The Diaries of Hannah Senesh and Anne Frank

When Anne Frank began keeping a diary in 1942, documenting her life in the secret annex in Amsterdam, she assumed that no one would ever want to read it. “It seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl,” she wrote. Even so, she instinctively approached her writing the way a “real writer” does, as a kind of performance. The diary entries are framed as letters to an imaginary correspondent, “Kitty,” a device that allowed Anne to experiment with writing for an audience. And while she uses real names for herself and her family, the other residents of the annex are given pseudonyms: the van Pels family became the van Daans and Fritz Pfeffer was called Albert Dussel, a way of turning them into Anne’s own creations, characters in her story.