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The Diary of Anne Frank IS AN ASTONISHING DOCUMENT. IT stands as a historical record—a chronicle of life lived under conditions of hardship and danger in a period whose events continue to haunt us. It is also the record of the inner life of a remarkable adolescent girl. Anne was given the diary for her thirteenth birthday, and she was 15 when she wrote her last entry. The circumstances of its composition are well known. The Franks were Jews living in Holland who went into hiding to escape from the Nazis. With the help of Dutch friends, they and four other people lived for 2 years in hidden quarters above a warehouse in Amsterdam. It was 3 days after Anne wrote the last entry in her diary that their "secret annexe" was raided and the occupants sent to concentration camps. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen 2 months before the liberation of Holland. She was not yet 16.
Her diary, which the Gestapo left, along with other papers, strewn about the floor of the secret annexe, exerts a powerful hold over our imagination. This comes in part from our effort to make sense of the period in which she lived and to integrate its implications. But for the reader of the diary, the engagement above all is with Anne herself. Her diary reveals her to have been a delightful girl—bright, lively, curious, mischievous, whimsical, passionate. She took pleasure in the observation and