I like this, because I also find her annoying, but like, she’s a child. I very much like the point about the Holocaust not being a story of heroes and martyrs but about real people, and real people are allowed to be annoying. I think of all the times I’ve seen Anne Frank’s name or photo — the one where she looks like she’s superhumanly sweet and innocent — used to make some kind of point about some ongoing political tiff by people who don’t care about Jews at all, and it’s like you can tell that they see her as a symbol, some object they are free to take and use however they want, rather than a real person who existed and suffered and was kind of a brat but also deserved to have lived in peace. Because as soon as any Jew does something those people don’t like, they’re “one of the bad ones” and suddenly they don’t care if they’re thrown under the bus. Like oh, we’ll put pictures of Anne Frank on our posters at the Womens March and compare Trump to Hitler and tear our shirts appropriately in public but we’re not gonna defend people calling Gal Gadot a baby-murdering kike because she’s Israeli so that’s ok. Or Jared Kushner is a bad person so it’s ok to say he’s a lizard person who controls the strings of the world, who cares if that trope hurts more Jews than just him. If they ever thought of Anne Frank as a typical spoiled preteen who was sometimes selfish and sometimes insecure and sometimes a jerk then they would write her off, too, but there’s no danger of that because they will never see her as a real, flawed person. To that kind of person, Jews are just ideal victims for their political metaphors, but the thought of having to think about Jews existing in front of them is just distasteful for them. The victims of the Holocaust weren’t martyrs; they didn’t ask for it or volunteer, and no good came out of it, nothing was preserved because of it, they were murdered. But if you think of them as saintly martyrs, it makes it easier to distance yourself from the horrors of the Holocaust and to freeze these people in this idealised capsule where they can be used however you want.
