The Diary of a Young Girl

When I changed high schools after the ninth grade, there was some confusion about how each school handled its history curriculum, and in the shuffle, I lamentably never got a formal education in 20th century world history. I assume this is why I was never required to read this book. Reading it now, decades late to the, uh, party, it’s hard not to wonder how it would have affected me as a teen.

Would it have made me more politically aware? Anne demonstrates a shrewd understanding of not only contemporaneous Dutch political attitudes and the international forces shaping the war, but also the details of why her family fled Germany when she was a small child, and why they eventually wound up in hiding.

Would I have felt less removed from the abject horror of the Holocaust? My own mother was born a day before D-Day. To an adolescent in the early 1990s, all that grainy newsreel footage from World War II may as well have been captured in the Middle Ages. In her diary, Anne’s understanding of what was happening in the concentration camps is accurate but impressionistic, informed by unverifiable rumors and largely cut off from her occupied community. We don’t have a first-hand account of her later experiences of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, but the horrible facts are known—she was separated from her father, then her mother, starved while seeing people marched daily to the gas chambers, and succumbed to typhus shortly after her sister did the same—and they’re felt so much more acutely after having gotten to know her as a precocious but relatable kid intimately sharing common teenage hopes and dreams under extraordinary circumstances.

It’s not a long book (I read a 1972 printing of what I think was the original 1952 English translation, and in hindsight I wish I had sought out a more comprehensive later edition), but I took my time with it, reading it over the course of almost two months. As the pages started to dwindle, and Anne’s optimism grew with the news of Allied advances, so did my dread. From a New York Times account of the book’s stage adaptation opening in Amsterdam in 1956:

There were audible sobs and one strangled cry as the drama struck its climax and conclusion—the sound of the Germans hammering at the door of the hideout. The audience sat in silence for several minutes after the curtain went down and then rose as the royal party left. There was no applause.