A Perfect Book for Now
Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
This could have been a recent Facebook post from a young person living through the Ukraine bombings. In actuality it was written on July 15, 1944, by Anne Frank in her posthumously published Diary of a Young Girl. Anne and her parents, her sister, another family of 3 and a single man hid together in a small apartment for over two years during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Otto Frank fled Germany to escape the persecution Jews were experiencing only to have it follow him and force him (and over twenty thousand others) into hiding.
I remember in junior high school when it seemed everyone was reading Anne Frank’s diary. For some reason I never picked it up. I heard snatches of conversation about it. I read The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom, crying into my pillow at night for her suffering, for her sister’s death. Maybe I just wanted to read something easy and breezy next, something fluffy that didn’t demand answers.
The thing about Anne’s diary versus so many other war memoirs: she wrote it during the siege. She wasn’t remembering events later. She was writing them as they happened. Irked with her mother, she wrote about it, not unlike my own teenage angst (and journal entries). First puppy love – she wrote about it. (Is he the one? Is this real?) I see why my teenage friends were all reading the Diary – they could relate to much of it, and so the war-torn parts caused that much more grief, almost as if it was each of them living Anne’s life.
As I read the book now, I couldn’t help but think about those in the Ukraine. The whole world is watching that war, condemning the invasion, trying to help without actually jumping into the foxholes. But, you know, this same “ethnic cleansing” (killing people just because they are a certain race or religion, call it what you will) has been going on in Myanmar while the world mostly ignores it. Maybe everyone just finally got tired of doing something fluffy that didn’t demand answers. We shake our heads at Nazi Germany and wonder how on earth that happened. I’m glad to see the world recognize the similarities with the Russia/Ukraine situation. (“They’re just peacekeeping troops,” Putin said just before they started bombing the life out of Ukraine.)
“. . . my greatest wish is to become a journalist someday and later on a famous writer.” Anne got her wish. Her famous diary has been published in more than 70 languages. Multiple millions have read it. It’s been turned into a play and a film. It’s been lauded. It’s been banned.
Have you read it? It’s fascinating to try and imagine living in cramped quarters, day after day, trying to be perfectly quiet much of the time so as not to be discovered. I’ll admit – I cried when I finished it knowing Anne’s fate. Most heartbreaking is knowing just a few more weeks of hiding and the war ends. They could have come out and resumed their lives. Instead all of them except Otto died. But perhaps it’s the deep tragedy of that, that keeps the book alive.
It’s the perfect time to read Diary of a Young Girl, either for the first time or again.
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