Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

FRANK, Anne [Elie Wiesel].

Item Number: 132116

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1952.

First edition, early printing of “one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war” (Eleanor Roosevelt). Octavo, original cloth, pictorial endpapers. Signed by Nobel Prize-winning author on the half-title page, “Shalom Elie Wiesel.” Elie Wiesel poignantly wrote regarding this title for Holocaust Remembrance Day. “Who has not read and reread “The Diary of Anne Frank?” Who has not been moved by the mischievous and innocent look that this unforgettable young Jewish girl gave to a beaten and ridiculed humanity desperately searching for reasons to hope? Why has this book, above and beyond all others, had such an impact on the world? Because one finds in it purity and sadness, the purity and sadness that only a child was perhaps able to express before dying? We love Anne. We cannot not love her. Of all the people who inhabited her closed universe still open to dreams, it is she who fascinates and touches us the most. One might say she is a guide who invites us to discover a dark, gloomy work. We follow her, we listen to her, we laugh with her, we cry also, we cry even when she laughs, perhaps especially when she wants to make us believe that she is only a young romantic girl who likes to amuse herself as she can” (Elie Wiesel). Introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. Translated from the Dutch by B.M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Ursula Suess. We have never seen another example signed by Wiesel, himself a Holocaust survivor.

Born in 1929, Anne Frank received a blank diary on her 13th birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Here diary was later discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank's remarkable diary has since become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the "Secret Annex" of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and amusing, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.