SOURCE: "Anne Frank, More Comprehensively," in The Christian Science Monitor, March 15, 1995, p. 14.

[In the review below, Rubin describes Anne Frank's Diary as a "prototype for the sufferings of millions of European Jews."]

Anne Frank was not a survivor, to borrow a term over-used in present-day parlance. She was born in Germany in 1929, fled with her family to the Netherlands at the age of four, and was flushed out of the secret annex where they had hidden for two years to die in a concentration camp in 1945, a few months short of her 16th birthday. Yet, as even the most cursory reading of her diary amply demonstrates, she had all of the qualities that are supposed to characterize survivorship: intelligence, courage, honesty, compassion, resilience, resourcefulness, and a good sense of humor.

Anne Frank hoped to become a writer. In the spring of 1944, after hearing a radio broadcast of the...