I have several books written by people in Anne Frank orbit but before I turn to them, it occurred to me that it might be good idea to re-visit a famous diary again - after all, I read it as a teenager myself and most of it probably went over my head back than + I am different person now than I was at 13 so I hoped to read it with better understanding and with a different perspective. This will be the only exception to my decision that in 2026 I read only authors I never read before: everybody else that I read this year was my first-time introduction. To be honest, its been more than four decades between reading it than and now, so its almost as a total new experience.
Sure, I was familiar with the story itself - not only via documentaries and articles online, but a famous Westertoren church tower that she used to see from her hiding place is a familiar spot where I walk into city centre. I have also visited the neighbourhood in Amsterdam South where Frank family actually owned apartment (many German-Jewish families lived there), also saw the bookshop where her father bought her the diary as a birthday present, her school and the sculpture standing in the middle of the square where family used to live. All of this means that the ghost of Anne Frank is always present around the city but since I live here, I didn't feel the urge to either re-read her diary or visit the hiding place. I would if I only visit Amsterdam and than it would be on top of my list of places to visit, but I am here every day and was secretly thinking it would be a depressing experience. However, if I want to read memoirs of people connected to her story, it would just make sense to first go back to the roots of the story, her own diary.
At the start, young Anne is just an ordinary schoolgirl, a chatterbox preoccupied with boys, flirting and her school friends. But very soon the dark clouds start gathering and when her older sister Margot gets official call to report to Gestapo, the family quickly goes into hiding, sooner than they had planned. Initially I think they were actually fairly comfortable just four of them, but soon they accept other people to join them and this is when real struggle begin, since being locked up in silence and limited space started to put pressure on everybody in hiding. Anne's diary swings between her teenage obsessions and descriptions of life in hiding - while its heartbreaking (and easily understood) that teenage girl feels so passionately about movie stars, boys, her hair or fashion, its the other parts of diary that are much more interesting to me, like stories about survival, bombing of Amsterdam, police on the streets, children breaking the windows and stealing everything that I personally find gripping.
"Little children, eight- and eleven-year-olds, smash the windows of people's homes and steal whatever they can lay their hands on. People don't dare leave the house for even five minutes, since they're liable to come back and find all their belongings gone. Every day the newspapers are filled with reward notices for the return of stolen typewriters, Persian rugs, electric clocks, fabrics, etc. The electric clocks on street corners are dismantled, public phones are stripped down to the last wire."
While her teenage musings might seem repetitive, it is exactly because of them that Anne still touches so many people around the world because we all understand where she comes from - we all went trough the puberty and our own dilemmas, arguments with parents and phases where hormones shift between high and low. However, it was the story about life in hiding and wartime Amsterdam that deeply resonated with me and I read it surprisingly quickly, with greatest interest. I am actually going to visit her hiding place next week.
