The Diary of Anne Frank. Everyone has heard of it, right? Most people (that I know, anyway) studied fragments in school. And I've had a copy sat on my - virtual - shelf for a couple of years. And always something else crept in front. Something not as demanding on my conscience, something I've read before, something I can wallow in and not have to think about too deeply.
What gets me is the fact that I know it doesn't end well. I know that on the 4th August 1944 her world comes crashes down around her ears and she is taken to prison and she spends the next year knowing that someone betrayed her and her family, and the four other people she has lived with cheek by jowl for more than two years. And I know that she dies and, adding insult to injury, dies a month before the concentration camp she was inured in was liberated. Of the eight people in the secret annex only Anne's father survives.
That said, this was an interesting read, in the same way that The Diary Of a VAD Nurse that I read in my college library was interesting. Mostly because I like people watching. And both of these diaries give you that in spades. At the start of the diary, Anne is 13, a newly minted teenager, with everything that entails. The moods, the no-one-understands-me, and the slow growing up. The moments when she realises she's been having a strop and tries to mend her ways, and then, two weeks later doing the self same thing again.
This book sucked me in, with Anne's worm-eyes-view of life in a handful of rooms and no chance to go out. the slowly growing frustration of a girl from a family who were reasonably wealthy being stuck and learning to get one with people day after day, week after week and year after year. And then all of a sudden, you're torn out of this world with a simple sentence.
ANNE'S DIARY ENDS HERE
I can't help but wonder how Anne would have written up the 4th of August. How she would portray her undoubtable fear and shock of being torn from a routine she has had to stick to religiously for two years. (I hesitated before using that word, since the whole reason they were there was their religion. And yet, Anne talks about the Bible, but never the Torah.)
For me, my degree added another layer of interest to this book. Because 1944 was also the Dutch hunger winter. Now this has had very interesting effects on the genetics of people born or living there and gave geneticists a fascinating insight into epigenetics, which I'll write about somewhere else. But hearing Anne writing about boiled lettuce, mouldy potatoes, and beans for every meal because that's all there was, was just another reminder that this was real and had happened.
Anne's dream was to become a writer or a journalist after the war, when she had finished her schooling. She never managed to attain that goal in life. But her diaries have ensued she has got what she wanted. She has not been forgotten after her life was over.
I think she'd like that.
