I guess I'll start off with what this book is all about.... yea
As the heading says, this is a diary maintained by Anne Frank, a young, Jewish girl who had gone into hiding with her family during the reign of Hitler, towards the end of the Second World War. It was a time when Hitler ordered for all Jews to be removed from Germany and be sent to concentration camps.... a fate worse that death.
With the help of a few German friends, she and her family moved into the unused upper floors of an office building, where they created a home for themselves for almost two and a half years. These German friends were their only connection to the outside world, bringing them rations, clothes, books, news and sometimes even cheer.
Anne was 13 years old. The diary traces her growth from a gawky teenager whose main interests were ping pong, ice cream and boy friends to a mature, sensitive girl who wondered why she was being treated differently just because she was a Jew, who cried when she saw the plight of other Jews from the window of her room and could do nothing to help them and yet wrote fairy tales in her spare time, hoping to be able to publish them one day.
Her writing is not particularly eloquent. And yet it touches something within us. All she has written about are descriptions of the people with her, their daily routine, the little fights and squabbles, and all through her own fight for gaining acceptance as a grownup in a world where time has stood still.
She talks about feeling like a caged bird whose wings have been cut, beating against the bars to get free. She feels a sense of impending doom, when she says that she feels as if she is standing on a little piece of heaven surrounded by dense, black clouds. And yet through it all she remains cheerful, challenging her fate simply with a smile, believing in the inherent goodness of man.
The diary ends on an abrupt note. Simply because a few days after her last entry, she and her family was betrayed by someone who worked in the office and were captured by the German police. But what actually hit this reader was that, the last entry ended in such a way as if she was going to continue… only she never got a chance to. However, a more poignant ending would not have been possible. The diary is complete in itself. Read it and you will know what I mean...
The epilogue tells us what happened a few days later and we are actually transported to that time…imagining ourselves along with them, cowering behind their secret door as the police pounded on it..clutching a few belongings to themselves… feeling their fear, their hopelessness, their despair….
Anne Frank was taken to a concentration camp Auschwitz, the worst of all the concentration camps... also known as the "Death Camp", where she succumbed to typhus within a few months…
She was not yet 16...
