LITERATURE AND REFLECTIONS ON WRITING

THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK (excerpt)

Saturday, June 20, 1942

Writing a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Oh well, it doesn't matter. I feel like writing, and I have an even greater need to get all kinds of things off my chest.
"Paper has more patience than people." I thought of this saying one of those days when I was feeling a little depressed and was sitting at home with my chin in my hands, bored and listless, wondering whether to stay in or go out. I finally stayed where I was, brooding. Yes, paper does have more patience, and since I'm not planning to let anyone else read this stiff-backed notebook grandly referred to as a "diary," unless I should ever find a real friend, it probably won't make a bit of difference.
Now I'm back to the point that prompted me to keep a diary in the first place: I don't have a friend.

FRANK, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. London: Puffin Books / Penguin Books, 2002.

For the whole text and the excerpts from 6/20/1942 to 7/5/1942, go to https://genius.com/Anne-frank-the-diary-of-anne-frank-excerpts-6-20-1942-7-5-1942-annotated. Accessed on October 20, 2020.

The Diary of a Young Girl remains the single most poignant true-life story to emerge from the Second World War.
In July 1942 Anne Frank and her family, fleeing the horrors of Nazi occupation, hid in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse. Anne was thirteen when the family went into the secret annex and, over the next two years, she vividly describes in her diary the frustrations of living in such confined quarters, the constant threat of discovery, the hunger and the fear. Her diary ends abruptly when, in August 1944, she and her family were finally discovered by the Nazis.
Anne Frank died in March 1945, aged fifteen, in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
The book The Diary of a Young Girl provides a deeply moving and unforgettable portrait of Anne Frank – an ordinary and yet an extraordinary teenage girl.