Dear Anne | Read-A-Long Diaries

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a contribution to the brilliant Read-A-Long Diaries Event; if you haven't read The Diary of a Young Girl yet, or would like to go again along with other people so you can discuss, remember to use #readalongdiaries on Twitter and Instagram! I'd check out Ely and Inge's blogs too - they've worked so hard to organise this, and it really is amazing, so make sure you stop by and say hi.

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(Ely made this banner. She said I could steal it.)

Dear Anne,

I have often wondered what it is about you that makes your story so inspiring, that has allowed it to survive through the generations even when you didn't. Don't get me wrong: I'm glad it did. I'm glad that, through your diary, we've been able to recognise all the pain and sacrifice Holocaust victims suffered just so they could try to maintain a normal life.

But why you? Why did your voice get heard above the millions of others who died?

Of course you went through terrible, heart-wrenching things, but those people did too. Your beliefs and behaviours were ripped apart, changed almost completely by these terrible things - but lots of people felt their beliefs change during the war. I see all this, all these similarities that could arguably make you just one of many, and yet there's no way I can deny the unique effect your words had on me and other people around the world.

"And all I really want is to be an honest-to-goodness teenager!" ~ Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Maybe it's because you were so young. It's one thing to have gone through the Holocaust as a child and write about it as an adult, like Elie Wiesel did with Night (another beautiful book that had me in tears, but in a very different way), but to write down those thoughts as you had them, without the filter of experience or regret? That, to me, created something entirely different, something raw and unapologetic. However you want to put it, Anne, you did go into that Annexe seeped in innocence. What made your diary so moving is that I could see first-hand as that innocence got stripped away by the horrors of persecution. Because it was logged day to day, I barely noticed at first - I doubt you did, either - but as soon as I really thought about it? The Anne on Page 283 was the same girl, but almost unrecognisable to the girl on Page 1.

If that makes any sense whatsoever. I think it does, just about.

“It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” ~ Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Maybe it's because, even as that situation stripped away your innocence and your thirteen-year-old self, you held on to her morals. It would have been completely understandable for you to become bitter and unbelieving after all you had to suffer: many of the strongest did, after all. That wouldn't have been wrong. But what made your story inspiring as well as heartbreaking was that you stubbornly refused to let go of your ideals.

"I'd like to spend all my time writing, but that would probably get boring." ~ Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Maybe - and this thought is very specific to me, I suppose - it's because you were a writer. I can relate to those endless hours attempting to scratch out something of worth, and look up to how organic your words are, how it's more like you're thinking on the page than actually writing. I hope even non-writers can understand what it's like to find release in something, to want to do it every second of every day until it almost takes you over. The joy and frustration and fascination . . . it seeps through the pages, and it's so inspiring that you managed to follow your dreams even cooped up like that for so long. I guess I must be able to at least try, if you did.

Maybe it's because there's no other book about the Holocaust that's so raw, and unfiltered, and real.

Do you know what? I think that's it. I think all the other things I've talked about - your youth, your stubborness and your fascination with writing - have combined with a thousand other things to create something uniquely true. And I've suddenly realised that, in my quest to work out what it is that makes your story so special, I've forgotten to do the most important thing.

I've forgotten to thank you.

You'll never know the effect your diary had on so many people. You'll never know that it's had me in tears three times, or that last time I read it I was so moved I pulled out a yellow highlighter and started marking quotes I wanted to remember. You'll never know that on some pages, there's more yellow words than there are un-highlighted. But I really, truly wish you could know that you've been published, and that your book has been read by millions of people in dozens of languages. That would have been what you'd wanted, after all.

Happy birthday, Anne. I hope you are proud of what you have created.

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In the comments: Is there anything that you'd like to say to Anne, if you could? Would you want to thank her, or ask her questions, or tell her what her work has meant to you? I'd love to hear how her diary has affected you, because I'm sure we've all been touched in very different ways.

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Conversation Starters: The Holocaust

Recently, I've become pretty obsessed with the Holocaust and the history of anti-semitism. Not in the completely cold-hearted, slightly spock-like way that I'm often obsessed with crime dramas, but because I want to try to understand what made such a horrible thing happen. I want to pick up the scattered historical pieces, make sure that it never happens again - that the current genocides, in Darfur and Syria and Burma, don't just keep being ignored - and make this world a more equal place.

Mostly, I want to hear people's stories.

Hopefully, you'll want to hear people's stories too, because then we can start having conversations. The Holocaust might be near-buried in our past, but it needs to be dug up again, because similar genocides - and anti-semitism - are an all-too horrible part of the present. 

If you do, then these books are where you can start. Where I started, anyway.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

No-one can mention the Holocaust or WWII literature without Anne Frank's diary. And classics become classics for a reason: what makes that book so special to me isn't just the horrible things she went through, her raw and matter-of-fact descriptions of them, or even the amazing ways she bore everything.

It was the fact that, before all of that, she was just a normal thirteen year old girl.

We might not be able to imagine even half the horror of being cooped up in three rooms as one of eight people for years, sitting in complete silence for the whole day so no-one hears anything. But we've all lived a version of the joy that comes from forming a table tennis club with your best friends, or scrounging ice-cream sundaes from boys who flirt with you.

Reading how someone exactly like us bore the horrors of that period is a true testament to the human spirit, and the most important part of this book is the truth of it. Anne humanises the heartbreak: our brains struggle to even comprehend what six million deaths look like, but one? We can imagine that all too well.

Night by Elie Wiesel

This is another beautiful account from a survivor that absolutely sings with realism and the emotional numbness of trauma, but what makes it different to Young Girl - and gives it its unique poignancy - is that it was written by a survivor years after the event. It's almost chilling when you think of how much those horrible memories must have seared themselves onto a young boy's memory, and truly eye-opening to read about them through the lens of someone who's had years to reflect on what impact they had on his life.

This book is powerful, deep (layers like an onion), and masterfully open to interpretation. What I love is how many hidden meanings you can understand from just thinking about some of the words; I'm sure, were I to re-read it, that I would have an almost entirely different interpretation.

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne

I don't want to tell you too much about this story, because the blurb itself tells you to go in with an open mind (and I would be an absolutely awful book blogger if I DISOBEYED a BLURB) but it's about a little boy called Bruno who doesn't understand what's going on.

But he isn't necessarily on the side you would expect. And World War Two is no place for any child.

Please, please read at least one of these books if you're the least bit interested in what happened. It's important that those stories get told to someone.

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In the comments: Do you have any more books about the Holocaust to share? What other historical periods do I need to investigate? And why are YOU interested in the Holocaust?

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Words for a Wednesday: The Diary of a Young Girl

I mentioned Anne Frank and her diary as one of my four 'superbooks', but it's really hard to do such an important piece of literature justice with a few paragraphs, so I thought I'd bring back the intermittent Words for a Wednesday to tell you guys a bit more about how amazing and eye-opening this book is.

She was a German Jew living in the World War Two years, and life was tough for her and her family. When the Nazis came into power, it happened slowly, but they began to commence what Hitler believed was the 'cleansing' of the human race. Jews weren't part of his Aryan, or perfect race, and that meant they basically weren't human in the brainwashed German people's eyes. So Jews were hunted down and killed in sickeningly organised camps, making one of the most horrible acts of genocide in modern history. Anne and her family were forced to go into hiding (if you'd like more information, this might be a good place to start.)

This book itself is absolutely due for a re-read, but after looking through some quotes on Goodreads, I can't help but feel like I'm back there experiencing it for the first time. Just . . . this.

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single second before starting to improve the world." - Anne Frank

Do you know why I love this so much? Because Anne acts the way we all wish we could when faced with extreme hardship: her hope shows one of the most amazing parts of human nature, the ability to keep your head up and keep believing in the simple power of humanity, even when it feels like most of the species has turned against you. Where many of us would descend into fear, Anne - a girl who was originally 'shallow' by her own admission - found a reserve of strength within her that I think some of us need to remember is there.

It used to make me think that she would have managed to change the world - and probably most of our minds - had she not had her life cut brutally short, but then I remembered. She already has. And to explain why, I need to give you another quote, because you're worth it and I feel like spoiling you lovely people today.

This one is from Josef Stalin, who we have to admit was not the most popular person in the world, but has a point in this case:

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." - Josef Stalin

The Holocaust was a horrible, horrible thing, and it wasn't just a million deaths. Six million were gassed in those chambers, and that's only the Jews. Almost a million gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and disabled people were killed too: it gets to the point when those numbers become so overwhelming that we can't take them in, and that's where Anne came in. She focused us on that one death, hers, and continues to remind us just what a tragedy Nazi rule was. It's people like her, stories like hers, who bring even the most horrible parts of history to life.

I believe Anne Frank has changed the world by allowing us to learn from the past.

Other people can believe other things about what she did, of course, because books are so subjective, and that's why I'd love to hear about your personal opinion. We need to talk about our histories, even the sad parts. We need to talk about them most - mostly because horrible genocide didn't stop on the 2nd September 1945. Vietnam, 1975. Rwanda, 1990. Violence in Darfur started in 2003, but it's still going on.

We need to talk about the sad parts because the human race hasn't yet learnt from its past.

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In the comments: So . . . what is your opinion? And do you agree with the quote? Do we all have the power to change the world?

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