THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL

Author: Anne Frank
Year: 1988 (1953, 1947)
Publisher: Hökerbergs
Language: Swedish (Translator Ella Wilcke)

”The Diary of a Young Girl” (”Het Achterhuis”) by Anne Frank is the authentic diary of an adolescent Jewish girl in the Netherlands from the time her family goes into hiding from the Nazis in 1942 until three days before the Gestapo raided their hiding place in 1944. And it is an overwhelming read.

Two weeks after I finished the book, I have still not managed to regain my composure. It rattled me to the core. It is a challenge not to think about what I have read and still, I am barely able to collect my thoughts and make sense of the experience.

Rendered unqualified to process Anne Frank’s diary intellectually, my emotional response is all the clearer. I feel horror, grief, and disbelief. I feel love, fear, and confusion. I feel anger. So much anger. But in this dense brew, one feeling towers head and shoulders above all others.

Shame.

Through every word and every page, shame followed me like a heavy load on my chest which sometimes made it hard to breathe and which still forces me to gasp for air when the memories force themselves to the front of my mind.

Shame came in several shapes and for different reasons.

At the beginning, the mere act of reading a young girl’s diary made me uncomfortable. This is, after all, a diary of a regular teenage girl living under highly irregular conditions. Anne Frank wrote about everyday things such as her favourite books and music, her friends and love interests, about which subjects in school she liked and disliked. I was reading the thoughts of a girl who made every effort to keep her diary secret to people around her (in the entry of the 21 September 1942 Anne writes expressively about how she had to physically protect her diary from the prying eyes of one of the other fugitives cooped up in the hiding place).

As she got older, her choice of topics developed. Being stuck in a confined space without access to classmates, friends, cousins, games, movies, sporting events, and concerts, Anne became introspective and resorted to writing about her crowded miniature world. She entrusted every secret, sensitive, and sometimes embarrassing detail to her beloved diary (or “Kitty” as she called it) and as a reader I was constantly reminded that I was an intruder in a supremely intelligent and impressionable young woman’s most private sphere.

I also felt shame about not having read this monumental document much earlier. In secondary school at the latest. For a person who prides himself on being reasonably informed on the Second World War, not having read Anne Frank’s diary is an unforgivable educational lacuna. History may have been made by Hitler, Churchill, and Truman, but history was suffered by Anne Frank and her family and millions of others like her. Their experiences constitute the basis of our knowledge about the era. They are the ones who lived and died in the midst of the world created for them. If one does not know their story, one knows nothing.  

Still, most of all I felt shame for mankind. For the scum who orchestrated the Holocaust, for the many who remained silent and allowed it to happen, and for the measly waste of a person who betrayed Anne Frank along with all the others in the yard house. How brutal, barbarous, simpleminded, and savage does a species have to be to make up an imaginary divide between people and use it as an excuse to unleash mayhem, torment, and misery on them for no other reason than that they can? What a bankrupt people we are, if our own satisfaction and self-worth require the oppression and agony of another? How lowly does one have to be, if one cannot stand on one’s own two legs but has to support oneself on the mutilated bodies of others?

None of Anne Frank’s despair, hope, fears, or confusion was her own choice. She was forced into hiding, forced to flee like a hunted animal from men who did not know her but judged her for her background. How can I not feel ashamed on behalf of humanity for this?

Having said that, dignity can still be restored.

On the 29^th of March 1944, Anne wrote in her diary that Mr Bolkestein of the Dutch exiled government had encouraged the citizens of occupied Netherlands to preserve all written material from the war and announced that an archive of testimonies was to be created once peace was restored. Anne Frank immediately began to plan for the publication of her diary and even gave it the title “Het Achterhuise” under which it was later published in its original Dutch. Suddenly, the shame of reading her words was remedied. I realised that by reading her book, I was granting her wish. She wanted me to do it. What joy! What relief!

The second source of shame has also been addressed. Admittedly far too late, but I did end up reading the book in the end. Maybe I needed to grow into it longer than most. Maybe you would gain from reading it at a mature age, too. Be as it may, I did end up reading “The Diary of a Young Girl”, an omission had been corrected and my life became all the richer for it.

It remains to address the third source of shame for it, too, can be redeemed. The forces that time and again fling the world into chaos are rarely unopposed. But they are still frequently victorious. Their success depends less on their own strength or the weakness of the opposition and more on the silence of the masses. By remaining silent, we side with the oppressors. It is imperative that people of good will unite and take action whenever the stench of pettiness, inferiority complex, narrow-mindedness, and hatred poisons the air.

But it is not enough to detect it in others. We must all be aware that we are human, too. We are, whether we like to acknowledge it or not, specimens of the same base species that for generations has slandered, slated, and slain each other for the silliest reasons. We need to recognise and reconcile with the fact that we are different from the butchers of Amsterdam not in nature, but in our ability to allow reason to trump our instincts.

Anne Frank’s death was pointless, but I for one will do what I can to make sure that her short life was meaningful. I will not live in shame.