The Diary of Anne Frank

"I am half Jewish, and when I first read this book I was about ten and totally unaware of what had happened in the war. The Holocaust is something that even in the 1960s people were reluctant to talk about, especially in front of children. Like Jane Eyre, Anne is someone you fall in love with as a person. Her enthusiasm and her innocence and the blossoming of this tender, sensitive, inquisitive young woman in the most adverse of conditions speak to you so directly. As a consequence of reading her diary, I began to keep my own and have gone on keeping it every day ever since. I have also always had an interest in direct testimony and the importance of bearing witness. There was the complete horror of not just the constant fear of discovery but also the claustrophobia and irritation of being locked up with a whole lot of people who have nothing in common with you. The people who shared the tiny hidden flat with the Franks were irritating and bigoted and smelly and boring, and yet, amidst all that, she managed to fall in love with the one other person who was there of her age. It’s both inspirational and agonising. Here is a person who cannot possibly be blamed for anything that was going on and yet she suffers both in hiding and then afterwards when she was murdered after the diaries end. I think it shows people our common humanity, and it reminds us as adults what it is to be young and passionate about life. We all hope we would try and be as noble as she is in adversity, to remember that there is something indomitable about the human spirit and youth."

"As my Dad and I were leaving the hotel near Arnhem where we were staying, I saw a copy of an old postcard pinned to the wall. It was from a girl called Anne Frank, who had spent a summer there, less than a kilometre from where my father had lived. Many people have read her diary . If you haven’t, it’s not too late. I gather from the introduction by Mirjam Pressler that there are three main versions: the one she kept for herself, the one she kept for public consumption and edited at age 15 (after she heard from the Dutch government in exile that after the war they might collect eyewitness accounts) and the version her father Otto put together, which excluded the sex bits and rude comments about her mother. She’s just so lovely and writes about everything that happened so clearly. She was born in Frankfurt in 1929, but moved to Holland with her family when she was five, because things had already gotten so bad for Jews in Germany. Later on, as Holland too became unsafe for Jews, her father Otto tried to move the family to America, but was unable to get a visa. They survived two whole years in hiding but were discovered nine months before the end of the war. It’s just so sad."