Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

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Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girlby Anne
Frank

• Born on June 12, 1929, Anne Frank was a
  German-Jewish teenager who was forced to go into
  hiding during the Holocaust. She and her family,
  along with four others, spent 25 months during
  World War II in an annex of rooms above her
  fathers office in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
  After being betrayed to the Nazis, Anne, her
  family, and the others living with them were
  arrested and deported to Nazi concentration
  camps. In March of 1945, nine months after she
  was arrested, Anne Frank died of typhus at
  Bergen-Belsen. She was fifteen years old.Her
  diary, saved during the war by one of the
  familys helpers, Miep Gies, was first published
  in 1947. Today, her diary has been translated
  into 67 languages and is one of the most widely
  read books in the world.

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Background Anne Frank and her family were German
refugees who resettled and tried to build their
lives in the Netherlands. Although the Franks
were proud of their German heritage, their
feelings toward Germany became very complicated
during the war When the Nazis invaded Holland,
the Frank family, like all Jewish residents,
became victims of a systematically constricting
universe. First came laws that forbade Jews to
enter into business contracts. Then books by
Jews were burned. Then there were the so-called
Aryan laws, affecting intermarriage. Then Jews
were barred from parks, beaches, movies,
libraries. By 1942 they had to wear yellow stars
stitched to their outer garments. Then phone
service was denied them, then bicycles. Trapped
at last in their homes, they were "disappeared."
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1942

• February, March, April - Auschwitz, Belzec and
  Sobibor all become fully operational death camps.
• June 12 - Anne receives a diary for her
  thirteenth birthday, which she calls "Kitty,"
  July 5 - Margot Frank, 16, receives a call-up
  notice to report for deportation to a labor camp.
  The family goes into hiding the next day.
• July 6 The Frank family leaves their home
  forever and moves into the 'Secret Annex'
• July 13 - The van Pels family, another Jewish
  family originally from Germany, joins the Frank
  family in hiding.
• November 16 - Fritz Pfeffer, the eighth and final
  resident of the Secret Annex, joins the Frank and
  van Pels families.

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1942 and 1944,

• 1943 February 2 - The encircled German Sixth Army
  surrenders to Soviet forces at Stalingrad,
  Russia. The tide of the war begins to turn
  against Germany. 
• 1943 liquidation of all Jewish ghettos in the
  Soviet Union and Poland.
• With a diary kept in a secret attic, she braved
  the Nazis and lent a searing voice to the fight
  for human dignityAlong with everything else she
  came to represent, Anne Frank symbolized the
  power of a book. Because of the diary she kept
  between 1942 and 1944, in the secret upstairs
  annex of an Amsterdam warehouse where she and her
  family hid until the Nazis found them, she became
  the most memorable figure to emerge from World
  War II besides Hitler, of course, who also
  proclaimed his life and his beliefs in a book. In
  a way, the Holocaust began with one book and
  ended with another. Yet it was Anne's that
  finally prevailed a beneficent and complicated
  work outlasting a simple and evil one  

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. Excerpts

• Fine specimens of humanity, those Germans, and to
  think I'm actually one of them! No, that's not
  true, Hitler took away our nationality long ago.
  And besides, there are no greater enemies on
  earth than the Germans and Jews." - October 9,
  1942
• "I don't believe the war is simply the work of
  politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common
  man is every bit as guilty otherwise, people and
  nations would have rebelled long ago!" (May 3,
  1944.)

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Excerpts

• When I write I can shake off all my cares. My
  sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But,
  and that's a big question, will I ever be able to
  write something great, will I ever become a
  journalist or a writer? "...if you're wondering
  if it's harder for the adults here than for the
  children, the answer is no...Older people have an
  opinion about everything and are sure of
  themselves and their actions. It's twice as hard
  for us young people to hold on to our opinions at
  a time when ideals are being shattered..." (July
  15, 1944.)
• When was the last time as an adult that you
  experienced the "shattering" of an ideal? Is the
  media a neutral force, or do you think it plays a
  role in supporting or destroying idealism?

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Anne Frank's diary is the voice of the
Holocaust-the voice that speaks for the millions
Hitler silenced. Anne went into hiding at the age
of 13, a rambunctious and at times difficult
child. Her diary reveals her maturation into a
gifted young writer, and when discovered two
years later, the precocious child had evolved
into a young woman. Anne was eventually
transported to the concentration camp
Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus shortly
before the Allies liberated the camp. Anne
Frank's diary is the legacy of young girl denied
her adulthood by Hitler's killing machine, and
stands for the many women and men, young and old,
whose lives Hitler's final solution snatched.
The story of her life is a tragedy, but the
enduring message is one of hope and tolerance
that will never die. The new edition reveals a
new depth to Anne's dreams, irritations,
hardship, and passions . . . There may be no
better way to commemorate the fiftieth
anniversary of the end of World War II than to
reread The Diary of a Young Girl, a testament to
an indestructivle nobility of spirit in the face
of pure evil."
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"Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are
being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is
treating them very roughly and transporting them
in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in
Drenthe to which they're sending all the
Jews....If it's that bad in Holland, what must it
be like in those faraway and uncivilized places
where the Germans are sending them? We assume
that most of them are being murdered. The English
radio says they're being gassed." - October 9,
1942   Have you ever heard the term 'hostages'?
That's the latest punishment for saboteurs. It's
the most horrible thing you can imagine. Leading
citizens innocent people--are taken prisoner to
await their execution. If the Gestapo can't find
the saboteur, they simply grab five hostages and
line them up against the wall. You read the
announcements of their death in the paper, where
they're referred to as 'fatal accidents." -
October 9, 1942   All college students are being
asked to sign an official statement to the
effect that they 'sympathize with the Germans and
approve of the New Order." Eighty percent have
decided to obey the dictates of their
conscience, but the penalty will be severe. Any
student refusing to sign will be sent to a
German labor camp." - May 18, 1943
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Mr. Bolkestein, the Cabinet Minister, speaking on
the Dutch broadcast from London, said that after
the war a collection would be made of diaries and
letters dealing with the war. Of course, everyone
pounced on my diary." - March 29, 1944 When I
write, I can shake off all my cares." - April 5,
1994 I've reached the point where I hardly care
whether I live or die. The world will keep on
turning without me, and I can't do anything to
change events anyway. I'll just let matters take
their course and concentrate on studying and hope
that everything will be all right in the end." -
February 3, 1944 "...but the minute I was alone
I knew I was going to cry my eyes out. I slid to
the floor in my nightgown and began by saying my
prayers, very fervently. Then I drew my knees to
my chest, lay my head on my arms and cried, all
huddled up on the bare floor. A loud sob brought
me back down to earth..." - April 5, 1944
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I finally realized that I must do my schoolwork
to keep from being ignorant, to get on in
life,to become a journalist, because that's what
I want! I know I can write. ..it remains to be
seen whether I really have talent...I need to
have something besides a husband and children to
devote myself to!... I want to be useful or bring
enjoyment to all people, even those I've never
met. 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!
Wednesday, April 5, 1944 Its utterly
impossible for me to build my life on a
foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see
the world being slowly transformed into a
wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that,
one day, will destroy us too, I feel the
suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at
the sky, I somehow feel that everything will
change for the better, that this cruelty too
shall end, that peace and tranquility will return
once more" - July 15, 1944 1
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Its a wonder I havent abandoned all my ideals,
they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling
to them because I still believe, in spite of
everything, that people are truly good at heart.
The reason for her immortality was basically
literary. She was an extraordinarily good writer,
for any age, and the quality of her work seemed a
direct result of a ruthlessly honest disposition.
Millions were moved by the purified version of
her diary originally published by her father, but
the recent critical, unexpurgated edition has
moved millions more by disanointing her solely
as an emblem of innocence. Anne's deep effect on
readers comes from her being a normal, if gifted,
teenager. She was curious about sex, doubtful
about religion, caustic about her parents,
irritable especially to herself she believed she
had been fitted with two contradictory souls.
One year before her death from typhus in the
Bergen-Belsen camp, she wrote, "I want to be
useful or give pleasure to people around me who
yet don't really know me. I want to go on living
even after my death!"
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So stirring has been the effect of the
solemn-eyed, cheerful, moody, funny,
self-critical, other-critical teenager on those
who have read her story that it became a test of
ethics to ask a journalist, If you had proof the
diary was a fraud, would you expose it? The point
was that there are some stories the world so
needs to believe that it would be profane to
impair their influence. All the same, the Book of
Anne has inspired a panoply of responses plays,
movies, documentaries, biographies, a critical
edition of the diary all in the service of
understanding or imagining the girl or, in some
cases, of putting her down.