O diário de Anne Frank (original 1947; edition 2008)

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The Diary of a Young Girl is composed of diary entries from a Jewish girl, Anne Frank, living in Holland during World War II. Her diary entries take place between the ages of 13 and 15 in 1942-1944. Except in the very early entries, she and her family are living in hiding with another family on the upper floors of an office and warehouse. There are a total of 8 of them cooped up in a relatively small space, unable to go outside and needing to be very quiet for long portions of the day. They suffer from food shortages and lack many other necessities, and they’re living in constant fear from break-ins, bombardments, and just the general fear of being discovered and imprisoned or killed. If anybody is struggling with our social distancing and quarantines of 2020-2021 and would feel better to read about people who have it way worse, this is the book for you.

This is an easy book to read in terms of its words and writing style, but some of the content makes it a difficult read in other ways. It’s hard to read about what the Jews suffered in general. It’s hard to read about a young girl suffering through the experience and the direct impact it had on her. I’ve read many fantasy books which often start off with a young person suffering great injustices and other difficulties, but it’s of course different when you’re reading the actual (translated) words of a real teenager who lived through those real world events. When you already know how things end, that also makes everything that much more difficult to read. Even the happy passages can feel sad.

It was also really difficult to read about the interpersonal relationships in the “annex” where they were hiding. The two families didn’t get along with each other or even with the other members of their own families. Anne is a full-fledged “nobody understands me” teenager, especially in the first year or so. I found her a true unreliable narrator, with her words so colored by teenage angst that I couldn’t tell what was real and what was overdramatized. Her mood swings were clearly seen through her writings, and it was a bit like being on a rollercoaster. When she was happy, her writing was (sometimes) more rational and reasonable. When she was angry or sad, the whole world hated her and nobody understood her and everybody was selfish and horrible. I imagine her situation, cooped up with the same 7 people day after day, unable to get proper privacy or hang out with friends or enjoy the outdoors, living in constant fear for her life, made the typical teenage mood swings a lot more dramatic. From her diary entries, it seemed like the adults weren’t much better. It was understandable from an objective standpoint, but it was frustrating and sometimes tiresome to read so much of it.

I read this book at least a couple times as a child. I can’t remember how old I was, but I surely wasn’t older than 8 the first time I read it and I’m pretty sure I never read it in junior high or later so I doubt I was older than 11 when I last read it. I remember understanding the horror of what Anne and the other Jews experienced, but I think when I was a kid I took Anne’s writings more at face value in regard to what she wrote about the people she was living with and how they treated her. I still sympathized with her reading this as an adult of course, but it was a different sort of sympathy and occasionally mixed with exasperation. I found myself wishing the adults had written diaries also so I could compare and contrast! The edition I read this time reportedly has much more content than the originally published version, but the added material isn’t highlighted throughout the diary entries. Some of the additions dealing with Anne’s body were pretty obviously new, but for the rest I wasn’t too sure. I could only guess that, based on the context provided in the introduction, some of Anne’s harsher and more direct complaints about the people in the annex were part of the added material.

Regardless of its fluctuating levels of maturity, Anne’s writing and some of her thoughts did show a lot of promise. There were some things she wrote that I really liked, and a couple things that resonated with me so much that I wonder if this book was partly responsible for influencing my beliefs in those areas as a child. It’s sad that we never got to see what she would have written and done with her life if she’d had the chance to grow up. Anne sometimes wrote of her experience in hiding as something that was helping her to mature more quickly and develop a greater depth of character that would impact the rest of her life, but she never got to experience the rest of her life. From some of the things she wrote though, it’s clear she would have been happy and amazed to know how many people her words would eventually reach. ( )

The toughest part about reading this book was reading all of Anne's thoughts, dreams and ambitions and then looking at the date of the entry and realizing how little time she had left. ( )

One of the few "suggested" book from school that I really liked! ( )

Reading again through my 13 year old son's eyes-school assignment-Since being a mother of a teenager I see this book's light so differently...amazing how no matter who or where you are in time or space-navigating the ages of 13-15 is eerily similar...something my son picked up on--I was still caught up in the impending events, emotion, love of Anne's spirit, and the doom...he picked up on what he needed and every young adult needs during this crazy ride they are on... ( )