On the morning of August 4, 1944 a “Secret Annexe” in Amsterdam was stormed by the Grüne Polizei and 10 people were arrested. Among them was Anne Frank.
When I was 10 I got given an old battered copy of The Diary of Anne Frank. I remember reading it avidly and then, because my family were travelling, reading it again and again over the next few months. I still have it and the cover is tatty and the spine is almost completely disintegrated.
The Diary of Anne Frank is most often held up as the bulwark between good human and bad human. The last words of a girl who was deemed by a state as deserving to die – words that showed us all clearly why that should never have happened. But it’s also, at least it was for 10 year old me, an amazingly insightful account of what it is to be a girl moving between childhood and adolescence. Anne so honestly and genuinely captured her constantly changing emotions during her time in the Secret Annexe that it was like a revelation to me – other girls feel this way too. In many ways her words stopped me from being afraid of myself.
I loved reading about her burgeoning crush on Peter Van Daan, her close and yet tempestuous relationship with her sister Margot and her strained relationship with her mother Edith, for whom she felt overwhelming love and harsh dislike at the same time and her adoration, and growing awareness of the falseness of that adoration, of her father Otto. Her diary is such a human story it’s utterly fascinating. And, of course, of these people – these true humans – only one made it out of the camps.
Would anyone, either Jew or non-Jew, understand this about me, that I am simply a young girl badly in need of some rollicking fun?
Anne Frank
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