I know it took me a long time, but I just finished “Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl”. Reading it didn’t make me feel any better, especially at the end but I am so incredibly moved by that girl. All throughout she reminded me so much of myself, and I was reliving my own 14 year old thoughts, and time of being stuck in such close quarters with my own family. The fact that she wanted to be a writer, and share her knowledge and ideas with the world is humbling. Being able to relate to her passion of writing, and wanting to share it with the world made me connect with her and of course her incessant chatter, an affliction I also suffer from. Part of me is overjoyed that her dream was fulfilled, but another side of me cries for her, that she was never able to enjoy that overwhelming happiness and reward of watching her dream come true. She so desperately longed for so many things that she was never granted.

The Afterword is short but torturous to read, and once again I was shocked by how dreadful people can be. Because Holland is where the story takes place, I was self-conscious at times to read Anne Frank in public here, and talk about Nazis and the millions who died at cruel concentration camps. I constantly wonder how the locals feel and how much thought they put into it. I will never be able to grasp the overpowering reality that this all happened, and how gradually and yet quickly everything became so sour. In the 1940’s people were still just normal people like us today and somehow it all went so dreadfully wrong.  

Kees pointed something out that was quite frightening. In the future, people will look back at us and feel the same way about the cruelty in which we cultivate and slaughter animals for meat. That really made me stop and think again. Could we really be contributors to such evil?

I want to appreciate the luxuries and freedoms I have today, but the closeness of history makes me slightly wary.                                                                              

I could go on and on about how I feel about the cruelty of war. I was at Auschwitz when I was 16 and I feel like reading Anne Frank’s story has brought another level of emotion to my knowledge of WW2. She brought it to life, and it is truly depressing.  I am so grateful that she kept her diary and that her story was shared with the world and I can’t help but wonder what she would’ve become after the war.  I pray that this kind of cruelty will stop and never happen again. But the scared voice in the back of my head says, “or would that hope only be in vain?”                                                                                                              

What can we DO to make it stop?

Savannah Grace

P.S. Thank you to Jessica, for lending me her book to read. I cannot wait to visit the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam!

P.P.S. I highly recommend this read