This is an autobiography based on Anne Frank's diary. Even today after 73 years this book is widely famous among us.

What makes this book so special? Well, this book was never written to get published, or even that someone will ever read it for that matter. If you write a diary entry you must be familiar with the unfiltered, raw, and original emotion behind writing it.

As this was not a planned book, so there is no unexpected twist but this book is worth a read. Please don't presume it to be a sad story, Anne Frank was a very jolly person which you can see in her little stories that she shared every day with her diary "Kitty". I was so amazed to notice how a teenager's writing can be so strong and thoughts can be so clear. It inspires me that even after so much chaos and fear around how positive and hopeful she was.

n  You might like to check out more similar books here.n

Written with a ball-point pen 'during Nazi occupation' but ballpoint pens first went on sale in 1945. A big maudlin waste-of-time from the people who brought you Schindler's List.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballpoin...

Hice lo impensable, una atrocidad, una perversión, yo, un hombre en sus veintes, he leído el diario privado de una niña de 13 años, sin su permiso



espero la sociedad encuentre la forma de perdonarme, y no tener que enfrentarme a una turba enardecida.

El diario de Ana Frank es uno de los libros más leídos alrededor del mundo, uno de los que posee más fama, siempre se escucha mencionarlo cuando se habla de clásicos, o cuando se habla de la segunda guerra mundial, sin embargo, a mi parecer es más lo que se habla de él, que lo que hay en su interior, o dicho de otra forma mis expectativas, como suele sucederme, eran mucho mas altas para esta historia.

La historia es sumamente monótona, son ocho personas encerradas, ocultas, debido a su religión judía y a todo el conflicto Nazi. Ana nos ira relatando su vida en lo que ella llama “la casa de atrás” la relación que tiene con cada uno de los integrantes de la casa, las discusiones repetitivas, los temores de ser encontrados, lo agradecidos que están por tener gente que los ayude en estos momentos, los libros que lee, y la esperanza del futuro sin guerra, así una y otra vez, una y otra vez, una y otra vez, solo se percibe el cambio de que, poco a poco Ana va madurando.

Nunca sabré hasta qué punto su diario fue modificado por las editoriales o incluso por el padre de Ana, aun así, definitivamente Ana fue una persona con pensamientos muy profundos para su edad, muy autocritica, a veces realista, a veces optimista, y claro con momentos de suma inocencia, se nota que es una persona real quien nos está relatando todo lo que acontece; ahora ¿debería ser leído? ¿Debería ser tan trascendental? A mi parecer… No, o por lo menos, no le encuentro sentido a que sea de lectura obligatoria en varios países, creo que hay historias más impresionantes y crudas de la guerra.

Creo que solo lo recomendaría, y espero no sonar machista (oh ahora si me van a matar) a chicas en edades escolares (mmm quizás por eso sea de lectura obligatoria en algunos países) porque como literatura juvenil de tiempos de guerra no está mal, y digo chicas porque pueden conectar más con Ana.

¡Ahora a huir de la turba enardecida!

The book is so beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time.
I enjoyed reading it completely.

Anne Frank’s diary is a personal coming-of-age account that takes places in the midst of one of the most dangerous times in our history.

I started reading Anne Frank's Diary, after nearly twenty-five years of procrastination, and also in the later years due to the feeling of it being overhyped.
I was wrong …, way too wrong .

n  "You only really get to know a person after a row. Only then can you judge their true character."

"Mums had a hard time combing her hair because the family comb has only ten teeth left."n

What mesmerized me most during its reading, is the metamorphosis of a thirteen year young girl into a fifteen year young woman. The contents of the diary start off with almost mundane topics of day-to-day life in the Secret Annexe. And in twenty-six months of her writing, the transformation that is observed in the way she expresses her thoughts, provides the feeling of what she truly was.
She was a person capable of deep thought at the age of 15.

n  "We were talking about the picture of a film star I'd once given him, which has been hanging in his room for at least a year and a half. He liked it so much that I offered to give him a few more.
'No,' he replied, 'I'd rather keep the one I've got. I look at it everyday, and the people in it have become my friends.'"

"As long as this exists, this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?"n

Usually when I read prose, I live within the book; 'it' becomes my world, or rather I become a part of 'it'; in other words, the book and my self become one. As a result, this time (although this was a diary) I was living with the Franks, the van Daans, Mr. Dussel, and the others who worked at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam, through the eyes and the thoughts of Anne Frank.

n  "Oh, when will we overcome all these difficulties? And yet it's good that we have to surmount them, since it makes the end that much more beautiful."

"…, things are only as bad as you make them."n

Having lived for two years and two months in her thoughts, and only within the confines of the building, was depressive, but which gave way to insights which are hard to come by considering a person of her age. Anne was an aspiring writer (and she definitely was good at it), the way she writes her diary was certainly good, and at times very much unique (although of course this one was translated into English). Being inside Anne's own self, also made me look within my own self, which was to me of one of the highest importance of reading the contents of her writings to Kitty.

n  "It's hard enough standing on your own two feet, but when you also have to remain true to your character and soul, it's harder still."n

When I started reading the book, I could think of giving it a 3-stars … it was good no doubt, but by the end it had to become what it is!

n  "I'm left with one consolation, small though it may be; my fountain pen was cremated, just as I would like to be some day."n

Her topics range from her school friends, family, and her diary Kitty, to all the ways in which they lived and survived within the two years of hiding. She writes an Ode to her lost Fountain Pen; on Suffering and Beauty; on Puberty and Adolescence; on Longing for anything new; on Talking, and Solace; about how "The grown-ups are such idiots!"; on Writing and Doing things; about the Jews; on Wars; Anti-Semitism in Holland (at the time); about Nature; on Injustice towards Women; Racism, Discrimination, and Human Rights; Living a Happy life; on Work; her own Self-awareness; Contradictions; etc.

n  "I don't believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago! There's a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start all over again!"

"What I condemn are our system of values and the men who don't acknowledge how great, difficult, but ultimately beautiful women's share in society is."n

The copy I read was the Definitive Edition, which had additional 30% of previously unreleased material (only in editions after 1995).Along with a Foreword and an Afterword, included was a 10-page essay on "The Legacy of Anne Frank" by Clare Garner. The essay describes how Otto Frank (Anne's father) got the book to be published, how he felt when he got his daughter's diary in his hands and started to read it bit-by-bit (after having survived the holocaust and returning to Amsterdam), and about the use of films and Broadway plays to keep Anne's legacy moving. Otto Frank later also helped in saving the Secret Annexe (which was supposed to be demolished), and which is now the Anne Frank House (it also includes a few objects that remain from the 'times') hosting international conferences and training workshops to highlight all forms of persecution, apart from being a museum. Visitors here also learn of human rights, discrimination, and racism, apart from the holocaust, while promoting Anne as a symbol of tolerance.

n  "There's only one rule you need to remember: laugh at everything and forget everybody else! It sounds egotistical, but it's actually the only cure for those suffering from self-pity."n

So what did I feel personally after the completion of the book? :)
Well, for one, let me confess, this was the first book that brought me tears (literally). No other book ever, has actually made me cry! This did not happen to me during the actual reading of the diary, but while reading one of Otto Frank's quoted feelings in his response to not attending the Broadway play based on the diary which opened at New York's Cort Theatre in October 1955. What he felt, was a quick reflection of the contents of Anne's Diary, and for me.
I also felt, if Anne had not died, she could have played one of those major roles of being the world-changers in her future. What a waste, … her and many others who were just washed off the face of the earth. RIP to them all.

While her story is sad, the naked Emperor cult around this book is unmerited.

The key quotation about people being basically good at heart is absurd in the light of the story, and from a theological perspective, just plain wrong.

I hated having to read parts of this in school. It's maybe the most boring, least interesting book I've ever heard anyone rave about. Hell, I think that my OWN journal is boring, let alone some stranger's diary.

Talking to a student about Anne Frank's diary.

As almost always, I get questions precisely when I think I state some "unchallenged" truth, and this question is good - why I believe it to be the most important document from the Holocaust for adolescents. After all, it doesn't really describe the horror that came afterwards. It is not about Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and about dying at the very end of the war. It is not about dying at all, really, even though the fear is omnipresent in the hiding-place. It is about living as a teenager in a tiny space with your parents and your sister and some more or less pleasant additional inhabitants that you can't afford to hate outright as they are just trying to save their lives.

I think it is the most important document of the Holocaust because it describes what happened to NORMAL, EVERYDAY people with all the positives and negatives that human beings are made of. It is a document to the random cruelty of hatred to strike people who have done absolutely nothing at all to provoke anybody. Who just wanted to live their difficult and easy and happy and sad normal lives and grow up and fulfil private dreams. It is about the humanity of those who became the victims of the Holocaust, about their personalities as defined before they were usurped by the evil machinery that forever changed the perception of what humans are capable of.

Anne Frank is a storyteller on the edge of the abyss who shows the horror by NOT describing it in graphic detail. This is her life, not her death. And to build empathy and love for humanity as a whole, we need to see the humans underneath the categories that psychopaths use to stigmatise "otherness".

As young and inexperienced as Anne was, she was fully human and perfectly equipped to show the world the bizarre disproportion between the abstract hatred that guided the criminals in charge during the Third Reich and the real-life targets.

When I first read this, aged 13, I had nightmares each night for almost a year, and I wished I could "undo" my knowledge. And now I promote this very source of my nightmares to the next generation because I strongly believe that by feeling for and with Anne and her family, we develop the tools to recognise the patterns of hatred and to speak up against them.

Some nightmares need to be dreamed to prevent others from becoming reality - again!

n  n
I never knew that a book could make me so emotional until I read this memoir for the first time during my high school days. Every time I was quarantined during this pandemic, I thought about Anne Frank and her family. When I found it difficult to stay indoors for just 14 days during each quarantine, the Frank family had to hide in the Secret Annex for two long years. That too at the backdrop of the world war and the holocaust. This young lady had to go through many horrible conditions in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Anne Frank shows us the horrors of one of the most brutal acts of cruelty in world history and the importance of freedom in a human being's life. This is a must-read book for everyone.

3.5/5 ⭐

An undeniable classic at this point, a simple story of innocence denied, heartbreaking in a childish manner. It will make you feel all sorts of contradictory feelings by the end.

A diary often reveals a great deal – about its author, and about their time – and such is certainly the case with the World War II diary of Anne Frank. The daily diary entries in which she set forth the attempt by her family and three acquaintances to survive the Nazi occupation of Holland are just as powerful and wrenching each time one takes up the book that was first published in Dutch as Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex), and was later published in English as The Diary of a Young Girl.

The background story of how the Frank family came to spend almost two years in their secret annex is a familiar one, and is no less heartbreaking for its familiarity. Otto Frank was a successful Frankfurt businessman at the time of Anne’s birth in 1929; the Franks – father Otto, mother Edith, and daughters Margot and Anne – were liberal, well-educated German Jews, proud of the cultural heritage of Judaism but not necessarily observant of all the tenets of the Jewish faith.

With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Franks made their way to Amsterdam, and started their lives over again in a new country; but after the Nazi invasion and occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, the Franks’ situation once again became untenable. For two years, the Franks dealt as best they could with the increasingly harsh anti-Jewish laws imposed by the Nazi regime; the earliest entries in Anne’s diary deal with those times, as she started writing down her diary entries in the blank-page autograph book that she had received for her thirteenth birthday.

She begins her diary on June 12, 1942, by writing the following:
.
I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.

Soon, Anne gets into the habit of starting each diary entry by writing, “Dearest Kitty,” and concluding with “Yours, Anne,” and I find that wonderfully endearing. It speaks to that idea that, even with a diary – a genre for which the theoretical audience is oneself, even if oneself at a later time – one is always imagining an audience.

For the first month or so, the diary entries deal with many of the ordinary rituals of and events from the life of a young girl – school graduation, visits with friends – though all of it takes place with the brutal reality of Nazi occupation just below the surface.

But on July 8, 1942, a call-up of a Frank family member for a work-camp detail forced the Franks to hurry forward their plans for taking shelter in a three-story annex hidden behind the fruit-extract company where Otto Frank worked. The Dutch term for such a structure is Achterhuis (“after-house”): there, the Franks took shelter; there, they hoped to wait out the war in some degree of safety; and there, Anne Frank continued with her diary entries.

Over time, the Achterhuis gained additional refugee inhabitants: a couple referred to in the diary as the “van Daans” (actually Hermann and Auguste van Pels), the van Daans’ son Peter (his first name is given correctly), and a single man called “Mr. Düssel” in the diary (his true name was Fritz Pfeffer).

Over time, as Anne Frank records, the increasingly crowded secret annex makes for sometimes tense relations. The reserved and scholarly manner of the Franks contrasts with the earthier and less refined ways of the van Daans; Mr. Düssel meanwhile seems thoroughly exasperated with Anne’s teenage ways, and Anne finds Mr. Düssel pedantic and well-nigh unbearable. With Peter, on the other hand, she forges an increasingly close bond.

Anne Frank was an extraordinarily talented young writer, and The Diary of a Young Girl is rich in carefully observed detail that draws a vivid picture for the reader. In her diary entry for Tuesday, August 10, 1943, for example, Anne notes sadly that “We’ve all been a little confused this week because our dearly beloved Westertoren bells have been carted off to be melted down for the war, so we have no exact idea of the time, either night or day” (p. 126).

Having walked in the heart of Amsterdam, and having heard the comforting sound of the city’s church bells, I try to imagine how it must have been for those eight people to lose that small source of comfort and stability of hearing the bells of the Westertoren, the bell tower for Amsterdam’s historic Westerkerk church.

Over the course of The Diary of a Young Girl, the reader watches Anne Frank working on developing a philosophy of life. On Tuesday, March 7, 1944, she writes, “My advice is: ‘Go outside, to the country, enjoy the sun and all nature has to offer. Go outside and try to recapture the happiness within yourself; think of all the beauty in yourself and in everything around you and be happy.’” She adds that “A person who’s happy will make others happy; a person who has courage and faith will never die in misery!” (p. 211) Of course, the first of many levels of tragic irony underlying this statement is that Anne Frank cannot go outside, except in her imagination.

The occupants of the Achterhuis follow the war news closely, hoping that the Allies will liberate Holland before the Nazis find the secret annex. After months of waiting and hoping, Anne begins her diary entry for Tuesday, June 6, 1944 on a note of excitement: “‘This is D-Day,’ the BBC announced at twelve. ‘This is the day.’ The invasion has begun!” (p. 311)

In her D-Day diary entry, Anne Frank goes on to describe “A huge commotion in the Annex! Is this really the beginning of the long-awaited liberation? The liberation we’ve all talked so much about, which still seems too good, too much of a fairy tale ever to come true? Will this year, 1944, bring us victory? We don’t know yet. But where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again” (pp. 311-12).

One of the most famous passages from The Diary of a Young Girl is this one, written by Anne Frank on Saturday, July 15, 1944: “It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” (pp. 332-33).

These are, heaven knows, powerful and resonant words. But what follows shows how deeply Anne Frank had thought about the fragility of human life, and about the human capacity for both good and evil:

It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering, and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us, too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I must hold on to my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I’m able to realize them! (p. 333)

This entry, with its mix of hope and realism, is one of the last in The Diary of a Young Girl. Three weeks later, on August 4, 1944 – the 761st day of refuge in the Achterhuis – all of the occupants of the secret annex were arrested by the Gestapo, and eventually all were deported to death camps.

Edith Frank and Hermann van Pels both died at Auschwitz. Auguste Van Pels is said to have died while being transported between the Buchenwald and Theresienstadt concentration camps. Fritz Pfeffer died at the Neuengamme concentration camp. Peter van Pels died at the Mauthausen concentration camp, five days after it was liberated by the United States Army.

And Anne and Margot Frank both died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in north-central Germany, some time before the British Army liberated the camp in April of 1945.

Only Otto Frank, imprisoned at Auschwitz, survived the death camps of the Holocaust.

The story of the finding of Anne Frank’s diary, and of its eventual publication, is an epic of its own; for the full story, readers are referred to the informative and helpful website of the Anne Frank House at http://www.annefrank.org.

Even if you have read earlier versions of The Diary of a Young Girl, you may want to make your way back to this most recent published version. When Het Achterhuis was first published in 1947, some of the passages in which Anne addressed her awakening sexuality were left out; so were some of the specifics of tensions among the Frank family. All of that is now included, making even more clear the courageous, truth-telling quality of Anne Frank’s writing.

I visited the Anne Frank House for the first time when my wife and I were on our first trip to Amsterdam. To see her room, with photos of movie stars on the walls – the same way teenage girls in other eras might put up posters of the Osmonds, or the New Kids on the Block, or the Backstreet Boys – and to think of how Anne Frank and almost all the members of her family died before their time was heartbreaking.

Later in the same trip, we detoured out of our way so that we could visit the Bergen-Belsen site and pay our respects to Anne and Margot Frank and the millions of other innocents who were murdered. The camp site is filled with mass graves, earthen mounds that each bear a stone inscription reading Hier Ruhen 5000 Tote – April 1945 (“Here lie 5000 dead – April 1945”), with only the number changing from one mass grave to the next.

And then there is a simple, gravestone-shaped monument to Margot Frank, 1926-1945, and Anne Frank, 1929-1945, with a Star of David and, in Hebrew, the Bible verse Proverbs 20:27 (“The human spirit is the candle of the Lord”). Always there are stones atop the monument, in accordance with Jewish traditions for honoring the righteous dead, along with photos of Anne Frank, letters and notes from visitors, flowers left in tribute. It is one of the most moving sights that I have ever seen.

The memorial, and all of those tributes left at the memorial, reminds us that Anne Frank lives on. All the murderous cruelty and malice of the Nazis could not still her voice. Her diary remains. She speaks to us still, in one of the most important books ever written.

Addendum, 20 August 2022:

A graphic-novel edition of The Diary of a Young Girl was removed from school library bookshelves by the independent school district of Keller, Texas, a suburban community just outside Fort Worth. The removal of this edition of The Diary of a Young Girl followed conservative activists' rewriting the guidelines for parental book challenges in a manner that required the removal of books that had been previously challenged but retained. The challenge, which evidently proceeded from a single parent's complaints, is thought to relate to passages in which Anne Frank talks about her awakening sexuality.

As Snopes points out, this incident does not constitute an absolute "ban" against The Diary of a Young Girl; copies of the original text remain on the Keller district's school library shelves. Yet the effort at censorship remains something very real. For one parent, evidently, a young girl writing in the privacy of her diary about her feelings about sex is so "unacceptable" that the book must be removed. Those ideas must be kept away from students who are themselves going through the difficult time of adolescence. The students must not be granted the choice of whether to access the ideas of The Diary of a Young Girl themselves.

And the lessons that The Diary of a Young Girl teaches us regarding the Nazi Holocaust and the murder of six million innocent men, women, and children are evidently, for that parent, not as important as the parent's attempts to impose their conservative sexual mores upon an entire community.

I ask two things of you:

1. Honour the memory of the six million men, women, and children who were murdered in the Holocaust.

2. Fight the censors. Read banned books.