A little girl’s words returned to the global consciousness as the administration of US President Donald Trump began implementing its declared goals of smoking out undocumented people in America and deporting them back to the countries they came from.
“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”
Several people opposed to Trump’s crackdown posted this excerpt on their social media from The Diary of a Young Girl, written by Anne Frank on January 13, 1943, originally in Dutch.
That the words became relevant once again 81 years – nearly to the day – after they were written in a hiding place in a small apartment in Amsterdam is perhaps a testimony to the cyclical nature of human events.
One user on X responded to Anne Frank’s words, posted by another: “San Antonio today!!! Raiding homes, places of work and loading migrants onto MILITARY planes. Planes are today’s equivalent of Germany’s cattle cars headed straight to Poland.”
Another user wrote: “The Family of Anne Frank sought refuge into America but was denied. She would’ve been 95 years old if this was approved. This is a friendly reminder to all those anti-immigrant anti-refugee!”
Another user wrote, “Somewhere in the USA, there is a Latina Anne Frank hiding from the ICE in an attic.”
This is not the first time the diary of the little Jewish girl during the Holocaust has been invoked in recent times. When Trump had first got into the Oval Office and ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to crack down on undocumented immigrants, Anne’s words found their way onto social media as well.
“...I cringe to see her invoked in contexts far removed from her historical situation,” wrote Ruth Franklin, author of the forthcoming The Many Lives of Anne Frank, in a guest essay for The New York Times on Sunday.
“This happened during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that Anne Frank had more freedom than people required to get the Covid-19 vaccine. Even in situations where the comparison feels more relevant, such as the migrant crisis in Europe and the United States, taking Anne’s words out of context risks flattening her into an archetypal symbol of victimhood, ignoring her historical reality and the remarkable achievement of her diary, and downplaying the continuing threat of antisemitism,” Franklin added.
Even as Franklin bemoaned the erasure of Anne Frank’s Jewish identity, the literary critic acknowledged that Anne’s words had provided inspiration far beyond her context, including inspiring the likes of Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa.
It’s not just Anne Frank, the little girl who died in a Nazi concentration camp and whose father, Otto, survived Auschwitz – the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust – and on the insistence of friends published his daughter’s diary in June 1947.
Many Nazi-era symbolisms have returned to the global consciousness in the first month of 2025, including a certain Elon Musk doing what many saw as a sieg heil.
As luck would have it, a replica of Anne Frank’s hiding place from World War II opens to the public on Monday in New York.
The project is meant to educate future generations about the horrors of persecution and war.
The full scale replica recreates, down to the smallest details like the photos of the Frank family, the peeling wallpapers, what life was like for the young victim of the holocaust.
More than 100 objects belonging to the Frank family are also on display, many of which have never been seen in public before.
