As dutch girl. Born and raised I have heard many stories, had many lessons about anne frank. And here I am 19 years old and reading this book for the first time in my existence.

I don’t have the feeling that I am reading her diary, but more a story as any other book. But then, when I close it I think about what this girl has gone through, that she after the war didn’t live, didn’t have any children. And even when the war was raging on she still thought about it. About love and family, about a future.

And that has me thinking that this girl is the strongest girl that I will remember through the dutch history!

This is a beautiful and wonderful book

It was a tough read indeed. Poor people had to go through all this hell on earth. However, such books help us open wider our eyes and minds on what was happening in the world and teach us appreciate our lives, family relations, friends and the chance of living merrily without this goddam WAR....

This book was one of the most heartbreaking books I've ever read. I still remember my shock at the end of the book when there were no more Ann the writer and it became Ann the dead little girl. I cried a lot at the end of this book it was really horrible ending.
I saw her growing up and fighting with her mother and her struggle in living under these horrible conditions. No kid deserves that. She deserved to be an honorable writer.
She'll remain to have a very valuable place in my heart.

every person should read this at least once in their lives.

I am basically a terrible person.

This isn't a review- I'm not going to go into my reasons for giving this book 2 stars. That would not do anybody any good. I will simply say that I feel extremely guilty rating the book this low, but I hope people understand that it doesn't reflect my view of the Holocaust as a whole, or my views of Anne Frank as a person. I have the utmost respect for both.

The girlfriend of my great-grandfather* lost her mother and her daughter in the Holocaust. Her daughter had a hairpin, a beautiful golden thing with topaz and pearls, and it was passed down to me. I never got to meet my great-grandfather nor Fanny (his girlfriend), but she put the pin in a box and gave it to my mother with these words written on it. (I was still a baby, and neither of them would live past my second birthday.)







That pin is a lot like this book. Whenever I look at it, nestled in my jewellery box, I feel the weight of generations of guilt pressing down on me. Its owner is long gone, and yet I feel the strangest thing- simultaneously connected and disconnected. I am in possession of something that unnamed girl loved, just as reading Anne's diary, and there's an eerie sense of abandonment in the object being left behind but their owners having perished long before their time.

Granted, I'm Jewish, but I can't help but feel that simply by being alive and knowing of the Holocaust and of genocides in general, I am doing them a disservice. In the wake of tragedies like this, there is nothing to say, there are no words, so I'm not going to waste this review talking about the merits and downfalls of this book. It is not mine to critique- this is the diary of a real girl who really did live, and so pointing out its flaws is a vain pursuit, in that it is so inextricable from its owner, just like that topaz hairpin.

There is a time and a place for criticising memoirs without criticising their authors, but now is not the time nor the place. Suffice it to say that I feel like an awful person for rating this so low, but I will not budge on it. One of my core principles is that I judge books in and of themselves, and how they stand on their own- it is impossible to do so here, with the text so linked to the history.

I don't know what to do with The Diary of Anne Frank or that hairpin. They remind me to never forget the tragedy, but how could I anyway? I don't own them, and I never can- they're relics, relics that do not and cannot ever belong to anybody but their original owners, and so I suppose I'll always feel like I'm keeping watch over the prized possessions of two girls who are never coming back to retrieve them.


*He was a baker who became an army dentist when the bakers' union went on strike in the Great Depression. Quite an interesting fellow.