Most people’s diaries are probably pretty boring to everyone else. (I’m pretty sure mine would be.) But not this one! During an incredibly difficult and stressful two years, Anne Frank chronicles her life cooped up with a bunch of other fugitives, hiding from the Nazis above an Amsterdam office. The diary entries are open and intimate, addressed to a fictitious friend “Kitty”. She writes mostly about herself and her interactions with her family and the others she spends time with. Her views on her family, especially her parents, seem fairly typical for a teenager, but she deals with the frustrations amazingly well given the pressure-cooker situation they are all in.
It is inspiring to read how they all just got on with things as well as they could, even when things were so grim. They were very generous with gifts on each other’s birthdays! I couldn’t help but think of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Despite the awful circumstances, life went on.
She did go back and edit the earlier entries after a year or two, but they are still pretty raw, if well-composed. It’s sad to read her hopes and plans for what she wanted to do when the war finally ended. She never made it – she wrote what turned out to be her last entry shortly after her 15th birthday. A few days later, the Nazis discovered them. Anne Frank died before the end of the war, but her diary survived to tell her story.