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Why there can never be another Anne Frank.
Last summer, as Israeli bombs and rockets exploded outside her home in Gaza, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl named Farah Baker began live-tweeting to document the war unfolding around her. Her communiqués ranged from the sad ("I miss my friends") to the heartbreaking ("A child martyred and many wounded"). By the time the 50-day conflict subsided, Baker had become an international media sensation, attracting hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when she called herself the Anne Frank of Gaza, her reference was picked up by sources ranging from Salt Lake City's Deseret News to Al Jazeera.
Thus Baker became the latest in a succession of young women-Zlata Filipovic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ma Yan of China, and Hadiya of Iraq-whose anguished and often incisive dispatches from imperiled regions have inspired comparisons to the Jewish girl who wrote her remarkable journal from the "secret annex" above a spice warehouse in Amsterdam. Doubtless more Anne Franks have arisen in other embattled places in the decades since Frank's diary was fififirst published in the Netherlands in 1947. And all of these diarists serve an important purpose: They compel readers to remember that somewhere children are living through calamity or, in some cases, not living through it.
The diaries in question were produced under wildly diverse circumstances. Frank remained unknown to the world during her lifetime. By contrast, the discovery of Ma's diary by a French journalist in 2001 brought the girl publicity and tuition funds for her and other children in her remote village of Zhangjiashu in northern China; Filipovic's publishers, also French, pulled strings in 1993 to evacuate her and her family to Paris; and Baker helped focus the world's attention on Gaza's...