In one of the final entries in her diary, the 15-year-old Anne Frank wrote that “deep down the young are lonelier than the old... it's twice as hard for us young people to hold on to our opinions at a time when ideals are being shattered and destroyed”.

Much has been written about the dangers of addressing contemporary issues via the story of a Holocaust victim who suffered unimaginably at the hands of (in her own words) the “cruellest beasts known to man”.

In the new BBC drama about Anne Frank's life, to be shown from Monday to Friday next week, the writer Deborah Moggach has done just that.

She has created, with great sensitivity, a teenage heroine who speaks to today's young people. She is about as far away from the Americanised 1960 version as possible - this is an Anne for the texting and iPod generation. Ellie Kendrick's portrayal strips Anne of her sainthood. She is one of us.

What it does not show is her terrible slow death with her sister, Margot, from typhus and hunger in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Annelies Marie Frank was an ordinary girl born into an assimilated middle-class German Jewish family at the worst possible time in history for Jews. A lively chatterbox, she started writing her journal at the age of 13, describing the onset of puberty and the concerns of growing up.

Among its many passages about adult bickering, sibling rivalry and frustration with her mother, she articulates what it feels like to be hated, she pleads for peace and yearns for the human rights that our young take for granted. Over the two years of writing, she developed a strong moral framework, something not clearly demonstrated in the TV drama, despite its other strengths.

A DVD of the series is available for schools with material from the Anne Frank Trust. A simple act that started with a little girl spotting a check-covered notebook in a bookshop window and hinting to her father that her 13th birthday was near will live on in the fight against prejudice, bullying and racism.

Part of Anne's saintly status, and something that provokes debate about the sentimentalising of her story, has arisen because of a line in the penultimate diary entry, often taken out of context, which states: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are truly good at heart.”

But this does not describe fear at the hands of her German oppressors. It comes near the end of a long entry describing the loneliness of growing up in the 1930s, when youngsters were expected to be seen and not heard, and where she talks about her blossoming self-knowledge. In the final entry before her family was betrayed, she grapples with the two sides of her personality, “good Anne” and “superficial Anne”, the one she cannot help showing to adults.

These passages speak to young people and can help them to open up about their own hopes, fears and concerns about becoming adults.

At the Anne Frank Trust we make no apologies for using Anne's story to challenge attitudes and behaviour to people's differences, even if Britain today is unlikely to experience the same collision of events that brought Nazism and the Holocaust.

As educational tools, we have not only Anne's words that force us to confront what it feels like to be persecuted, but also the large collection of photographs that their father, Otto Frank, a keen amateur photographer, took of Anne and Margot. From these we see Anne as a gifted, vivacious, free-thinking girl. Those whose ideology was based on the “master race”, considered her untermensch, subhuman. By looking at her experience, we can encourage children to step into the skin of “the other”, be it of a different skin colour, culture, accent, sexuality or gang.

The real hero of this tragedy is Otto Frank, the only one of the eight people who hid together to survive gassing, hunger, disease and death marches. This loving father was determined, despite everything he suffered, that his daughter's diary should be a force for good. He teaches us, as a counterbalance to the destruction wrought on Europe by Adolf Hitler, that one man can make a difference for the good.

Interest in Anne Frank does not seem to abate. At present we have seven exhibitions about her touring Britain, visiting locations as different as Feltham Young Offender Institution, Celtic FC, Coventry Cathedral and a pupil referral unit in Tower Hamlets. An inmate in Wakefield prison, whom we trained to be an exhibition guide, summed up what engagement with Anne Frank can mean: “Being so close to this story has made me think about my life. It was the best thing that happened in all my time in prison.”

The exhibition is making a long-term impact on communities as diverse as Blackburn, where its visit prompted “a rainbow coalition of Christians, Muslims and Jews”, in the words of Canon Chris Chivers, of Blackburn Cathedral, and Somerset, where there had been alarming incidents of rural racism. There is no barrier to the global reach of Anne Frank, from street kids in São Paulo to the townships of Johannesburg.

The Diary of Anne Frank will be shown on BBC1 from Monday.

Gillian Walnes is director of the Anne Frank Trust, www.annefrank.org.uk

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