A Lesson for Everyone!!. Review on Diary of a Young Girl, The - Anne Frank

I hope I will be able to confide everything to you and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support

These words at the very beginning of the book arrest the reader’s attention. These words speak about how badly Anne Frank needed a friend she could confide in and share her hopes/scares/dreams/fears.

On her thirteenth birthday, Anneliese Frank receives a gift that she would cherish for many more months to come…..a red & white checkered diary. She pens in her first few thoughts (quoted above) on that very first day (as if she already knows all that is in store for her).

In the weeks to follow, Anne writes about her birthday, her school, her friends. She expresses her happiness over all the fun things that Jewish youngsters had the freedom to do at that time. Almost a month from her birthday, Anne’s sister Margot summoned to a work camp in Germany. Anne’s family has no choice but to to go into hiding to avoid this. The hiding place is the Annexe which is just above her father’s (Otto Frank) office in Prinsengracht, Amsterdam. This escape is mainly orchestrated by Mr.Kleiman, Miep & Bep faithful employees working in Otto frank’s office. Here, the Frank family is joined by the Van Pels family and a little later by dentist Mr.Pfeiffer (In her diary Anne has referred to the Van Pels & the dentist by pseudonyms Van Daans & Albert Dussell respectively)

Throughout this hiding period, Anne’s need to communicate with someone in the outside world kept on growing. However, in those days when the Nazis used to pack off the Jews to labour camps, trying to establish any contact with the outside world was dangerous for her and her family. She is a voracious reader; one of her favourite books being Cissy Van Marxveldt’s ‘Joop ter Heul’, which is written in a series of letters. This style is adopted by Anne who records all her thoughts & details of her day-to-day life in her diary in the form of letters to an imaginary friend called Kitty. She not only writes all that she feels, but she also pastes some pictures in her diary accompanied by comments.

Before going into hiding, many of writings deal with her feelings about her various friends and classmates, her infatuation with a boy named ‘Peter’ (from her school) and many other boys who she feels are besotted by her. However, as life in the secret Annexe starts unraveling, her writings become more focused on the happenings in the annexe, her co-inhabitants and life in hiding. Many of her thoughts in her diary speak of her growing hatred for her mother and her immense love for her father. The cloud of fear (of being found out by the Nazis) hovering above their heads shows in Anne’s thoughts as she writes We’re surrounded by darkness and danger…I simply can’t imagine the world will ever be normal for us. To think about ‘after the war’ is like building castles in the air

Much of the world news finds it way to the Annexe through a private radio which has direct lines to Tel Aviv, London and many other stations. In the evenings, the whole family sits huddled around the radio listening intently for news—good or bad. However, as per one of the rules of the Annexe, listening to German news was totally prohibited. Be it the news of some Jewish family being evacuated from their hiding place or be it a break-in at Anne’s annexe…. Be it the skirmishes between her mother and Mrs.Van Pels or be it a bombing in the vicinity…Be it her growing liking for Peter (Van Pels’ son) or be it the food shortage in the annexe ; Anne conveys everything to her dear friend Kitty in sometimes a grim and at times a comic way.

Shhhh……its eight-thirty. No running water, no flushing toilet, no walking around, no noise whatsoever she writes.

Life in cramped quarters of an annexe is seldom something that would make a teenager happy. The tense atmosphere in the annexe leads to frequent quarrels amongst the inhabitants making it even worse for everyone; All this and much more are reflected in Anne’s writings. Even in the most difficult of times, Anne manages to pacify herself in a way even adults may not be capable of.

By the end of 1943, Anne has transformed from a carefree teenager into a self-critical and introspective young girl. She yearns for freedom and hopes to be an author or a journalist one day. Like all teenagers, she craves to do her own thing and live life on her own terms.

At times she tells Kitty how she considers herself lucky to have a home; faraway and safe from the Nazi eye. At times, she feels guilty that she sleeps in a warm bed when most of her fellowmen (including women, children and old people) are tortured and slowly but surely marched to their inevitable ends. How can she crib about having beans for lunch and dinner for days together when many other Jews are not so fortunate to even have a decent meal. Our close friends are now at the mercy of the cruelest monsters ever to stalk the earth. When will Jews be treated as humans?

In the spring of 1944, Anne decides to rewrite her original diary so that she could publish them after the war, following a call over Radio Orange from London by Dutch Secretary of Education in exile. He declares that experiences of the common man during the war which have been recorded in the form of stories especially diaries can be published after the war is over. This provides the much-needed boost to the young Anne to start rewriting her diary entries with the hope of publishing them someday.

By this time, Anne had read a lot many books, biographies which shaped her style of writing even more. This coupled with the circumstances quicken the pace of her maturity. Her writings also show her diminishing interest in the meek Peter who is nowhere equal to her when it comes to level of thinking and strength & veracity of character.

On the fateful day of 4th August 1944, the police was tipped off about this secret hideout and the Franks, Van Pels & Pfeiffer are all taken into police custody. Margot and Anne are sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In the winter of 1944-45, a typhus epidemic broke out because of the unhygienic conditions in the camps resulting into the death of thousands of prisoners—Margot & Anne were one of them ; the exact date of Anne’s death is not known but it is assumed to be in late February or early March, 1945 (just short of 3 months for Anne’s sixteenth birthday)

So, there it was lying in the Annexe …. the diary, a close confidante and a silent witness to the happenings in the life of an ordinary yet so extraordinary teenaged girl; until Miep found it and tucked it away. After the war when they were certain that Anne had died, she handed over he unread diaries to Otto Frank. He was the only member of the family to have survived the concentration camps….and the war.

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