Book title – The diary of a young girl

Author – Anne Frank

Format – Hardcover

From June 1942 to August 1944, a Jewish girl named Anne Frank kept a diary of her experiences in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, after the Netherlands fell to Nazi control during World War II. It happened that during the two years that mark the most extraordinary changes in a girl’s life, Anne Frank lived in astonishing circumstances: she was hidden with seven other people in a secret nest of rooms behind her father’s place of business, in Amsterdam. Anne begins her diary entries by talking about her 13th birthday party, the day when she received the diary. Anne says she is keeping a diary because she doesn’t have any true friends and feels alone, despite having a loving family. She does not feel that she can confide in her parents or her 16-year-old sister, Margot, although she cares for them. Anne decides to give her diary a name, Kitty, and to write to Kitty as if the diary is the close friend she has always wanted. Thus, the diary tells the life of a group of Jews waiting in fear of being taken by the Nazis. It is this unfolding psychological drama of a girl’s growth, mingled with the physical danger of the group, that frees Anne’s book from the horizontal effect of most diaries. Hers rises continuously, with the tension of a well-constructed novel. On the plane of physical suspense, a series of burglaries in the office-warehouse dreadfully endangers the hidden group.

There are many important messages in this book, but the most important message is that all people have the right to live in freedom. Anne’s story shows us that just because people may be a different religion or race, doesn’t mean that they should be treated differently. The terrible treatment of Jewish people during the war has shown this. Her diary shows us things that people don’t think about now, for example how every day the people in hiding worried about maybe being found and punished. The thing that strikes me the most is how happy Anne is despite her and her family in an awful situation. She thoroughly enjoys writing and describing others and is a talkative and inquisitive typical teenage girl. That being said, she didn’t always understand how difficult life was for her mother and the other adults around her and constantly passes remarks on the people who shared their hiding space. Sometimes this wasn’t very nice, but it shows how everybody’s life was challenging because they had to be quiet and not bring attention to themselves. Despite the passage of time, her story was something new, a different way of understanding the horrors of the Holocaust. “The resulting diary is one of the most moving stories that anyone, anywhere, has managed to tell about World War II,” as TIME’s book reviewer put it, describing her experiences as not just a personal outlook but also an important piece of work for records of the World War II.

Anne Frank, spirited, moody, witty, self-doubting, succeeded in communicating in virtually perfect, or classic, form the drama of puberty. But her book is not a classic to be left on the library shelf but, a must read into the outlooks of this young girl’s mind. It is a warm and stirring confession, to be read over and over for insight and enjoyment. I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in reading historical, war or mystery books as it is so interesting. Anne died of typhus in 1945, imprisoned at Bergen-Belsen, just a few months before her sixteenth birthday. Her diary, written between 12 June 1942 and 1 August 1944, was found after the war and later published by her father Otto H. Frank, the only surviving member of the family. It has become a bestseller throughout the world and is an extraordinary piece of writing from such a young girl, detailing her emotional transformation from childhood to adolescence and reminding us of the horror of prejudice and persecution.