The Diary of a Young Girl
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There was a time in my life when I convinced myself the events in this book never happened.
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Hm, that's interesting. No, I have never done that.Do you have any idea why you did it?
I did try to blank out the ending. I just created an alternative fantasy where she lived.
Paul Martin wrote: "Hm, that's interesting. No, I have never done that.Do you have any idea why you did it?"
well I guess I did it because I couldn't cope with the truth like Taygus said.
I mean she was around the same age as me and I couldn't accept that she went through all those horrible things.
I've never done something like that, but I can understand it. People sometimes consciously but often subconsciously block out trauma, and if you found the events in the book traumatic, I can see it making sense to block out the reality.
Makes sense as a block to trauma - i mean, if you read it at the same age as Anne was, it´s natural to try and erase the evil that happened to her, and simply denie it.It didn´t happen to me.
My mother often questioned the scene where the dentist cleaned the teeth of Mrs. VanDaan. My mother never once questioned the authenticity of the holocaust, she just thought that the scene was a little too dramatic and that Anne may have dramatized it to paint Mrs. VanDaan as a ridiculous figure. Since Anne was a teenager I think it's a reasonable idea.Probably not what people are talking about. I didn't have the same experience as blocking out trauma.
When I read this, I know how it ends...but deep in my heart, I was hoping that Anne was able to be rescued from the death camps and be a normal girl and grow into a woman. So sad!
I can relate, kinda sorta. I believe that when I read it, I didn't realize that it was a true story, and welcomed it as fine literature by a young writer (I fancied that one day I would write, too, so I was looking at it to see how a child writes a novel). I think it dawned on me soon thereafter what happened to her, in particular, but I had no place to put my feelings. I believe I picked it up a second time, when I was older, where the true horrors of what she experienced found their place in my heart of sadness. I can't bear to look at the book now.
Ironically, I would experience the plight of refugees as a caseworker in the Philippines, processing Indochinese refugees. Again, I stilled my heart until I saw Schindler's list years after its release. I think some of us put our sadness away, until we are strong enough to handle it. Unfortunately, that's what also makes us callous to the world events around us, like Gaza. But, I digress.
I first read Diary of a Young Girl at about age 9 and knew it was a true story. As a child of parents who lived through the Depression and World War II, I was never shielded from the truth about how horrible life could be. Through my pre-teen and teenage years I voraciously read about World War II and the Holocaust. My parents never censored my reading (except for The French Lieutenant's Woman at age 12).In 8th grade Civics, our teacher ran the Nuremberg trials tapes. We watched them for at least a week and nothing was censored. It included a lot of German footage taken at the gas chambers and of the camps. It is something I can never forget.
My daughter read the Anne Frank story at a relatively young age, as well as The Devil's Arithmetic. Both made a big impression on her. I read the second book at the same time and found it very moving too.
Anne makes a unique connection to most people who are able to read her words. She was not perfect and yet she seems so much more fully realized than most teenagers do. Partly because of the circumstances she found herself in during those years and partly because she was obviously a very intelligent and articulate young woman. It seems almost likely that she would have gone on to very good things had she survived. We can imagine her having a lively young adulthood, with many gentlemen enjoying her flirtations. We see her going to college, finding a foothold in the world. We can see her with a successful career as a writer or journalist. We imagine her husband and her children and we could very well picture her walking beside us today, an elderly woman with lots of little great grandchildren around her and they would be barely matching the energy and vigor that she would still possess. Anne is the ultimate example of Human Possibility and for these reasons, Anne is the part of us that is still possible. The part that still dreams, still yearns, still gets silly and daydreams about boys. When we arrive at that very real and bitter end, with just the little red-checked diary lying on the ground we feel robbed of the possibility that she and all other victims of genocide might represent. It's not at all surprising that a young reader might block it out. It's how we keep Anne alive, in the ways that we can.
There was a time in my life when I dreamed, hoped and prayed the events in this book never happened...or that such things could never occur again...or that even worse things hadn't happened in the past. For I desperately wanted to deny that humanity has not yet reached the stage where s/he deserves to caress the cheek of God...
I read it when I was ten and was horrified. I'd never even lost a relative - or pet - and the idea that these things could have happened ... the book was my first exposure to the Holocaust. I asked my dad about it. He was at Normandy on D-Day and was one of the soldiers present at the liberation/opening of one of the concentration camps. He never talked much about what he saw or did, but he told me Anne Frank's story was entirely real.
Later in life, when the series 'Holocaust' was on TV, my younger sister watched it with him, and she said to him, Dad, was it as bad as that?
His answer, it was worse.
I've read this book when I was like 14 and I can say that it was really hard for me to believe that all those things she wrote were actually true. However, I never denied it or anything like that
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So you convinced yourself it couldn't possibly be true.
No, I've never done anything like that.