But with the publication three years after the war of “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” millions of readers would weep at this tale of courage and hope. There in the warehouse-like space that Anne Frank dubbed The Annex, the constant scribbling of Otto and Edith Frank’s younger daughter became a source of gentle family amusement. I told Elli, ‘Help me pick up all Anne’s writings.’ ” Elli (another, former employee of Otto Frank), was still very scared, and looked to me for direction. My eyes scanned the rubble for more of Anne’s writings, and I saw the old accounting books and many more writing papers that Elli and I had given to her when she had run out of pages in the checkered diary. I knew how precious her diary was to Anne. I remembered how happy Anne had been to receive this little book to write her private thoughts in. “On the floor,” Gies writes in “Anne Frank Remembered” (with Alison Leslie Gold Simon & Schuster, $17.95), “amidst the chaos of papers and books, my eye lit on the little red-orange checkered, cloth-bound diary that Anne had received from her father on her 13th birthday. The Germans would confiscate everything, she knew, and so, lovingly, she gathered up a few treasured possessions, vowing to keep them safe for the Franks’ return.

They had no such vision when, after their friends were discovered and arrested, the victims of a still-unknown betrayer, Miep Gies returned to the building that had once housed Otto Frank’s spice and jam businesses.

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