Review #11: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Title: The Diary of a Young Girl
Author: Anne Frank
Publisher: Anchor (February 1, 1996)
Release Date: 1952 (1st time in English)
Reading Level: Ages 9-12
Pages: 352
Source: Bought

Written by a young Jewish girl while in hiding with her family from the Nazis during World War II, Frank's Diary has been dramatized in one form or another in every major language and country around the world.

The only book I've read 'about' the Holocaust, before this one, was The Book Thief, which turned into one of my favorite. Now that my teachers recommended Anne Frank, I read it. I loved it, although it is so monotone sometimes that I wanted to sleep --like one of my friends said today to all our classmates and the teacher.

When I read the first lines of this book, it really felt like she needed a friend --and that's exactly what she found: Kitty, her confidant, her diary. She had just turned into thirteen years old when she began writing --specially, at first, about boys and her friends. It is so interesting when we realize that she changes. She grows up --in every single meaning of it-- when her and her family have to go into hiding, once her dad receives a call-up notice from the SS. Since then, they pass two years living in the Secret Annexe, a three-floor place above her dad's Opekta offices, until the SS discovers them.

They can't talk aloud, they can't make a noise, they can't do anything outside that place. They only can eat, read, talk whisperingly, write and sleep. And all these difficulties had made her grow up, made she doesn't be so radical anymore, made she thinks of some aspects she didn't.

Besides that, she had sentimental problems with her mother, admired her father, kind of liked her sister, but didn't trust anybody --until she turns into Peter's friend in the Annexe. Now she has a person in who she can really trust. They discuss topics she would never discuss with her relatives. They kind of have a romance and Anne gets pretty excited with it. She talks about it everyday when they meet in the loft. But there are great scenes...

I can't tell anything more about it... You have to read it, if you haven't yet, to know what I can't say. I can't say in words what some of the things she says meant to me. There are so-touching feelings behind them! And the lines that most touched me were the last ones: "(...) and [I] keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if... If only there were no other people in the world". God bless you, Anne!
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