There were other books but this one stood out from the rest to a girl who was running wild at the time and didn’t have a care in the world except to be a young girl and to live life to the fullest.
Then I got into books and this one, well, let’s just say it had me from the get go. I couldn’t put it down and I walked her path, the one she had walked so many years before. I lived her life through her words and I cried at the injustice of it all, and when she lost family members, I wept like it had happened to me. Her father was the only one to survive the Holocaust.
The story was about a 13-year-old Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis for two years during the occupation of the Netherlands. It was also about the resilience of the human spirit but more than that, it was about man’s inhumanity to man. The diary does a perfect job of capturing the constant terror they lived under being concealed in the “Secret Annex” above her father’s business. It must have been claustrophobic not to mention horrific living under the extreme silence that was required of them to keep from being exposed or arrested.
She wanted to be a writer and or a journalist, she would achieve that dream posthumously. Her father Otto Frank published the book in 1947 and it is now an enduring reminder of the resilience of the human nature and the dangers of prejudice.
The book made me see the world in a different light. I realized and saw firsthand from reading the book that evil was out there, it had the power to destroy and it brought home the fact that my little corner of the world was safe while there were others out there that required a certain mentality to survive and where “safety” was far from what it was from where I was.
I think, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” broadened my way of thinking and I started taking an interest in what was happening around the world and would later go on to write about human injustices, racism, and human rights issues.
That book was the stepping stone to a whole new world, not always of the good kind but it was needed and it changed a young girl’s way of thinking for the better.
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