Rit Nosotro reviews

Anne Frank:
The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank: the Diary of a Young Girl is a very vibrant window into the past of a young girl who faced the realities of World War II. It is a personal journal that was translated into English from Dutch. The journal was first published in 1947, and was eventually printed in many languages. This book has given us a way, among others, to see history through the eyes of one who actually experienced it first hand. Anne wrote down many feeling and experiences that almost enable the reader the experience the past with her.

Anne Frank is 13 years old when she begins to write in her journal. She gives a brief history of herself, and states that she was born in Frankfurt, Germany. She then immigrated, along with her family, to Holland. She explains that they had moved to Holland to get away from Hitler and his imposing laws, but the Nazis eventually came to Holland as well. Anne writes in her journal as if to a person whom she calls “kitty”. She records in the diary a lot of deep feelings, as well as everyday things that are going on around her. She tells about how she has been made to change schools so that she goes to school with only Jewish children. She misses her friends, but finds some old ones in the new school.

Anne’s father tells her that they are going to need to move to a safer place soon because Margot, Anne’s older sister, has been called by the Nazis to go to a concentration camp. They did not know the full extent of what was happening in the camps, but of course, they knew that life there was bad. Not even a month after the journal was started the Franks go into hiding. They live in what is known as the “Secret Annex”, an upper floor to an office building where friends of theirs work. Soon after the Franks get settled in their new home, a new family, the Van Daans, move in with them. Anne goes into detail describing the various idiosyncrasies every one of the Van Daans has. She does not get along with Mrs. Van Daan, and she thinks Peter, their son, is lazy. Later, another Jewish man, a dentist, moves in with them.

Much of the book goes into great detail describing everyday routines and life. We find one of the main themes to be how much everyone does not get along. Anne feels that her mother is not really adequate for the job of mothering, and they are at odds all throughout the diary. Anne talks about the bombs going off, and how it scares her. She says that for a while she went into her father’s bed and slept there for comfort when she was scared at night. She says that they must be extremely quiet all the time so that no one but the workers below hears them.

Anne misses all of her friends a great deal, and does not really spend any girl time with her sister, perhaps because of the three year age gap between them. However, she develops a quite special relationship with Peter Van Daan. Once she began to see him as a shy, but nice, guy, things went a lot smoother between them. They would just sit and talk, sharing feelings about life. Eventually, as would happen to any two young people who spend countless hours alone together, they began to view each other as more than friends. Anne records her feelings about her first kiss from Peter, and she is elated. Their kind of dating in secret continues in what appears, from Anne’s writings, to be a fairly pure relationship.

The journal abruptly ends, with no warning about what we know happened to the Franks and Van Daans soon after that last entry. The Nazis were searching the office, and despite the efforts by the employees to conceal it, they found the hidden door behind the bookshelf. The occupants of the hidden dwelling were all taken to a processing camp. Later, the men and women were separated. It is not known if entire the family ever saw each other again. Eventually, when the unfit were weeded out from the healthy, the two girls were separated from their mother, and she was killed. Anne and Margot lived in a concentration camp after that for a while, and they both eventually died there, only a few months before the Allies freed everyone there.

Anne Frank: the Diary of a Young Girl is a very real look into the past from the eyes of a vibrant young person. It shows the suffering caused by Hitler in a very personal and real way. It is very important that even with all of the new technology and new points of view, that we never forget the past. This book is a wonderful but tragic reminder that there are people who have been through much worse than us, and suffered because of someone else’s idea of an ideal world.

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