On June 12th, 1942, a young girl in the Netherlands named Anne Frank turned 13 years old. She received a cloth-bound blank book that she had requested for a birthday gift. Anne intended to use it for a diary, although she didn’t think anyone would ever be interested in reading it.
For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later I, nor anyone else, will care for the outpouring of a thirteen year old schoolgirl.
Anne wrote about her life and how she and her family went into hiding in 1940 to avoid the Nazi death camps.
The little autograph book/diary that Anne had received less than a month before going into hiding, became a mirror into the soul of the teenager. As the world around her was increasingly crumbling, she began to pour out her heart and soul in her diary. She also used several other notebooks and individual pieces of paper when the book was filled.
The entries in her diary record the thoughts of the girl. She records the growing tensions in their hideout, and even despises her mother, although later she chastises herself for having such thoughts. She records her first kiss, from a 16-year-old boy whose family was in the hideout with them, but then squelches any possible romance. All in all, she records the ups and downs of budding womanhood, under the most adverse of situations.
She continued to write until their hiding place was discovered in 1944. Later, Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her father found the diary after the war was over. Millions of people have been touched by Anne’s writing in the years since. Anne Frank would have turned 79 today. (via the Presurfer)
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