A few years ago, Deutsche Bahn, the Ger­man nation­al rail­road, announced a new fleet of high-speed trains. Their plan was to name each one after a Ger­man lumi­nary, includ­ing Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Lud­wig van Beethoven, and Anne Frank. Anne grew up in the Nether­lands and wrote her famous diary in Dutch, but she was born in Frank­furt to a Ger­man Jew­ish family.

The out­cry was imme­di­ate. ​“DB is nam­ing trains after vic­tims of depor­ta­tion by train, start­ing with Anne Frank,” one jour­nal­ist tweet­ed. Oth­ers defend­ed the choice, argu­ing that Anne has become known as a sym­bol of the ​“peace­ful co-exis­tence of dif­fer­ent cul­tures.” Even the Auschwitz Muse­um weighed in to point out that link­ing a train with Anne — who was deport­ed to Auschwitz in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber 1944 and from there to Bergen-Belsen, where she died in Feb­ru­ary 1945 — was ​“still painful for the peo­ple who expe­ri­enced these depor­ta­tions.” With­in a year, the idea was offi­cial­ly nixed by DB.

This was just one of the news items that popped up in my Google alerts while I was research­ing my new book, The Many Lives of Anne Frank. My biog­ra­phy doc­u­ments Anne’s life and inves­ti­gates ​“Anne Frank” as an idea that has devel­oped since her Diary of a Young Girl was first pub­lished in 1947. It’s easy to laugh — or groan — at the myr­i­ad, most­ly taste­less ways she’s invoked to sell every­thing from make­up to hot dogs (the ​“Anne Frank­furter”) to tam­pons (in Japan, ​“Anne’s day” is a euphemism for the start of the men­stru­al cycle, since the Diary was one of the first books in Japan­ese to address the sub­ject). Not to men­tion the Anne Frank Hal­loween cos­tumes that sur­face every few years.

But I was also sur­prised to learn how many peo­ple have been gen­uine­ly inspired by Anne — some­times in the unlike­li­est of sit­u­a­tions. Fas­ci­nat­ed, I start­ed col­lect­ing their sto­ries. Even­tu­al­ly there were so many that I was able to use only a few in my book. Here are three of my favorites. If you pic­ture the typ­i­cal Anne Frank read­er as a teenage girl, you might be as sur­prised as I was.

In the mid-1990s, Jeff Mangum, the lead singer and song­writer for the now-leg­endary indie-rock band Neu­tral Milk Hotel, picked up a copy of Diary of a Young Girl in a sec­ond­hand book­store. He read the book straight through and after­ward ​“spent about three days cry­ing,” he lat­er told a jour­nal­ist. In the wake of this encounter, Mag­num wrote In the Aero­plane Over the Sea, an eeri­ly beau­ti­ful album that is large­ly acknowl­edged as one of the great­est indie-rock records of all time. It’s a song cycle around the themes of love, loss, and rebirth, haunt­ed by Anne Frank. The years of her death and birth appear repeat­ed­ly in the songs, as well as cryp­tic ref­er­ences to her life sto­ry. ​“Hol­land, 1945” imag­ines her rein­car­nat­ed as ​“a lit­tle boy in Spain/​playing pianos filled with flames.” Mangum lat­er said he hadn’t so much writ­ten the songs as ​“chan­neled them from somewhere.” 

I first came across Yikealo Beyene in an episode of the fan­tas­tic pod­cast Israel Sto­ry. In 2005, at age twen­ty, this young activist snuck across the bor­der into Ethiopia from his native Eritrea, where he had been jailed and tor­tured by the secret police. In an Ethiopi­an refugee camp, he came upon Diary of a Young Girl. As a young man who had known war his entire life, he came to think of Anne as his friend. When he found out what had hap­pened to her, he cried. Then he decid­ed to trans­late the Diary into Tigrinya, his native lan­guage. After work­ing on his trans­la­tion for two years in the refugee camp, he lost it to smug­glers who helped him make his way to Cairo and even­tu­al­ly to Israel. He dreamed of find­ing Anne’s fam­i­ly in Israel and asked the sol­dier who picked him up at the bor­der, ​“Do you know Anne Frank?” 

Final­ly, a few years ago I attend­ed a per­for­mance titled ​“Otto Frank” by the­ater artist Roger Guen­veur Smith, the lat­est in a series of plays by Smith chan­nel­ing his­tor­i­cal fig­ures. Through his voice, they speak about their lives, but also about present-day issues that they might have want­ed to address, had they been able to. As Otto, Smith spoke about his daugh­ter, her bril­liance, and his oblig­a­tion to share her gift with the world. But he also talked about the 2009 shoot­ing of a secu­ri­ty guard at the Unit­ed States Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Muse­um by a white suprema­cist and the dan­gers faced by migrant fam­i­lies. He called his daugh­ter ​“mi amor” and promised to send her ​“across the riv­er to safe­ty, keep­ing La Migra at bay.” At the end, his heartrend­ing shrieks blend­ed into a siren as he called her name: ​“Ani­ta, Anita.” 

In my book and else­where, I’ve cau­tioned that tak­ing Anne’s name out of con­text can flat­ten her into an arche­typ­al sym­bol of vic­tim­hood, eras­ing the specifics of her life and death and imply­ing that anti­semitism is no longer a destruc­tive force in the world. I have mixed feel­ings about efforts like The Diary of Anne Frank — Lat­inX, a pro­duc­tion staged a few years ago in Los Ange­les that recast the play using actors with a Latin Amer­i­can back­ground in response to the deten­tion and depor­ta­tion of ille­gal immi­grants dur­ing the first Trump admin­is­tra­tion. The line between appre­ci­a­tion and appro­pri­a­tion can be dif­fi­cult to draw — and large­ly depends on one’s own per­spec­tive and per­son­al history.

But what these three fig­ures do with Anne is dif­fer­ent in an impor­tant way. Rather than claim­ing to iden­ti­fy with her or her sit­u­a­tion, they respond on the most human lev­el to the real­i­ty of her sto­ry. Then they use it as a jump­ing-off point to cre­ate some­thing that only they could bring into the world. This strikes me as a deeply respect­ful — and imag­i­na­tive — form of homage.