Olivier Vojetta's Blog: BUS RIDING BOOKS - Posts Tagged "anne-frank"

—BUS RIDING BOOKS—
‘Anne Frank, Diary from a young girl’ by Anne Frank
Here is my review of the book…

Apologies for sharing this review days after the New Year festivities. This book about a life in hiding during WW2 is not exactly cheerful but I think this is the perfect time to talk about it.

Because it makes us realise how lucky we are. And what a better gift than this at a time when we are all penning down our new year resolutions?

Yes there are terrorists’ attacks, yes there is the threat of the Islamic state but the world is all in all the safest it has ever been. So we are damn lucky to live in this world, absolutely. This is what the few weeks I cohabited with Anne Frank taught me.

Anne was with me on every bus ride I took over the period, from home to work and back. As time went by, we became really good friends, meeting each other mornings and evenings. Every encounter started the same way, with "Dearest Kitty...", but instead of talking to her teddy bear, she talked to me for her next three years in hiding, in the attic of a warehouse.

During this time, we got closer and closer. She shared very personal things with me, like her love for Peter... Anne's only hope, yet nothing was certain - "would [they] love each other enough to get married?" Anne asked herself. She also taught me about hope. Hope for the end of the war. Hope for peace. "Where there is hope there is life" she said.

Even if I live in a different time and country, and I didn't grow up wise within the same walls as Anne Frank, I quickly realised we had lots in common as she asked herself "Will I ever be able to write something great?" The same question I've been asking myself for years, although clearly not with the same degree of urgency, nor under the same precarious conditions. She was reading a lot too, we also had that in common. What's more? Well, it seems we both had an older sibling who so much more advanced and intelligent than us in our parents' eyes. The very reason why Anne admitted this to me: "not reading books written for adults until I am as intellectually developed as my genius sister Margot".

1942, 1943, 1944. Anne lived through a lot: from the battle of Stalingrad to Mussolini's resignation in 1943 and all the rest of it, the camps, the laws against Jews, the yellow star. And she took me on her incredible journey. But all of a sudden, the diary stopped. The gestapo arrived and captured the eight people who were hiding in the attic. It was not long until Anne and her sister Margot were deported to a concentration camp and died there, their bodies probably dumped in the communal grave.

Only Otto-frank, her dad, survived. And he would spend the rest of his life making sure that the world hears the message from his daughter. To him and her, I would simply like to say "Je suis Anne Frank" and encourage everyone to read Anne Frank's book again, to make her live again, in this life or another.

O.V.