Sam Kates's Blog - Posts Tagged "anne-frank"

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This has been on my to-read radar for over forty years, but I kept putting it off because I suspected I would find it upsetting.

Indeed. Every time Anne began a sentence with ‘After the war…’, my stomach turned over or a lump appeared in my throat. There’s a moment when she’s talking about the loss of her fountain pen, which she accidentally threw with some rubbish into the incinerator, that made my blood run cold. She wrote:

“I’m left with one consolation, small though it may be: my fountain pen was cremated, just as I would like to be some day.”

(view spoiler)[Anne survived Auschwitz, dying in early 1945 of typhoid in Bergen-Belsen, but I could not help associating her comment with the crematoria at Auschwitz that were used to dispose of thousands of executed corpses. (hide spoiler)]

Reading the diary provoked a range of emotions, from bittersweet humour to fist-clenching anger, all underpinned by a constant sense of deep sadness. I’m not sure quite what I was expecting, but Anne doesn’t have any special insights into the workings of the nazi terror machine from which she and her family were hiding, and why should she? She’s an ordinary teenager—a bright one, granted, and what a beautiful writer the adult Anne would probably have become—distracted by some of the same sort of things teenage girls today might have on their minds: boys, schoolwork, her developing sexuality, her relationship with her parents, what she might become when grown up.

It's her very ordinariness that makes what happens to her all the more horrific and her writings all the more powerful.




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