The book in question is the diary of a German-Jewish girl, written between the thirteenth and fifteenth years of her life. With her parents and elder sister, Anne emigrated to Holland in 1933 to escape German racial persecution and, faced by the same danger during the German occupation of Holland, the family decided to go underground. This was in 1942, when in Holland the Jews were compelled to wear on their clothes the yellow star with the word "Jew," when they were allowed only in restaurants marked "Jews only," and when the first transports of Jews - destination unknown - were sent to Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and the gas chambers. For more than two years eight people lived in a loft at the back of a house in the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, hidden and cared for by kind Dutch people and sealed off from the outer world. These diaries were found by Dutch friends in a heap of rubbish, overlooked by the police and Gestapo after they had found the hiding-place, arrested the inmates, and sent them to concentration camps. Of all the eight people, only the father survived and came back. Anne Frank died in Belsen in March, 1945, in her sixteenth year. The diaries were published literally in Holland, under the title Het Achterhuis, in five editions; only a few unessential entries are left out in the genuine German translation.
During these two years, a sensitive and somewhat precocious child has, in her loneliness and anxiety, outgrown her years and acquired an insight into her own soul which perhaps is only acquired by one who, in spite of hope, has a premonition that little time is left. The whole of a life seems to be projected into these two years and their intensity is certainly greater than that of a long, quiet life of leisure. A great many of the entries, written in the form of letters to an imaginary friend Kitty - wishful thinking and longing for a real friend in whom to confide much more than can be told to parents - deal with the daily life of two families and a single man, living together in a few small rooms and sealed off from the rest of the world: the inevitable quarrels, the impatience, the nervousness and the thousand irritating things so familiar to anyone who has spent years in a prisoners' camp or on a lonely island. A nightmare of life! On November 8, 1943, Anne writes:
I see the eight of us here as if we were living on a bright spot in the blue sky, surrounded by heavy, dark rainclouds. Our place is still safe, but the clouds become more and more dense and the circle separating us from approaching peril, more and more narrow. We are finally so surrounded by darkness that, in the desperate desire to become free, we come to blows. We see below how men fight and we look up where happiness and peace is. We, however, are cut off by the thick, impenetrable layer which bars the way there and surrounds us like an insurmountable wall which will smash us when the time has come. I can only cry and implore: "Oh circle, widen and open up for us."
And, the same day:
Yes, I say often: "After the war!" But this is as if I spoke of castles in the air, of something which can never be reality. Of my life at home, the friends, the school with all its pleasures and worries, of everything "before" I think with the feeling that not I but somebody else had experienced this.
As to her own life, she works methodically at languages and history, her special interest, as she wants later to be a journalist. She has her childish hobbies but, above all, she explores with an analytical mind her relations with the other "prisoners," first of all with her parents and her elder sister. As so often happens at this age, her mother becomes more and more of a stranger to her. Children have an outspoken sense of justice and mothers in their endeavour to educate their children tend to misunderstand a shy remark and mistake it for a pert one - "Mutterchen, du siehst die Apfel reifen, kannst den Trieb der Tochter nicht begreifen." But Anne, in her resignation to the will of God, has also acquired an outlook different from her mother's. After a year and three-quarters of confinement, she writes:
At night when I have gone to bed and ended my prayer with the words: "Thank You for all the kindness and love and beauty," then I rejoice. I then think of the "kindness": Our disappearance, my health; of the "love": Peter and all that is still tender and sensitive so that neither of us yet dare to touch it and all that might one day be: love, future happiness. And the "beautiful" which embraces the world, nature, the arts, beauty and all the grandeur connected with it. Then I don't think of the misery but of the magnificence. Here is one of the main differences between my mother and myself. If anyone is distressed, she says: "Think of all the misery in the world and be grateful that you don't experience it." However, I say: "Go out into the fields, into nature and the sun, go out, seek happiness in yourself and in God. Think of the beautiful, which is in and around you always and be happy!" I think mother's advice must be wrong, because what will you do if you yourself are in distress? Then you are lost. I find, however, that even then something beautiful remains: Nature, the sun, freedom and something in yourself. It is to this you must keep, then you will find yourself again, you will find God, and you will keep your balance. And he who is happy himself will make others happy too. He who has courage and confidence will not perish when he is in distress.
She becomes attached to Peter, the son of the other family, and in a strange way she sees in him another Peter, the beloved boy friend of her childhood. But soon, to her inmost self, he too becomes more and more alien; he is not of her spirit and she worries about him, withdraws again into her solitude, and more and more she ceases to be a child. The sorrows, grief and hardship of life have given her an insight which is strange and moving. She has overcome all this and hers is the triumph of life even when her clear soul had to leave her wretched, tortured body. In one of the last entries - July, 1944 - before the diary was ended abruptly by the entering German police, she writes:
It is a miracle that I have not yet given up all the hopes which seem so absurd and unrealizable. But I stick to them in spite of all, because I still believe in the kindness of men (an das Gute im Menschen). It is impossible for me to build up everything on the basis of death, misery and turmoil. I notice that the world is being changed slowly into a desert! I hear more and more distinctly the rolling thunder which will kill us too; I feel with millions of people their grief, and yet, if I look up to the sky, I think that all will become better, that this hardship will end and that the order of the world will again be ruled by peace.
The poor child had hoped after the war to write a book on the experiences and the incredible life of people who had to go underground. Here it is, written under the immediate and direct impression of the moment, but it was certainly not intended for anybody except herself. Yet this human document of the darkest period of our time should be read by thousands, not least by the uncaring in Germany - and elsewhere.
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