Anne - SHORT ESSAY on Anne Frank

A Postcard I bought at the Anne Frank House

Anne Frank was thirteen years old when she started to diarise her life in hiding. For anyone who hasn’t read her, I implore you to research her life, and find a copy of the published diary if you can. My words don’t feel enough to explain the continuing importance of Anne’s story. The lessons that can be taken from it are incredibly valuable, and it seems to me that their relevance has yet to diminish.

I was inspired by Anne to write today after I recently visited her place of hiding in Amsterdam – the acterhuis (meaning literally, the behind house, tucked away from street view) – where she and seven others lived in secret, to escape persecution. Any attempt at describing the impact that visiting the house had on me will be an understatement and woefully insufficient.

While I think it is important to talk about difficult topics, I am approaching this one with hesitation. I am scared of polluting the conversation or diminishing its seriousness by writing this small amount on it. But I am going to try my best to voice something I felt, deep in the pit of my stomach, when I stood in the room where Anne Frank, a once breathing teenage girl, lived for two years.

The Anne Frank House is a maze of mementos. Once belonging to Anne: passport photos, letters, childhood toys, drawings, and, of course, diaries are preserved in each room of the tall, winding building. Her bedroom was the most visual display of her thoughts; her walls form the backdrop to her photos and magazine clippings. I’ve read since that, over time, Anne covered her more childish postcards with images of Art History, as she outgrew herself. During her time in hiding, Anne wrote short stories, collected her favourite quotes from writers in a notebook and dreamt of her future. She wanted to be a journalist, publish her writing, study Art History and travel to Paris and London.

Through our differences in time, language, country and (clearly) life experiences, I felt overwhelmingly close to her, in our similarities. Anne was many things, but above all else, she was a teenage girl that was learning to be herself. Having just written ANnabout building myself out of my collection of collages, a few days later I found myself surrounded by evidence and documentation of the personal, intimate growth of another and different imaginative, driven teenage girl.

Despite this, I find it impossible to consider Anne Frank as just a teenage girl, outside of the context of the scale of the war she lived in. I also think it is perhaps insensitive to try. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote “One voice speaks for six million.” The number of devastating stories overlapping with Anne’s cannot be ignored. I believe each one would make the world a better place for being told, just as Anne’s has done. 

But I felt, surrounded by examples of Anne’s creativity and introspectiveness, that there is a reason we remember her especially. Clearly, she wrote a diary, and in doing so preserved a piece of history. She made the decision to rewrite old diary entries in the form of a novel, because she wanted them to be published after the war, and these thoughts – the musings of a thirteen-year-old girl that she thought no one would want to read – became a book that moved generations of people, including Eleanor Roosevelt, JFK and Hilary Clinton. I think it’s important to remember that not any 13-year-old in her shoes could have written a diary as inspiring as Anne’s. Her writing was filled with her head and her heart, and both were brilliant.

After losing his daughter and finding a little bit of her again in her diaries, Otto Frank was surprised by what was inside Anne’s head. Her diary, he said, “revealed a completely different Anne to the child that I had lost. I had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings… We never knew how intense her personal development was; and of all of us, she was the most self-critical.” Not to dramatise an incredibly sombre point, but I felt that this quote went to the heart of common misassumptions about teenage girls. Anne managed to shine a light on the universally teenage, intense, often inexplicable feelings of repression and resentment towards both ourselves and our surroundings.

Anne Frank was a brave soul, who gave a voice to those living in a particularly horrific part of history. But she was also a hero for teenage girls. Utterly brilliant, in the specific way that only teenage girls can be. I wish I could communicate my gratitude, to her, and to every other ambitious, reflective and hopeful teenager.