The Diary of a young girl - Anne Frank, the heart breaking story of Nazi atrocities ..

Thirteen year old Anne Frank

It was on a passing mention by my friend Ravin about Anne Frank, that I decided to google about her. When I read that she was a victim of the German atrocities and the diaries she wrote over a two year period around 1942, when she was thirteen years and marching to fifteen, became a true testimony of what the children and common people around Germany especially the Jews feared about the Nazis, I decided it should be read. The book has been read by millions of people all over the world and has been translated to more than seventy languages.  A great testimony of the sufferings of the Jewish people during the second world war.

"The Diary of a Young Girl, also known as The Diary of Anne Frank, is a book of the writings from the Dutch-language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. The diary was retrieved by Miep Gies, who gave it to Anne's father, Otto Frank, the family's only known survivor, just after the Second World War was over. " - wikipedia.

The atrocities committed by both parties during the second World War, especially the hardships and pains of the Jews of Germany and Europe in general had to undergo during the Second World War has been very well explained from the lenses of a teenager in the book.

The book explains the how Anne's family to escape imprisonment and possible gassing in the concentration camps or gas chambers decided to run away to Netherlands. In Netherlands they had to stay in an office cum warehouse for almost two years to escape the prying eyes of their neighbours sharing their living with another family and three male jews.

Anne Frank diary in her house, a museum now

The narration by Anne of her daily events are very interesting. Especially of the fear that grips the whole family when someone knocks on the door, the efforts taken by the family to prevent noise from the house going outside, masking their daily activities to give everyone the feeling that there were no one staying in the warehouse.

The casual mention by Anne of how Jews were discriminated against by the Nazis and were sent to concentration camps and gas chambers is really frightening and at the same time sad too. How could European white man discriminate and exterminate his fellow white men so disgustingly is a thought that runs through the back of our mind while we are reading the book.

The dairy was written before the era of digital computers and so I was naturally inclined to know how the dairy entries were done manually. 

Wall in Anne's room ..

The beauty of the book is that we are able to see the Nazi Germany from the eyes of a 13 year old girl.  How did an intelligent community of Germans get to be swayed by the communal propaganda of Hitler and the Nazis over fifty years ? The Germans under Hitler were allowing the Nazis to commit the atrocity on the Jews.  Sadly by 1945, the greatest extermination of a race was methodically underway and almost 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis around the world.

The world has learnt a hard lesson from this and see that there is no repetition of this atrocity on any section of the population in any other part of the world. We should not allow politicians to use communal propaganda to divide the people and kill each other. The events happening in Syria and Iraq over the growth of ISIS is a serious event all of us should try to address seriously.

There is a no place for hatred in our society and in this world, let us unite in love. We all belong to the group of Homo sapiens and we may have brutally killed or evolved from our cousins Homo erectus maybe 300,000 years back, but we should not kill our own brothers, be they from Caucasian, Negroid or Mongoloid race, never ever ...

Anne and family were captured on 4 August 1944 by the Nazis on being informed to the authorities by an unknown informer and sent to prison. The reason, they were Jews and nothing else. Around Feb 1945, Anne, 16 and her sister Margot, 18 contracted Typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and died.

How lucky are people living in democratic countries ? they fear nobody and can exercise their freedom to choose their religion, profession, partner and a future. 

The way Anne analyses human emotions and writes of the limited people in her diary from a teenager's viewpoint in a deep and erudite manner, I wonder whether in Anne, we have lost a future Nobel Prize winner in Literature ..

To know more about the life of Anne Frank, visit the Anne Frank website here ..

Click here to buy it from Amazon .. 

If we were to look at the 6 million Jews who were killed during the five years from 1940 to 1945, it comes to approximately 3300 everyday. That is a great tragedy the world does not want to see again. All the world residents and leaders should do their level best to avoid such a catastrophe again, not for the rest of time humans are on this planet. A grave lesson all earthlings should understand and learn. No wonder in spite of constituting just 0.001 percent of global population, they have got almost 20% of all Nobel Prizes awarded so far.  Of the 900 people who have been awarded the Nobel Prizes so far, over 20%, ie. 180 have been Jews. A point for the world to ponder ..

George.