The Diary of a Young Girl

This was a hard book to read. It started out light and easy, as you'd expect from a 13-year-old's diary. As the situation gets harder, so do the topics in the diary, though it's not until the end when it gets really hard to read. This is history; the ending is not a surprise. What did surprise me was how much I dreaded reading the final 50 or so pages of the book, because the war starts going well and hopes in the Secret Annex start rising... and yet I know how the story ends for them.

I do not know why I didn't read this in school. In some ways, I wish I had because it is an important book and I would have liked to have read it when I was closer to Anne's age. On the other hand, I'm glad I didn't read it until I was an adult and could show more better connect with the entire situation, and not just Anne's. This is an important book, and one everyone needs to read. It's heartbreaking and uplifting all at once, and it's themes are as relevant now as they were when it was written. show less

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl's greatest strength is unsurprisingly how intimate and personal it is. It is incredibly challenging to find another book that so beautifully and thoroughly represents the experiences of a teenager who struggles with ordinary issues, like love and finding their place in the world, and is also subjected to something as terrifying as the Holocaust. The bravery and resilience that Anne exhibits through her diary is equally inspiring and heartbreaking when one considers that she was just one of millions of innocent people to be murdered despite her efforts. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl is poignant, inspiring, and a must-read autobiography for all interested in World War II.

One of the most important documents produced by humankind, the diary of Anne Frank needs no introduction. It is an imperishable and world-famous story, and would be a remarkable one even if Anne hadn't written about it so impressively. But through Anne's gift, we receive a vivid and gripping chronicle of life in 'the Secret Annexe'; the teenager is an excellent writer, clear and focused and perceptive of character and setting. Already wise beyond her years and compelled, by the war and by the persecution of Jews, to grow up even faster, she births a stunning account that any writer in the world would be envious of. She charts with candour and humour her own progression over the two years in hiding: her changing relationships, her show more understanding of things and her developing philosophy of life.

This chart of a maturing young woman would be of literary merit even without the war, and it is heart-warming later in the book to read of her revisions of her previous behaviour, her growing eloquence and inner-peace and her blossoming writing skills. Which makes it all the more cruel that her progress was snatched away. The thought of this incredible young human being on a cattle-truck to Auschwitz, frightened, brutalized, emaciated and separated from family, is abhorrent, and makes you want to scream at the complacent evil that humankind repeatedly defecates onto this planet and which extinguishes the lights given so purely and honestly by the likes of Anne Frank. Though she retains her individuality – something she was fierce about when living amongst the occupants in the Secret Annexe – Anne has become the human face of the Holocaust. She was a person just like us, from a family just like ours, and anyone who reads her diary will find something with which they can identify and lock onto. It is a document that by its sheer benevolence and grace – towards the end she writes that "in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart" (pg. 218) – shames the sheer evil idiocy of reducing individuals to labels and generalizations. How could anyone think this intelligent, inquisitive, unassuming and even-handed girl was a degenerate sub-human, and deserved to die horribly for it?

Beyond her standing as an icon and emblem of goodness against the black malevolence of the Holocaust, Anne's personal, individual, tragedy is that she never got the chance to express herself with more studied composure, to go out into the world (both literally and figuratively) and sample what it had to offer. The last line of her last entry in the diary – a few days before she was denied forever the opportunity to write another – speaks of "trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if… there weren't any other people living in the world" (pg. 222). If it wasn't for those vicious anti-Semites living in the world, it is clear she would have become a writer. As the diary progresses, it is thrilling to witness Anne's growing realization that she has a gift for this sort of thing. She shares her dreams of becoming a journalist and a writer, even of getting her diary published in a modified form. Some of her complete entries – in particular, the one of 23rd February 1944 – read, to me, like excellent short stories. She is clearly thinking about posterity and is composing her thoughts and her voice in readiness for when she will be free. The Allies have started to liberate the continent; she has "the feeling that friends are approaching" (pg. 204). After two years of privation and hiding in fear, she is close to freedom. Yet she is on the last train to Auschwitz. She dies in Belsen just weeks before British liberators arrive with looks of uncomprehending horror on their faces. I have spoken about her diary and the enduring simple beauty of her prose, but her capture and death are also instructive. The line between hope and destruction, between darkness and the light, is a fraction of a hair's-breadth, which makes it all the more important to cherish fragments of humanity like this one.

"I don't think then of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains... Think of all the beauty that's still left in and around you and be happy!" (pg. 146) show less

"I want to go on living even after my death."

I got the chance to visit Amsterdam in 2024 and see the Secret Annexe. It was an amazing and heart-rending experience, as was reading Anne's diary again some 40 years after I first slogged through it in middle school (I think). It boggles the mind how something like this should be subject to book bans just because it talks about Anne Frank having her period and confessing to her feelings of attraction to both boys and girls. It boggles the mind how anyone in the world can go on espousing the views of the N*zis even after the world fought and won and war against those views.

Beyond drama, romance, science fiction, poetry, short story, novel, etc., a certain book category exists that weighs accusingly upon the conscience of every reader. It encompasses those books whose titles we have heard spoken throughout our entire literate lives, whose authors' names are as familiar to us as our own, whose importance is bruited throughout the knowledgeable world, yet whose pages we have never turned. These are the books that one must read before departing this incarnation if one is to have any hope of entering Valhalla, Nirvana, Moksha, or perchance even Sto-vo-kor. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was such a book on my list of literary voids.

The edition that I have now finished (The Definitive Edition, Vintage show more Books, March 1996, ISBN 978-0-385-48033-8) has not only filled that void but has also proved to be quite educational as well as affecting. The Foreward, Introduction, Afterward, and Editorial History sections as well as a section entitled “The Inhabitants of the Secret Annex and Their Real Names” were enlightening and fascinating. The book ends with a brief explanation of the Anne Frank Fonds organization in Basel, Switzerland, a foundation of which I was previously unaware and under the auspices of which the book is published.

My sole misgiving about The Diary of a Young Girl is that I can read it only in translation, my literacy in German being more or less nonexistent. The misgiving is the same that I have with any book that has been translated by anyone other than its author. Language is deeply and inextricably intertwined with the culture and modes of expression of its native country. It has nuances and connotations unique to its native speakers. Reading generates mental images and impressions in the audience that are generated by the cultural background of that audience, images and impressions that are likely different from those of the speaker or writer who is a native of another land. The English words in the diary were obviously never written by Anne Marie Frank, and how accurately the feelings behind her German words have been rendered into English I cannot know. The writing is quite professional, adroit, and readable, but I wish I could have read the diary in Anne Frank's own words.

One practice of the translator that does bother me is that she seems to have taken great pains to use what she feels to be equivalent English expressions to footnote occasional German phrases that have been left in their original language even when the English words are at substantial variance with their German counterparts. For example, the footnote to “Du bist doch eine echte Rabenmutter” reads “Oh, you are cruel.” This is a somewhat free translation, echte meaning “real” and Rabenmutter meaning literally “ravens' mother.” Yes, to call someone a real ravens' mother in German is to call her a “really bad mother,” but I wish the footnote had been more literal in its translation, followed perhaps by an explanatory note as to the English equivalent. Another example is footnoting “Um Gottes Willen” as “Oh, for heaven's sake.” That rendering sounds just a bit too mild to me.

Despite this little bit of nitpicking, I found that reading The Diary of a Young Girl to be an entirely worthwhile expenditure of time and effort. The reader comes to know vicariously much of what Anne experienced in reality as well as coming to know Anne herself, and I found her to be a fascinating person. As I have noted, other parts of the book give the reader a good understanding of the historical context—both pre- and post-diary—surrounding the events chronicled by Anne. We can be grateful that two of the helpers who aided the eight Jews hiding in the Achterhuis (translated as “secret annex”), Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, rescued the diary and returned it to Otto Frank after the war and that he ensured its preservation and publication. In so doing, they fulfilled Anne Frank's desires as expressed in her diary to “go on living even after my death” (page 251) and “to make my voice heard . . . [and] to go out into the world and work for mankind” (page 263). The book, even in translation, is worth every minute spent in its reading. show less

In a perfect world, no one should have to tell anyone what this book is about. The atrocities committed by the Nazis, including but not limited to the deaths of over 6,000,000 Jews, should be common knowledge to everyone alive today. But we don't live in anything close to a perfect world, certainly not now.

For those who don't know, Anne Frank, her mother, father, and older sister, another mother, father, and son, and a single man, all Jews, went into hiding in a small concealed space in Amsterdam in July 1942. They did so to hopefully avoid the fate of other Jews at the hands of the Nazis then occupying Holland. Anne was 12 years old. She kept an almost daily diary of their life in hiding until it abruptly ended in late summer 1944 when show more all eight were betrayed to the Nazis. All were arrested and sent to various concentration camps. Less than 6 months later Anne, her mother, and sister were dead. The only survivor of the Frank family was the father, Otto.

This book is Anne's diary and if you read it you will vividly picture what her life and that of those with her was like in their hiding space. Two full years without once being outside or without seven others around them at all times. You will have to do as I did and continually remind yourself, this was written by a 12 to 14 year old girl whose writing skill was well beyond that of most people, regardless of age. I can't imagine anyone telling this story as well as did Anne.

A recent poll found that two-thirds of American millennials do not know what Auschwitz is. One in five has never heard of the Holocaust. (http://tinyurl.com/y73agnr5) If you are one of them you need to know. If the world forgets, a time similar or worse may well happen again. It happened to Anne, it could happen to you. show less

At first, it feels like any other book where we get a protagonist's firsthand accounts of life, except it's not really 'a book' or 'a story'. It's hard to remember that while reading... if you were judging it as a story, there are parts that are 'slow', without 'character development', the 'pacing' is all over the place... but it's important to remember, again, this isn't a book.

It's someone's actual diary. It's the medium this person used to document herself, confide her own thoughts to herself. It's an incredibly deep and intimate look at a person's inner life and thoughts, many of which are that of an ordinary 14-year old (who loves writing), being in extraordinary circumstances.

I had to look up historical events to know as well... show more when does the Netherlands get liberated? How far is Germany when she's writing this? The Allies? You know where, when, and how it ends, which is what makes it tragic, but the flashes into her life are anything but. She was optimistic, funny, and, I guess as they'd say back then, "a stand-up gal". What a way to be remembered. show less