A Texas middle school teacher in the Hamshire-Fannett Independent School District has been fired over a book she assigned to her eighth graders. The name of the book may surprise you: it’s Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation. This version of the world’s most famous diary is official: it was actually commissioned by the Anne Frank Fonds, the foundation that holds the rights to the original diary and its publication.
Anne Frank was a Jewish girl living in Holland during World War II who was forced to go into hiding with her family and four other Jews to escape the Nazis. They successfully hid for two years, until they were betrayed and arrested in August 1944. All eight were sent to concentration camps, and only one survived: Otto Frank, Anne’s father. Anne’s diary was found in the family hiding place by a friend after the family’s arrest, and returned to her father after the war. Touched by his child’s writings, Otto Frank had them published, and the rest is history.
Middle School Teacher Fired Over Anne Frank’s Diary
So why would the real-life account of a teenage girl in hiding from the Nazis cause a teacher to get fired? When I heard about the teacher’s firing, I was perplexed, so I checked the book out from my local library. I read the entire thing in just an hour or two. What I found was a beautiful adaptation that stays true to Anne’s words with illustrations that bring her and her struggles to life. Also notable is the way it humanizes not only Anne but the seven other people she was in hiding with for two years. The illustrations and the shortened length make this adaptation an ideal way to communicate the importance of Anne Frank’s diary to younger readers.
So, what was the objection all about? The answer is: two specific passages in the book that were originally edited out by Anne’s father, Otto Frank. Whether the contents embarrassed him or whether he just wanted to protect his daughter’s privacy, we do not know.
The first short entry has Anne recounting a sleepover with a friend when she asked if they could show each other their breasts. She then says whenever she sees a female nude statue she is “in ecstasy.” To me, this just seems like a young girl going through puberty and being curious and excited about what her body will become. No big deal. But some parents object to Anne’s seeming attraction to another female.
The next objectionable entry is longer and has Anne describing in detail what the female genitals look like. Her description is accurate and clinical, and again shows the curiosity of a young teen girl. It doesn’t surprise me that Anne was curious about genitals as she lived in a small cramped annex with seven other people and shared her bedroom with a grown man. There was little privacy and she probably saw some things. While detailed, her description is just that – a description. It is not lurid or salacious.
To be honest, I don’t have a problem with my 8th grade child reading the book in its entirety, including these passages. I don’t think that the honest writings of a 12-14 year old girl are too graphic for her peers. However, I don’t think that these passages should be read aloud in class or particularly focused upon, simply because I can see how they would embarrass kids in mixed company and make them uncomfortable. They are important only because they show Anne as a real, complex, living pubescent girl. Someone who is normal. Someone who is just like you and me were at that age.
Different news sources have reported that the teacher merely assigned this graphic novel, while others reported that the teacher read the objectionable passages aloud or had kids read them aloud in class. If that’s true, then I can understand why parents are upset. But merely being upset over these two parts of a book and not taking the whole of the work and its importance to history into consideration is a mistake in my opinion. Anne Frank’s life and witness to the horrors of the Holocaust should not be squelched or quieted in any way. To do so is to hop on a slippery slope of whitewashed history that we cannot afford to go down.
