The Diary of a Young Girl By Anne Frank
By Anne Frank
This was my first time reading Anne Frank's diary. I don't know what I expected, but Anne was far more intelligent, witty, and observant than I ever would have expected a thirteen year old to be. Her observations and descriptions of herself, her surroundings, the war, and the people in the annex were incredibly astute, often gut-wrenching, and always honest. Her self-awareness and self-consciousness were amazing for someone her age.
The Diary follows Anne from her birthday on June 12, 1942 when she received her diary as a birthday present from her father through to her time in the annex with her parents. her sister Margot, the Van Pels family, and Albert Dussel up until they were all discovered by the gestapo. Anne recounts the difficulties of living in secret for such a long period of time (2 years) with people in such close quarters. She also tells us about their helpers, heroic non-Jews who helped to keep them hidden and to provide them with food and other luxuries in a time when rations were scarce and the penalty for hiding Jews was severe. Anne's doary ends a few days before they were discovered.
Throughout the diary Anne talks about what she wants her life to be like after the war, and she often makes very prescient comments about what could possibly happen to her and what she wishes for the world should she actually not make it through the war alive. At times her comments were chilling, knowing what we know happened to her, her family and the others in the annex. It made my rewatch of an Anne Frank film hit in a different way. After reading her own words my sense of her as an actual person made the experience much more affecting.
How do you rate a person's diary? I can say with certainty that Anne would have been a great writer, and though we have these words from her, we would have been much richer if she had lived to be able to publish her work after the war. Her writing was intelligent, funny, rich, and descriptive. We get a full sense of the "characters" of those in the annex, and Anne's own self-reflections are what propels the diary forward and keeps you wanting to flip the pages. It is a five-star read due solely to Anne's excellence as a writer.
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