Peter Schiff

Peter Schiff is the childhood love Anne Frank remembers after their paths have separated. Though absent from her life in hiding, he returns through vivid dreams and recollection, becoming a measure against which she interprets her feelings for the Peter who shares the Secret Annex. The diary presents him not as a participant in the Annex’s events but as a powerful presence in Anne’s inner life: a remembered attachment whose meaning grows as she grows older.

Identity and Background

Anne recalls first taking an interest in Peter when she was a young schoolgirl. They spent a summer together and were, in her account, inseparable: they walked through their neighborhood hand in hand, with Peter in a white cotton suit and Anne in a short summer dress. She remembers him as tall, slender, and good-looking, with dark hair, brown eyes, ruddy cheeks, and a serious, quiet, intelligent expression. His smile, she adds, made him seem mischievous and boyish.

Their childhood closeness ended after Anne went away to the countryside for summer vacation. When she returned, Peter had moved from his old address and was living with a much older boy. Anne understood that the boy had apparently told Peter she was only a child; Peter stopped seeing her. She continued to cling to the attachment until she recognized that pursuing him might make other people think she was boy-crazy. In the years that followed, he spent time with girls his own age and no longer made a point of greeting her.

The Lost Attachment in Anne’s Memory

Anne’s later recollections revise her belief that time had erased her feelings. She says she had told herself she had forgotten Peter and no longer liked him, but came to understand that jealousy of the other girls had been part of what remained. As she grew older and more mature, she realized that her love had grown too. She could understand why Peter might have thought her childish, yet the possibility that he had forgotten her still hurt.

A dream makes the old attachment newly immediate. Anne dreams that she is sitting across from Peter while they look at a book of drawings by Mary Bos. In the dream, he meets her eyes and says, “If I'd only known, I'd have come to you long ago!” Anne turns away, overcome by emotion. She wakes still carrying the dream’s sense of closeness and feels both sad at having lost him again and glad to recognize that he remains the only one who has stayed so clearly in her mind. The dream does not establish what Peter himself felt; it stages the answer Anne longs to imagine.

Peter Schiff and Peter in the Annex

The remembered Peter becomes entangled with the Peter who is actually near Anne in the Secret Annex. Anne insists that she is not in love with the Annex’s Peter, yet acknowledges that she sometimes experiences a feeling like the one in her dream of Peter Schiff, though less intensely. The distinction begins to blur: she writes that Peter and “Petel” are one and the same, joining the childhood beloved to the young man beside her without claiming that their histories or identities are literally identical.

That comparison lends emotional weight to the relationship developing in the Annex. Anne imagines the two of them sitting together in silence and believes the adults do not understand what draws them close. Her descriptions of the Annex Peter include his childishness, tenderness toward Mouschi, strength when carrying heavy loads, and bravery when watching gunfire or searching the dark house for burglars. Those observations belong to Anne’s present relationship, while the remembered Peter supplies an earlier pattern of affection and a dream-image against which that intimacy is felt.

Dreams, Divided Feeling, and Narrative Role

On April 28, 1944, Anne recalls the dream of Peter Schiff again, saying that she has never forgotten it. She compares the feeling of his cheek in the dream with occasional moments of closeness beside the Annex Peter, then describes a recent moment on the divan when “the everyday Anne slipped away and the second Anne took her place.” In that inward division, the second Anne wants only to love and be gentle. The memory of Peter Schiff is therefore part of how Anne gives shape to feelings that she finds difficult to express directly in everyday life.

Peter Schiff’s significance in the diary rests on this contrast between absence and vivid inward return. The account offers no later meeting or response from him; what it records is Anne’s memory, her interpretation of their childhood separation, and the way dreams keep the attachment present. His place in the narrative is consequently less that of an active character than of a remembered possibility: the lost first love through whom Anne measures longing, maturity, and the uncertain closeness she discovers in hiding.