Anne’s initial descriptions of Mrs. van Daan are not entirely unkind, but they quickly sour. Anne portrays her as a woman obsessed with superficiality, particularly her prized fur coat and her flirtatious past. One of the most memorable episodes in the diary involves Mrs. van Daan’s constant complaints about the Frank family’s “privileges” and her belief that she is being treated unfairly. Anne criticizes her for being “provocative,” egocentric, and stingy—especially with food. While Anne’s judgment is harsh, it is essential to remember that the diary is a subjective account by a teenager. Nevertheless, even allowing for adolescent exaggeration, Petronella van Daan embodies the less heroic side of hiding: the petty bickering, the hoarding of resources, and the inability to transcend one’s own anxieties.
Historically, Auguste van Pels (Petronella’s real name) was a German-Jewish refugee who fled with her husband, Hermann, and son, Peter. The pressure of two years in hiding without fresh air, privacy, or certainty would test anyone’s character. Where Anne’s mother, Edith, turned inward with depression and withdrawal, Mrs. van Daan turned outward with complaints and provocations. She lacked the diplomatic tact of Otto Frank and the introspective nature of Anne. Instead, she became the scapegoat for the group’s collective frustration—a role Anne, as a budding writer, eagerly assigned to her.
In the end, Petronella van Daan serves an important literary and historical purpose. She reminds us that heroism in the Holocaust was not universal. Fear and deprivation did not make everyone kinder; for some, it made them smaller, more irritable, and more selfish. Anne Frank’s diary is a testament to hope, but Petronella van Daan is a testament to the raw, unvarnished reality of human frailty under pressure. She is not a figure to admire, but she is a figure to understand—a flawed, scared woman trapped in a tiny room, whose worst sin was being insufferable, not inhuman.
The ultimate tragedy of Petronella van Daan lies in her fate. After the annex was betrayed in August 1944, she was deported. Unlike Anne and Margot, who died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen, Auguste van Pels was sent on a death march from Auschwitz to Belsen, then to Raguhn, and finally to Theresienstadt, where she perished in April 1945—just weeks before liberation. That this sharp-tongued, materialistic woman endured the same horrors, died the same death, and is remembered largely through the unflattering lens of a teenager’s diary is a poignant irony.
Yet, to leave Petronella van Daan as merely a caricature of a “difficult woman” would be incomplete. In the diary’s later entries, Anne herself shows moments of nuance. She acknowledges that Mrs. van Daan is not malicious but simply “unpleasant” and deeply insecure. The woman’s famous quarrel over a pair of shoes or the constant worry about her fur coat (which she had to sell or leave behind) are not signs of vanity alone; they are symptoms of a person clinging to remnants of a normal, comfortable life that has been violently stripped away.
In the confined world of the Secret Annex, where eight people lived in constant fear of discovery, friction was inevitable. While Anne Frank’s diary often highlights her own growth and the quiet dignity of her father, Otto, it is Petronella van Daan—the mother of Peter van Daan—who emerges as the most vivid and complex source of domestic tension. Far from a simple villain, Petronella van Daan represents the destructive effects of chronic stress, material insecurity, and the clash between generations living in extreme proximity.
