SOURCE: "Growing up Banished: A Reading of Anne Frank and Etty Hillesum," in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, edited by Margaret Randolph Higonnet and others, Yale University Press, 1987, pp. 84-95.

[In the essay below, Ergas compares the diaries of Etty Hillesum and Anne Frank, focusing on such themes as femininity, identity, and persecution.]

Memories help us live. Oddly, they need not be our own, seared as they are into the lives of those who were not there. Wars, for example: long after the bombing has stopped and the shell-shocked cities have been reconstructed, children learn to remember scenes of devastation they never witnessed. Persecution, too: age-old fears come to haunt generations born and bred in safety. Partly experienced and partly borrowed, memories are selective—mental notebooks we keep to honor the past, but equally to keep track of ourselves. "Remember what it was to...