t record her thoughts about it.

After the war, Otto became a committed supporter of Israel, the creation of which provided a home for around 200,000 Holocaust survivors who were denied visas to the United States and elsewhere. Though he expressed dismay about the treatment of Palestinians, he remained sympathetic to Zionism as an assertion of Jewish identity and strength in the wake of the Holocaust. “I know that had [Anne] lived through the war she certainly would have been enthusiastic about the Zionist movement,” he wrote in 1952.

No one can know what political positions a surviving Anne would have held. Many have speculated that after experiencing Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, she would have abandoned her famous belief that “people are really good at heart.” She might also have felt differently about Zionism. The Bergen-Belsen diarist Hanna Lévy-Hass, who initially returned to her native Yugoslavia after surviving the camp, immigrated to Israel in December 1948, though she had previously shown no interest in the movement. Her daughter, Amira Hass, born in Israel in 1956, is a well-known leftist journalist who lives in the West Bank and reports on Palestinian affairs in articles that are often blisteringly critical of the Israeli government.

What we do know is that from the ages of thirteen to fifteen, when many adolescents experience a political awakening, Anne remained largely unpolitical. She followed the progress of the war along with the rest of the Annex residents, but mostly in the context of her obvious personal stake in it. During her final months in the Annex, she showed a burgeoning interest in feminism, but that was about the extent of her political engagement.

In November 2023, an Italian street artist known as aleXsandro Palombo created a mural intended to commemorate the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7. With tears streaming from her eyes, Anne, dressed in a white-and-blue-striped concentration camp uniform,¹ holds an Israeli flag. Next to her stands a Palestinian girl around the same age, wearing a keffiyeh with a Palestinian flag motif. In one hand, she holds a Hamas flag; with the candle in her other hand, she lights it on fire.

Screenshot from AleXsandro Palumbo’s Instagram account.

The image was vandalized almost as soon as it went up. Someone scratched out the images of Anne and the Israeli flag and wrote the words “Free Gaza” over them. The Palestinian girl remains, silently defying Hamas. Now it is she who speaks for Anne.

Israel/Palestine reading group

I’m judging from the lack of comments on my post about To the End of the Land that this book didn’t strike a chord. My next read will be The Parisian, the first novel by British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad. I’ll post a comment thread for that next month.

As ever,

Ruth

1. Women in Auschwitz actually wore civilian clothes.