ANNE FRANK: THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL | KAIROS GLOBAL | APRIL 2020

Author: Albina Babu

In the beginning, God created human beings to be like him and ‘saw that it was good’. However, as a consequence of our pride and rebellion against God, humanity has caused unspeakable suffering through its sinful actions; including injustice, war and mass murder. A situation in which all these factors were seen was the Holocaust, which was the genocide of millions of ‘undesirable’ people during World War II. Jews, Romani (‘gypsies’), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the disabled were targeted due to an immoral and evil belief of the superiority of a specific type of human (the Aryan master race) in comparison to the rest of humanity, who were seen to be racially invaluable and subhuman. As a result of the Nazi racial ideology, 6 million Jewish lives were destroyed, reducing the Jewish population in Europe by 67%. 

Annelies Marie Frank is one of the most well-known Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Her diary, ‘Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl’, has sold more than 35 million copies. Anne started her diary in 1942 at the age of 13, when she went into hiding with the rest of her family in the secret annexe of an old warehouse, in order to avoid persecution by the Nazis led by Adolf Hitler. She began writing in the hope that it would be a ‘great source of comfort and support’. Her account of life in hiding during the Second World War is an extremely personal and enlightening version of a historical tragedy. She writes about her feelings – the guilt of being allowed to live whilst her friends were being ‘marched to their death’; the fears of being forced into a concentration camp; the hope for an end to the war and the longing for a return to their ‘old lives’. The diary then stops suddenly in August 1944 when the residents of the annexe were captured by the Nazis. Anne died three months short of her sixteenth birthday at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, most likely due to an epidemic of typhus fever. 

The theologian C.S. Lewis wrote in ‘Mere Christianity’ that God wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate and teachable, as good children are, but also intelligent. This was emulated by Anne Frank through her innocence and perception. She showed intelligence and strength beyond her years, evidenced by her writing: ‘I know what I want, I have a goal, an opinion, I have a religion and love. Let me be myself and then I am satisfied. I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage’.

Although Anne was not particularly religious, it seems that her time in the annexe isolated from society and a difficult period of her life led her to a stronger faith. She stated in July 1944: ‘People who are religious should be glad, since not everyone is blessed with the ability to believe in a higher order… Religion keeps a person on the right path. Not the fear of God, but upholding your own sense of honour and obeying your own conscience’. 

Anne’s story teaches us fundamental lessons, including the importance of hope and positivity in times of distress and danger: ‘I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains’. Even with all the discrimination and hatred that she experienced solely because of her religion, she believed in the goodness of humanity: ‘I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart’. Although heart-breaking, this inspiring book is certainly worth a read as it successfully manages to bring the person of Anne Frank and the horrors of war alive through Anne’s suffering and compelling writing style.

Albina Babu is an MSc graduate living in Birmingham, UK, with her mum Ancy and sisters Arsha and Aneena.