Anne Frank exhibit points to diarist's literary ambitions

WASHINGTON -- Fairy tales, short stories, essays, the start of a novel -- 15-year-old Anne Frank didn't just write a diary in the two years she was hidden from the Nazis.

An exhibit that shows some of her varied work, titled "Anne Frank the Writer: An Unfinished Story," opens at the Holocaust Museum on Thursday. It would have been her 74th birthday.

The exhibit, which first lady Laura Bush planned to visit Wednesday, quotes in full an essay called "Give!" that Frank put in a ledger-like notebook called "Stories and Events from the Annex."

"The world has plenty of room, riches, money and beauty," it concludes, according to the translation from the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. "God has created enough for each and every one of us. Let us begin by dividing it more fairly!"

What Frank liked to call "the secret annex" was her family's two-story refuge in an Amsterdam building that housed the businesses her father Otto Frank used to own. Anti-Jewish laws imposed on Holland by German occupiers forced him to sell, but the buyers were friends who helped the family hide until the Franks were betrayed by an informer and sent to a concentration camp.

When the Nazis came to power in their native Germany, the Franks had moved to Holland, a country known for centuries to welcome Jewish and other refugees. But they didn't move far enough. A few years later, German tanks rolled through Holland on their way to France.

Birthday gift -- a diary

For her 13th birthday, Otto gave his daughter a diary bound in a red-white-and-blue plaid -- the exhibit has a replica. The original remains are on permanent show in Amsterdam. Pages in the exhibit are from the original manuscript, displayed in the United States for the first time.

"Will I ever be able to write anything great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?" she wrote. "I hope so, oh, I hope so very much, for I can recapture everything when I write, my thoughts, my ideals and my fantasies."

The exhibit has a long quote from Frank's poem "Eva's Dream," a fairy tale featuring an elf with some sharp observations about flowers. The elf disapproves of the rose -- "she's so beautiful and her fragrance is so intoxicating that it goes to everyone's head, most of all her own." The bluebell, on the other hand, "chimes for flowers, just as church bells chime for people. ... It's a much happier creature than the rose."

Anne Frank died, apparently of typhus, three months before turning 16 and just weeks before liberation of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, near Hamburg, Germany.

Frank and her elder sister Margot, who died before her, had been transferred there from Auschwitz.

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On the Net

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: www.ushmm.org

Anne Frank House: www.annefrank.nl