The girl whose diary made a difference- Anne Frank

Do you write your own diary? If you think it’s useless, Anne Frank did it and her diary was a great source of history of the Germany during the World War II.

Who was Anne Frank?

Anne Frank is a Jewish girl who has to go into hiding during World War 2 to escape from the Nazis (Nazism was a 20th-century German ideology when it was governed by the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler). She was born on 12 June 1929 in the German city of Frankfurt am Main, where her father’s family had lived for generations. She has a sister, Margot, who is three and a half years older. Together with her family members, she hid in a secret annex in Amsterdam during the years 1943 and 1944, during which she wrote her now world famous diary. Unfortunately, they were discovered in 1944 and were sent to the Jewish concentration camps where she died.

What was her diary about?

On her 13th birthday, Anne receives a diary as a gift from her parents. At first, she finds it a little odd to be writing in a diary. She can’t imagine that anyone would ever be interested in the musings of a 13-year-old girl. But slowly with writing more and more, she realizes that diaries are written not for others to read it, but for ourselves, for the pleasure of writing. Soon, her diary became her best friend. What Anne needed was to vent her feelings. The first thing she writes is: “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”

While she’s in hiding, Anne decides to think of her diary as a friend, whom she names Kitty. It makes the writing easier. Besides, she doesn’t really have a real friend, ‘and that’s how the whole idea of keeping a diary started’, she admits. ‘All I think about when I‘m with friends is having a good time. I can’t bring myself to talk about anything but ordinary everyday things. We don’t seem to be able to get any closer, and that’s the problem. Maybe it’s my fault that we don’t confide in each other. In any case, that’s just how things are, and unfortunately, they’re not liable to change. This is why I’ve started the diary.’

Anne did not just write about her life during the hiding in Netherlands. She also wrote her favorite stories and quotes written by other authors that she liked in a notebook. Her diary profoundly indicates what she thought about life and how she wanted to see it. She became a woman from a girl there.
Anne always thought that after the war ended, she would be a journalist and a bigger writer. And if she could not write articles for newspapers, she told herself she would write for the pleasure of it. ‘But I want to achieve more than that. I can’t imagine having to live like Mother, Mrs van Pels and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people,’ she wrote in her diary once.

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Anne Frank did not live to grow up and become a journalist. She died at 16. But the passion she held for writing- something she was not sure enough, made her one of the biggest young inspirational figures of the Second world history. She inspired million young kids to start writing up their thoughts and collecting their ideas in the best friend anyone can ever have- a diary.

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