The most famous diarist of the Holocaust, Anne Frank, began to write down the drama of her daily life with no ulterior motive (apart from her teenage ambition to write fiction).
But in March 1944, the year before she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, she heard a radio broadcast by a member of the Dutch government in exile who promised to publish the letters and diaries of his people after the war.
From that moment on, Anne Frank knew that she was writing for posterity, even if she could never have guessed how important her words would one day become.By contrast, the diarists chronicled in “Who Will Write Our History,” a vital and sobering documentary directed by Roberta Grossman, always knew that they were drafting the record of an existence whose memory — were it not for them — would be wiped away.
They were Jewish residents of Warsaw who, in
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