Anne Frank and Me
Looking Back on a Life
How The Diary of Anne Frank influenced the paths I chose and steadied me on my way…
“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Anne Frank
My thirteenth summer, I read Anne Frank’s Diary, The Diary of a Young Girl.
That title resonated with me, as I was the same age as Anne, when she began her diary. I curled up on hot summer days, stealing precious hours away from chores, engrossed in her life. She began writing in 1942, I began reading in 1962, but her story felt like my story.
I too was a girl in budding adolescence. Anne didn’t get along with her mother, loved her father and competed with her ‘perfect’ sister. Her words told how she struggled to understand life, including the changes going on in her body as she discovered her sexuality.
That’s just how I feel, I thought, as I poured over the pages. How can she know how I feel? I lived twenty years later, after the war, had a middle-class life, was not being hunted by the Nazi’s, afraid for my life.
But underneath the layers of time, culture, language, war and peace, we were both two young girls sliding into womanhood, unsure of ourselves and our place in the world. My future loomed ahead of me. Anne hoped that her future lay ahead. She wanted to be a writer.
“I want to go on living even after my death!” she wrote on April 5, 1944, four months before her capture and arrest. She did not know that her wish would be granted, that she would go on living, through her diary, after her tragic death at age 15.
The Diary of a Young Girl (also called The Diary of Anne Frank), has sold more than 30 million copies and has been translated into more than 70 languages. The Los Angeles Times reported that, “After the Bible, The Diary of Anne Frank, is the most widely read nonfiction book in the world.” (April 10, 2010)
Even though I knew the end of Anne’s story, as I read her diary, she came alive for me from her words on the page. She felt like a friend, searching to understand her inner and outer worlds. Just to know that there had been one other young girl who felt like I did in so many ways, helped me to feel better about myself and gave me a sense of inner strength.
I felt her resilience as I navigated the challenges of my teenage years, my mother’s anger and abuse, my parent’s crumbling marriage and divorce, problems with school and boys.
If Anne could stay hopeful, with all her hardships, while hiding for over two years, then so could I.
No other book offered such a deep, inside view of another girl my age’s thoughts and feelings, struggles, hopes and dreams. I admired her outspokenness, her cheekiness. When Anne wrote about never being able to go outside, about staring at the sky from a tiny attic window, and about her first kiss with Peter, I could feel it all.
Anne had lost her future. I still had mine.
I saved up my allowance and purchased a small diary, with a tiny lock and key, and began to write down my thoughts and feelings. In my teens, I made my way through a few of those diaries, then in my 20’s, began journaling consistently, using a big notebook.
Journaling has helped me through a painful divorce, career changes and losing loved ones. It has also given me a place to acknowledge progress and positive milestones in my life, my second marriage, grandchildren, awards for writing. As I look back over my long life, I can trace back my love and passion for writing to all those journals and before that, to Anne’s diary.
A few years ago, faced with a long, boring drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I listened to an audio recording of The Diary of a Young Girl. As the dry landscape passed by the windows, I relished again the words that had moved and changed me so many years ago.
They brought to mind my own tender years, and how the spirit behind her words had helped me in my life. Despite my rough beginning, I now have a loving marriage and family, a career as a writer that I am passionate about and tremendous gratitude for the preciousness of life.
On my first visit to Amsterdam this past year, I visited the Anne Frank House. I joined visitors of all ages and cultures as we walked through the cramped spaces of the ‘Secret Annex’ where Anne, her parents, sister and four others, hid for over two years. Each of us listened to the audio on our headsets, the mood, respectful and somber as we moved silently through the cramped spaces.
We saw large images of Anne, so young and vibrant, in school and with her family, before they went into hiding. The family looked happy and prosperous. In one photo, Anne, wrapped up in a thick, warm coat on a cold winter day, snuggled against her father. He had moved the family to Amsterdam from Frankfurt, Germany in 1933, hoping to escape the threat of the Nazis.
Other photos portrayed Jewish families being rounded up and captured, arms up as they marched down the street, away from their lives and their futures. Then, pushed into crowded cattle train cars, crammed together, the German officers standing by, herding, prodding, heartless. The sheer brutality of it felt shocking. Yet it happened, a reminder of how far down we can fall, as humans, in our treatment of each other.
In a film shown at the museum, actress Emma Thompson shared these thoughts:
“The only thing we have to remember is: all her would-haves are our real possibilities. All her would-haves are our opportunities. The book is a flame, a torch and we can light our own candles and illuminate our hearts with the incandescence of her spirit.” (2006)
Now, since visiting the museum, eighty years after she began her diary, I have been reading it again and still feel inspired by her words.
I can look back over my life and see how the ‘incandescence of her spirit’ contributed to me in so many ways. I did not know at 13 that I would begin and then continue to keep journals and become a writer. Her ‘would haves’ did become my possibilities and my opportunities. And for that, I am grateful.
Twenty days before her capture, July 15, 1944, Anne wrote:
“I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquility will return once more…
It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical.
Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, as a result of horrendous hygienic conditions, in early March 1945. Just weeks later, April 12, 1945, English soldiers liberated the camp.
She almost made it.
The Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam welcomes more than a million visitors a year.
Plan to arrange your tickets well ahead of your visit.
Every first Tuesday of the month, all tickets for the following month become available. If there are no more tickets available on the selected date, they are sold out.
There is no waiting list for tickets.
https://www.annefrank.org/en/.
© Diane Covington-Carter 2023
Diane Covington-Carter is an award-winning journalist and author of four books. www.dianecovingtoncarter.com