The Diary of a Young Girl (1942), Anne Frank

It is my opinion that The Diary of a Young Girl (1942) easier for the reader to relate to than a text book. As a student, when I usually read a book, I find myself looking forward to the end and want to know how the story plays out. However, with this journal it was quite the opposite. As its pages grew thinner, you not only grew closer to Anne but also more anxious for her survival. You can actually feel a human life slipping away in the Nazi hands that seem to be an omnipresent force, clasping at her throughout the pages.

Wiki- Anne Frank

As this is in the form of a journal, her words come to life and the reader feel much more involved and somewhat like you are there, hiding in the annex with her, as her fictitious friend ‘Kitty’. Her use of facts and quotes from political people and daily conversation contrast each other and achieves a realism that no historian could. The dates before each entry shows the reader a precise date for not only the events but also the reactions from the people forced to face them, which is also very moving. I personally liked how at the end and at intervals of my edition they included photographs of the Annex and Holland at this time (1942), photographs of Anne and her family and copies of the hand written original diary. Appendixes such as these that are found in textbook affected me much less than the ones in her journal as you feel emotionally invested. This was strange to me as I remember being in primary school, reading about the impact that the holocaust had all over the world yet it impacted very little in the class.  Reading Anne Frank’s words affected me like meeting a survivor (Such as Eugene Black, 84, who I met in 2002, last at the school in 2012), yet with the sadness of losing her, much like her family would have faced. I believe that if I had read the quotation ‘Little children of eight and eleven years break windows of peoples homes and steal whatever they can lay their hands on’ (p.167) at the age I studied WWII I would have been much more moved than reading the somewhat cold descriptions from text books showing disrespectful gory images.
There are many fictional stories set in this time such as ‘Schindler List’ (1933), directed by Steven Spielberg, which, like history books, make people and events strangely unbelievable and unrealisable.  By contrast, Anne Franks diary is more powerful to a reader as it both a narrative and factual. Whilst reading I highlighted phrases that stuck with me. She was a real child and no one could help her. It made me very proud to have a grandparent who served in the WWII. In the quotation “I want to go on living after my death” (p.171) the impact of her diary hits home as this is exactly what the journal enables.  Rabbi Hugo Gryn (1995) puts it simply and accurately that ‘her word will continue to testify to decency and natural goodness, and that they will reach the heart and minds for countless generations to come…they may indeed endure for eternity’ (foreword, p.xi) and in this way Anne received her wish by living on by us remembering the terrible past and also by stopping it from reoccurring. I believe that the use of personal pronouns, life anecdotes, inner thoughts and opinions about a serious subject matter enhances more emotions in the human psyche than a textbook would, and it is that which pulls the reader away from numbness and into her world. We should never forget and Anne will help us do so.

 Kate Ruston, written 2012

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