The tightly packed panels that result, in which a line or two adapted from the “Diary” might be juxtaposed with a bit of invented dialogue between the Annex inhabitants or a dream vision of Anne’s, do wonders at fitting complex emotions and ideas into a tiny space - a metaphor for the Secret Annex itself.
Polonsky’s illustrations, richly detailed and sensitively rendered, work marvelously to fill in the gaps, allowing an image or a facial expression to stand in for the missing text and also providing context about Anne’s historical circumstances that is, for obvious reasons, absent from the original. At times he reproduces whole entries verbatim, but more often he diverges freely from the original, collapsing multiple entries onto a single page and replacing Anne’s droll commentary with more accessible (and often more dramatic) language. As Folman acknowledges in an adapter’s note, the text, preserved in its entirety, would have resulted in a graphic novel of 3,500 pages. Into this quagmire bravely wade Ari Folman and David Polonsky, the creators of “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation,” a stunning, haunting work of art that is unfortunately marred by some questionable interpretive choices. “Who owns Anne Frank?” Cynthia Ozick asked in an essay that berates the Broadway adapters for emphasizing the uplifting elements of Anne’s message - particularly the famous quotation, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart” - while insufficiently accounting for her hideous death, at age 15, in Bergen-Belsen. Meanwhile, the enormously successful Broadway adaptation of the “Diary” has been severely rebuked for downplaying Anne’s Judaism and ironing out the nuances of her message. Thus the outcry that greeted the discovery that Otto, in putting together a manuscript of the “Diary” for publication in 1947, had deleted whole passages in which Anne discussed in graphic terms her developing sexuality and her criticism of her mother, and the excitement when, in 1995, a “Definitive Edition” appeared, restoring much of the deleted material. Both a coming-of-age story and a portrait of human psychology under unimaginable stress, it has become justly iconic.īecause of the special circumstances of its creation and publication - Miep Gies, one of the office employees who sustained the Franks by bringing supplies and news from the outside world, gathered Anne’s papers after the family’s arrest and gave them to Otto, the only Annex inhabitant to survive, when he returned from Auschwitz - many readers have treated the “Diary” as something akin to a saint’s relic: a text almost holy, not to be tampered with.
Beginning on Anne’s 13th birthday, when she fortuitously received a diary with a red-and-white plaid cover among her gifts, and ending abruptly right before the Franks’ arrest, in early August 1944, the “Diary” chronicles just over two years spent in the “Secret Annex,” the warren of rooms above Otto Frank’s Amsterdam office where the family of four, along with four of their acquaintances, hid from the Nazis. Her “Diary of a Young Girl,” with 30 million copies in print in 60 languages, is one of the most widely read books of the 20th century and, for an incalculable number of readers, the gateway for a first encounter with the Holocaust. The story of Anne Frank is so well known to so many that the task of making it new seems at once insurmountable and superfluous. ANNE FRANK’S DIARY The Graphic Adaptation Adapted by Ari Folman Illustrated by David Polonsky 149 pp.