Banned Book: Anne Frank's Diary

where they burn books,
they will ultimately burn people as well.
-Heinrich Heine, 1820

While book challenges and bans in the US have become disturbingly frequent in recent years, the list of books that are most frequently challenged is relatively short— a product of a coordinated (and often lazy) effort to target specific kinds of books, often more to make a political statement than out of genuine concern for children.

One book that often appears on this list is Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, by Ari Folman and illustrator David Polonsky, a close— at times word-for-word— adaptation of The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank. Perhaps most recently, the book was included on a spreadsheet of 673 book challenges filed by a community member in South Carolina’s Dorchester School District 2.

The Author

Frank entered hiding with her family in Amsterdam in 1942, at the age of thirteen, after her sister was “called up” (ordered to go to a labor camp) by the Nazi Party. Frank began her di…