The Diary of a Young Girl

To me, this book became one of the most insightful, witty, well written and interesting books that I have ever read! It is almost unbelievable that the author, who possessed such a poignant mind with a very fine sense of humour, and a tremendous literary talent, was a girl of only 13-14 years of age!

Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who, in 1942, together with her family and another family, went into a hiding in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of Holland. She had written most of this diary while they stayed there (and not in the camps, as usually thought of). Two years later they were found out and arrested by the Nazi police and transported to the labor camps, where almost everyone was eventually killed or died, including Anne. The only survivor was her father. Anne's diary was rescued by their Dutch friends just before the Nazi returned after their arrest to clean that hiding. After the war, with her father's consent and help, Anne's diary was published and became one of the most well known books in the world.

I had not heard much about it before I started to read it, and so had no particular expectations of what it will be. Quite unlike the popular image of this book, which is usually presented as the description of the suffering of the Jews during the WWII, the horrors of labor camps, etc., it is an optimistic and highly entertaining read about the life of this teenage (13-14) girl, mostly concerned with the grown ups around her and their social behaviour in that hide; her relationships with them and her innermost feelings and anxieties; her first and second love; her self exploration during those 25 months there and the hopes and dreams that she entertained for after the war is over, when they can return to a normal life; and much, much more. Although the struggles of the war and their frequent fears in hiding are also addressed, her writing mostly remains a humorous, witty, very touching and super addictive read!

So I am a little bit perplexed why so many 5* reviews here emphasise so much the terrible fortune of the many Jews during the WWII and the tragic end of Anne Frank and most of her family. Whereas these are undoubtedly the shocking facts (well described in another book, "Anne Frank Remembered"), they happened after this diary was completed by Anne and thus did not influence neither the spirit nor the content of it.

This book is an important read for every parent because not only does it show what an early teenager anticipates, wants and needs to see in her parents, but also describes very well on how particular character traits of the parents and other grown ups, which we as adults stop even noticing because they're all so common, how these are perceived by children and how they form their opinions, and then of course their attitudes, towards us & life. I think it will be quite clear to everyone who reads the book that the parents-kids misunderstanding symptom, recurring in every generation, must be due not so much to the change of circumstances / technologies / opportunities / values, etc., but because too many of us, when we grow up and become parents, tend to do exactly the same things for our kids and become exactly the same characters which we ourselves despised while being young. No other book which I have read describes the yearnings and the needs of an adolescent so well and can offer so much practical insight for parents and kids alike as this one!

I do not intend to repeat what is already written in some other reviews here, but to give you just one example where this book really struck me by the depth of Anne's thought and feelings: how well (at the age of 14!) she defined what love is and what it is not. What does it mean to love someone? In one place she writes: "Love is understanding someone, caring for him, sharing his joys and sorrows". And then few months later she adds: "To love someone, I have to admire and respect that person". Until I read her diary I thought that the best definition of what love is was given by a renowned psychologist Erich Fromm (who actually wrote it when Anne was no more): "Love... always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsibility, respect and knowledge". But if you pause and slowly repeat and compare these definitions, how much more precise and resonating is this word that Anne used, "to admire" (the same word in the Russian translation)! Aren't we all really longing for a partner, for friends and parents whom we would not only know and respect, but admire? Does not each of us yearn to live a life that is worth not only of respect, but admiration? Sometimes it happens that just one or few precise words open up the new depths of understanding and meaning. For Leo Tolstoy, a famous Russian author, 8 words spoken in the Sermon on the Mount: "Do not resist the one who is evil" (only 3 words in Russian actually) opened up the understanding of the teachings of the Gospels. As for me, this one verb, in the context of Anne's writing about love, - to admire (not in the modern, superficial sense of admiring what is on the outside, but subtle admiration of the person's character), - enriched my understanding of love. This is just one example which is most vivid in my memory from this book, but the truth is that at no moment I was willing to speed up my reading, or to skip any paragraph or part of it, because everything she wrote is really so captivating!

P.S. Few words on the English translation. This English text is beautifully written, maybe even a bit too beautiful, too stylized compared to the original. I actually cannot compare it to the original in Dutch, but when I looked at the Russian translation, some written thoughts sounded a little less accurately formulated there; somehow it felt more believable to be closer to the writing of a 14 year old girl. Yet I did preferred to read the English version, since as long as this is a translation, I think it is alright to make it more natural & harmonious in the final language, rather than trying to find ways to retain the slight unpolished-ness of the original. Besides, English is more of a kindred language with Dutch.

I saw the original film of Anne long ago. I knew the general plot. However, I had no idea how educated and well-read this child was. She had read volumes of literature I would expect very few people of today to have read. Her use of language is astounding for a twelve to fifteen year old. And she’s fluent in German and Dutch while easily understandable in English and probably French. While reading through her diary I tried to imagine her if she would have survived into old age. Who would she have become? She was destined to become perhaps a writer of novels or screenplays in France? Perhaps Anne would have become a university professor at one of the great English colleges? We’ll never know because antisemitism still exists.

I first read this book (the edited down version) when I was nine years old, I received the book as a gift, and again when I was twelve for school. I recently re-read the book (the new un-edited version) and coming from an entirely different perspective now that I am a thirty year old mother.

First, I want to say that I absolutely believe that this book should still be included in school curriculum. The only thing 'new' about it is that pages and passages were added. Nothing was taken out and the translation was not changed. Reports that the book is so different that it's nothing like the original are false. Reports that the story is different are false.

There is no reason for the edited version to still be used because children read Anne Frank's diary around ages 11-14 years old which was around age when Anne herself was writing the diary. Anything that could be seen as supposedly "inappropriate" can be seen on daytime television with a PG or maybe PG-13 rating. Especially these days, there's definitely nothing in there that is beyond the norm for the average tween-teen. I think that continuing to use an edited version is insulting to Anne Frank's memory. Not only that, but it provides valuable information about the time period and gives more relateability to the diary.

The passages which are included in the new version are not anything that the average 8-12 year old girl does not already know about her own body and the "birds and the bees", and are so few and short that they comprise a tiny percentage of the work itself. The romance between herself and Peter is very chaste and nothing untoward happens in the story. (Spoiler: they hold hands and a kiss a few times. that's it.) The passages that some see as inappropriate are not at all titillating, a medical textbook is more erotic. Coming from a mom's point of view, I would definitely allow my daughter to read the unedited book.

I think this should stay on school book lists because some kids these days see the Holocaust as something that happened a long time ago that is meaningless now, without realizing that genocides and racial motivated violence still happens every day. I think it seems to them like just another thing they have to learn about along with The Hundred Years War and the Crusades.

Anne Frank's diary gives kids perspective and helps makes the tragic loss of life during WWII a tangible thing they can understand. The diary is so relate-able and reflects so many feelings that all teens have had, that she becomes three dimensional to them and no longer a just some person that died a long time ago. This sensitivity towards the loss of a life is what we need now in the times we live in.

As we read the diary we see how much potential was lost not only in Anne but in her entire family. Anne Frank was an intelligent and well-read young woman who studied multiple languages and had an analytical mind. I believe we lost a shining beacon of women's intelligence when she died. She was an emerging feminist, activist, and writer! I think she would have been an amazing woman who would have gone on to do great things. All that potential was lost millions of times over during WWII, and this is what we feel deep in our hearts upon closing the book.

Most of the book is about the privations and hardship of living hidden away in the "annex". There is very little coverage of the violence of the times or much that is going on in the outside world because they had little knowledge of it since they were hidden. I think this is partly why some schoolchildren report the diary is boring. It does get repetitive at times, which reflects the feelings of those living in hiding. They had to wait and wait in fear, not knowing what the next day would bring.

There are many self-reflective passages where Anne laments being picked on by the adults in the annex, wondering if she will live up to the expectations they have for her, hoping she can reach her goals. There is a thread of hope apparent even in her most depressing writings. I think these are the parts I think teens find most relate-able because all teens want to achieve things, please their parents, and find hope in their moments of despair.

Toward the end of the diary we see just how difficult things have become for the family which is not always accurately represented in the movie versions of the diary. They were starving, never full at meals, and having to exist off moldy and tasteless food. There was one bathroom for eight people and at times the toilet could not be flushed. They had threadbare, holey clothing which was too small. The cat used the bathroom wherever it wanted towards the end, and their helpers came less and less frequently as circumstances got worse and worse. Their conditions deteriorated in ways that children living in the comfort of the 21st century could never imagine. It's so important for kids to read about these conditions and contrast them with their own in order to not only feel grateful but to feel sympathy for those who lived in these terrible times.

The Kindle version had fairly large print and worked just fine on my phone and tablet with no issues. The new version has a new introduction and I believe the epilogue has changed a bit as well. I enjoyed the footnotes feature which allows you to touch the number which takes you to the footnotes page, then when you touch the number again it takes you back to the page you were originally on. I had no problems purchasing or downloading.

If you want to know more about what happened to Anne Frank after the diary, there is a book called "The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank" by Willy Lindwer which includes stories from people who met her in the camps.

Another recommendation is the author Eva Schloss who was Anne Frank's stepsister, who wrote about surviving Auschwitz.

I downloaded and re-read this book after visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the Annex where she hid out until her betrayal and arrest. It was eerie seeing the same neighborhood sights, hearing the same church bells that she wrote about. I really don't think you can appreciate her precocious insight and the poignancy of this book unless you are reading it as a father of a teenage daughter. "A voice in me screams: go outside," she wrote after years of claustrophobic isolation. It must have been like living in a submarine. "Not being able to go outside upsets me more than I can say, and I’m terrified our hiding place will be discovered and that we’ll be shot. That, of course, is a fairly dismal prospect." "In the evenings when it’s dark, I often see long lines of good, innocent people, accompanied by crying children, walking on and on, ordered about by a handful of men who bully and beat them until they nearly drop. No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children, babies and pregnant women—all are marched to their death... I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed, while somewhere out there my dearest friends are dropping from exhaustion or being knocked to the ground. I get frightened myself when I think of close friends who are now at the mercy of the cruelest monsters ever to stalk the earth. And all because they’re Jews." She tried to imagine a postwar world but it became increasingly difficult. "I simply can't imagine the world will ever be normal again for us," she wrote on 8 November 1943. "I do talk about 'after the war' but it's as if I were talking about a castle in the air, something that can never come true." Yet the striking thing about the diary is its banality, how life went on despite the terror beyond the secret annex. After a fight with her father in March 1944 she wrote him a letter declaring "You must not and cannot regard me as 14. I've grown older because of all the misery." She even learned shorthand through a weekly correspondence course (in one of her helper's names of course): "I’m also working away at my shorthand, which I enjoy. Of the three of us, I’ve made the most progress." She had an innocent, child's sort of faith, although she admitted not knowing why those who seemed as devout as anyone (she was from a liberal, assimilated family) were dying: "I can’t help her [a friend who had been arrested but would ironically survive]. I can only stand by and watch while other people suffer and die. All I can do is pray to God to bring her back to us...Dear God, I have everything I could wish for, while fate has her in its deadly clutches. She was as devout as I am, maybe even more so, and she too wanted to do what was right. But then why have I been chosen to live, while she’s probably going to die? What’s the difference between us? Why are we now so far apart?" She had survivor's guilt yet the irony of course was that her survival was not assured. "God has not forsaken me, and He never will," she wrote four months before she was to be arrested and less than a year before she would die. On 4 August 1944 at 10:30 am following a tip from someone whose identity remains unknown, she and her family were arrested by three Dutch agents and an Austrian SS officer. They were sent to Auschwitz but as the Russian troops approached, Anne and her sister were transferred to Bergen-Belsen. Otto Frank, her father, was the only one of those in hiding to survive. He was saved on 27 January 1945 when Auschwitz was liberated; he was in the infirmary at the time. Auschwitz in January, 1945; there were only 7,650 survivors. He didn't know it at the time but his daughter, Anne, was still alive. In fact, a childhood friend, Hannah Gosler, who was Jewish but also had Paraguayan citizenship so was kept in a better camp neighboring Bergen-Belsen, managed to meet her twice, tossing a Red Cross package over the barbed wire. Her sister had died, Anne said, and now she had no one. It just wasn't right. She didn't know that her father was still alive. She died of typhus two months after her father had been liberated, in March 1945 at Bergen-Belsen. Her sister died in February 1945 of the same cause. Peter van Pels who appears prominently in her diary almost made it, but died on 5 May 1945 in a camp in Austria. On 21 May 1945, Anne's father Otto wrote to his mother in Basel, Switzerland: Otto Frank wandered back to Amsterdam where he arrived on 3 June 1945 to a joyful reunion with those who had helped him. All had survived. He learned en route that his wife had died, but he had heard nothing about his daughters, so waited. It's been translated into about 75 languages and made into numerous plays and movies, including one that won Shelley Winters an Oscar for her portrayal of Mrs. Van Dan. The actress donated the Oscar to the museum and there it was - a shiny gold Oscar up close and personal. There are countless Anne Franks out there right now, children and young people growing up in war and occupation, targeted for death by people they have never met simply because they are the wrong religion, ethnicity, political party, or sexual orientation (a memorial to the tens of thousands of homosexuals murdered by the Nazis was also nearby). The horror of her story is not its uniqueness but its almost mind-numbing regularity before and since World War II. Our species has this strange compulsion to round up and kill other members of our own species, something unique in the animal world (except among other primates), for the most arbitrary of reasons. If we don't acknowledge, study, and dismantle this compulsion, the cycle of industrialized cruelty will continue.

To be honest, I can't imagine how anyone could say 'I'm weak' and then stay that way. If you know that about yourself, why not fight it, why not develop your character? Their answer has always been: 'Because it's much easier to.' -Anne

Anne Frank was thirteen-years-old when she and her family went into hiding in an Amsterdam warehouse, in confined spaces known as the Secret Annexe. What she logged in her diary gave us a glimpse of the emotional rollercoaster that occurred for almost two years with the attitudes that came from living with different personalities coated with the fear of being discovered in their hiding place. My takeaways from her diary included the following observations and quotes that Anne recorded in her diary.

• My fountain pen was always one of my most prized possessions; I valued it highly. • My writing has raised me somewhat from the 'depths of despair.' • Riches, prestige, everything can be lost. But the happiness in your own heart can only be dimmed; it will always be there, as long as you live, to make you happy again. • Unless you write yourself, you can't know how wonderful it is; I always used to bemoan the fact that I couldn't draw, but now I'm overjoyed that at least I can write. And if I don't have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. • I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me! • The weak shall fall and the strong shall survive and not be defeated. • Nature makes me feel humble and ready to face every blow with courage. • "There's a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start all over again!" -Anne

Things didn't end well for those who were hiding in the secret Annexe. They were deported to extermination camps in the east and reached Auschwitz in Poland three days later. Otto Frank (Anne's father) was the sole family member and inhabitant of the Annexe who survived. He later remarried. One of the helpers for those hiding in the Secret Annexe, Miep Gies (Hermine Santrouschitz), rescued among other things Anne's diary and gave it to Otto Frank upon his return to the Netherlands.

This is such a heartbreaking story and one told by many survivors of the horror they experienced in concentration and extermination camps.

Well worth the read.