The diary of a young girl

                                                           - Anne Frank 

'I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart' were words penned down by Anne Frank on July 15th, 1944; only a few days before she and her family were arrested and taken to a concentration camp. Their crime - they were Jewish.

Anne Frank is supposedly the most popular victim of the Holocaust. Teenagers around the world read the diary as a part of their academic curriculum. But what's so special about this teenager and her diary

that everyone around the globe reads her?

"The diary of a young girl reads much like a fictional story. Thirteen years old Anne and her family are forced to leave their comfortable home and hide from the Nazis in Germany-occupied Holland (now Netherland). They take shelter in her father's office building. Anne confides in her diary, gifted to her on her 13th birthday. In it she writes about her life, going to school and then moving into the hiding place (Annex), the struggles faced there, and the crippling anxiety of being caught and sent to a concentration camp or worse, killed.

Initially written in Dutch and then translated into many languages, the diary of a young girl' encapsulates the horrors faced by families in 'hiding' through the eyes of a teenage girl. The Holocaust (during WW2) killed about six million Jews and there are as many tragic stories, more gruesome than Anne's. But what stands out is the way a 13-year-old could write such an engaging piece of writing. Wars have seldom brought any good, rather taken away so much than humanity could ever endure. Through Anne's diary, we not only see the reality of the times but also the loss of a great budding writer.

©️Aishwarya Sontakke