“People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but that doesn’t stop you from having your own opinion.”
This book, like many books, has been on my ‘to read’ list for a long time. I am pretty sure I read this book when I was younger, but I cannot remember. As a teenager growing up in Germany, I do remember how sick I was of learning about the second world war. I loved history, but I wanted to read about the history of the whole world, of the conquistador’s, the blood-letting religion of the Inca’s or the stories of the Pharaoh’s.
My father, who was a military man, deemed it necessary that family holidays were situated at places important to war memorials. I am the only person I know who visited Hitler’s bunker and Eagle’s nest while on holiday as a young girl. I still remember the gold elevator at the Eagle’s nest and the bunkers where he was said to kill himself with Eva Braun. Because of my father’s position in the army I am also one of the few people to have been fortunate enough as a child to have been allowed to visit East Berlin before the wall came down.
I was about fourteen when we visited Auschwitz. I was too young to really understand the atrocities that went on there, but now I am older I feel privileged that a lot of my holidays as a child were so steeped in history. Reading Anne Frank’s diary now, as an adult, held so much of my attention and admiration. Not that the diary entries were amazing, but they were so raw and real for this little girl and it is an amazing privilege to be able to read Anne’s thoughts of her time during the war.
Before I finished this book I did some research on what happened to Anne and her family. After reading so many passionate entries about her dreams of becoming a writer it was heartbreaking that she and her sister, Margot died in a concentration camp just weeks before the camp was released and just months before the end of the war. I wanted her to hang on, to live and be all of the things you know she could have been. Reading such a personal account of someone’s life during the war, especially someone so young, it makes me aware just how much the world has missed out on from all those pointless deaths. Who knows what many of those people could have become if they had survived? Thinking about this when the diary abruptly ends on the 1st of August, knowing that after this last diary entry Anne and her family are found and taken away, made me so sad.
If she had lived, Anne’s jumbled up writing would have developed and matured. But at least Anne did become a published writer, and her diary helped to document the people’s lives during the war and has therefore become a relevant historical document in its own right, and it has also caught the imagination of generations of readers. Anne would have been happy about this.
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