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Muller dramatizes some of these events. The technique moves the narrative, but it also underscores a familiar problem: fictional attempts to enhance this chapter of the 20th century cannot compete with the facts. There is more authenticity when Muller approaches the material in a scholarly, dry-eyed manner, which is just right for revisiting a story that has been sentimentalized and uplifted for stage and screen.
Anne Frank's celebrated idealism ("I still believe that people are really good at heart") is more than balanced by her tart perceptions and her less-quoted dread--what she called "the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too."
Muller conveys this sense of doom by methodically compiling the minutiae of systematic inhumanity. She follows the Franks' tragic arc from Anne's comfortable childhood and later the persecution in their native Frankfurt to false hope in Amsterdam, and finally the concentration camps and no hope at all.
Anne was sent to Bergen-Belsen, where some time during March 1945, she, her sister Margot and hundreds of other prisoners were stricken with typhus. Their captors, preoccupied with the advancing Allies, left them to die.
Muller pays respect to the legend, but she also does something long overdue. She saves Anne Frank from idolatry and impersonal symbolism by restoring her physical presence: an extraordinary woman-not-to-be with greenish eyes, a trick shoulder and an overbite that kept her from whistling.
--With reporting by Abi Daruvalla/Amsterdam and Andrea Sachs/ New York