Just finished Anne Frank's 'Diary of a Young Girl'. A really special experience for me as this was the first serious book I read together with my daughter.
This celebrated book is by a young girl Anne Frank who was a Jew. Her family shifted to Holland from Germany, hoping that Holland would remain a safe place for them. Germany captured Holland and finally she (then 13) went into hiding with her family. They were captured and deported to a concentration camp. That was unfortunate because hers was the last group to be sent from Holland. She died of typhoid only a month before her camp was liberated. She was 15 then.
She kept a diary that was presented to her on her 13th birthday, till her last day in hiding. That diary was her only true friend during those awful months. And she confided everything in that. What makes the reading so agonizingly intolerable is that Anne is hopelessly honest in her writing. The diary somehow survived and so did his father who got it published.
Its not so much about holocaust and Germany. Its about a very young, sensitive and intelligent girl who was going through what is generally the most intricate phase in a girl's life. A phase when freedom, in its broadest sense, is demanded by, and granted to, young souls. When aspirations and dreams combine to create a world of its own. When friendships and relationships are not sought but bequeathed. And here we have Anne, in hiding, under constant agony and fear. Nightmares and dreadful solitude! In a world, swinging violently between fear and despair at one time and hope at the other!
Her world is not natural and her life crawls on so piteously. This life is so unreal as if she is living in my imagination only!
Its this aspect of the book that puts such human tragedies in perspective. A whole generation of Anne missing her childhood, her youth. Six million killed and another couple of millions subverted.
My daughter all the time was expressing her disbelief for what was happening to Anne ("only two years, my senior", she says, " how could that happen?"). As for myself, sitting and reading the 'Diary' with my own little Anne, I could hardly believe my luck.
