Some have said her story was too particular: that being in hiding meant she was spared exposure to the most gruesome horrors. Much has been written about Anne Frank and whether her story was the best one to represent the Holocaust to mass audiences. They wrote in Germany, Austria, Holland, France, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Romania, and Hungary not surprisingly, their writings reflect Europe’s linguistic Tower of Babel, including Yiddish, the mother-tongue of East European Jews that was almost entirely extinguished by the annihilation of its population. Some were assimilated Jews while others were strictly Orthodox and many fell in somewhere in the middle, including several children of mixed marriages and at least one convert to Catholicism. Some came from affluent families while others were the impoverished children of peasants or laborers. Some wrote as refugees, others in hiding or passing, and still more inside the Jewish ghettoes of Eastern Europe. Who are these writers? They were both boys and girls their diaries begin as early as the mid-30s in Germany and span the entire period of the Holocaust, several ending only after liberation. Decades later, more than seventy-five diaries of young writers have surfaced from the wreckage of the Holocaust, and many dozens more remain untranslated in archives around the world.
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