The events of the World Wars staging on the planet earth not only brought the highest recorded casualties of the 20th century but brought many historical consequences and incredible stories. People in my community often take Hitler‘s genocide of killing 6 million European Jews as an act of achievement or blessing because they theorize the opinion that it is the Jews being blood-thirsty toward the Muslims in Palestine for decades. Hardly they are familiar with the Zionism movement and do not recognize the difference between the Jewish religion and the Zionism movement.
The complexity of the subject lies in the tragic state where the Jews were the prime target in The Holocaust. In my life, I personally came to realize that Jews have been war or political victims ever in the timeline when I happened to watch Roman Polanski‘s The Pianist back in 2003. I was familiar with the face of the young Anne Frank as I happen to see in some tribute videos played on the TV a few years ago and I calculated the prominence of her picture in the history section that there is something very memorable about this girl. Later on, through various sources on the internet, I learned about her personal and posthumous achievement as a teenage diarist revealing some very critical details of the existing chaos in Nazi Germany and the Netherlands, and her very tragic conclusion of giving up life in one of the concentration camps in Germany at a minor age of 15.
Anne Frank rose to posthumous fame globally when her diary was published with the sharp details of her personal life and the war disturbances during her two-year hiding with her family. It is not just an impression of reading a girl’s diary speaking of the world war but it is a deep psychology of understanding one of the 6 million casualties about how a normal person of any age is shaped in the historic or political chaos. How does a girl of 13 with all the luxury of a domestic and school life live an unfortunate life in the two-year hiding with her family?
Everyone in Europe was affected by the world war and Anne Frank is one of the most discussed Jewish victims of that time. As a reader, when you read the first dozens of the letters, you become a child like her. With her writing and your reading, you begin to create and develop an understanding of her, her ideology, her opinion, her social behavior, and attitude towards her parents, her sister, her friends (among which couple of them became more than a friend for a short period), and other people with whom she was hiding in the concealed rooms. Diary was Anne’s best and most loyalist friend but the reading mentally convinces if you are the diary’s replacement and the deceased is talking, admitting, and confessing to you.
Anne wasn’t a childish immature diarist as I was expecting. To my surprise, she was a mature girl who had a treasure of words to describe in detail her physical and emotional developments. She was impressive in giving detail about the structure of the house where the whole family was hiding which is known as the Secret Annex (Achterhuis in Dutch). She has spoken about her relationship with Peter in much detail which draws your attention. Peter was a 16-year-old son of the van Pels family, the family who joined the Franks in the hiding. Besides, she expresses her love for history and literature and set her ambition to become a journalist when the war is finished.
In my reading experience, the dozens of books which I have read so far, this is the book that gives me more pain and grief. I have to admit that when I was reading this book, I was traveling the time and wanting that bad to save the entire family from the evils of invasion. It breaks my heart to understand how much people have to suffer from the decisions made by the people in power. I began thinking while reading her letters about my honest opinion that the whole world, its existence, the life, the timeline, and every creature arriving at the surface are all scripted by God. He is the author, a writer of the fate of the earth and its inhabitants. Anne was bestowed with the diary, a present she got on her 13th birthday from her father. A month later, the hiding began and the diary gifted a month ago became Anne’s keeper of the secrets. For the next two years, she began writing in rich detail about a lot of things until she was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the concentration camp. It was Miep Gies who hid the Franks and van Pels in the Secret Annex. Months after Anne’s tragic death, Miep found the papers and the diaries on the floor of the concealed room. She didn’t read it but forwarded it to Anne’s father Otto Frank after the war when her death was confirmed in the Autumn of 1945. If there was no war, there would have been no hiding and this book would never be written nor reached us. It is all scripted, Anne wasn’t brought into this world to live a normal life. She was born in the most disturbing timeline at the unfortunate place to write the diary and do us a favor to read her. It is all scripted.
Miep Gies died a few years ago at the age of 100. One of Anne’s friends, Hanneli Goslar, is still alive at 88 and now lives in Jerusalem with her family. Goslar has appeared in several Anne Frank documentaries. Had Anne not died in the camp, she might have fulfilled her ambition to become a journalist and would have been 88 to date. Anne and her sister Margot were buried in an unknown mass grave but the reading of her memoir is buried in our hearts and we have sympathies and respect for the poor little girl.
Sami Naik | Film Critic 