That word ''only'' is the problem. Since the diary was first published in 1947 it has sold more than 25 million copies in 50 languages. You shouldn't deprive young readers of a book that has such enduring power to move them. But one book cannot do it all. The answer is not to slam it or ban it, but to add to it from the wealth of powerful Holocaust literature.
Young readers find that it is the personal accounts, like the diary, that are most moving.
A Child of War,'' a finalist for the National Book Award in young people's literature, is neither sentimental nor exploitative. She is such a fervent New Yorker that it is hard to believe that she learned English only when she immigrated to the United States in 1952 at the age of 16. Her pictures give no hint of her dark, terrifying childhood. Barely 5 years old when the Nazis came to her comfortable home in Poland, she spent the next five and a half years in hiding and on the run, from the ghetto to the countryside to a Benedictine convent. Her younger brother was always with her, disguised as a girl to hide his circumcision.