![]() ![]() There was Peter, the son of another Jewish family in the Annex, whom Frank thought might become her special confidante. Her diary is littered with descriptions about the nude female forms in art history books that moved her almost to tears.īut the moment I knew that Frank and I were twin souls was when I came to the passages where she mused on her sexuality. She wondered about the inequalities that went beyond the yellow star pinned to her dress, asking, “Soldiers and war heroes are honoured and commemorated… but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?” She, too, felt adolescent guilt, writing that she was “selfishly wrapped up again in her own problems and pleasures” – a charge levelled at every angsty teenager since the dawn of civilisation. She worried to Kitty that her relationship with her mother would never be close, and complained that another boy in the Annex hogged the bathroom. So many of Frank’s concerns, I thought, were just like mine, and so many were about horrors that I would never see. It was with Kitty that she shared her innermost thoughts and feelings with the budding guile of a teenage girl. She had the same affectations as any other girl : Addressing her diary entries to “Kitty” who shared a name with one of her friends, but who, according to Frank, was closer to her than any of them. Like me, Frank was bookish and loved words. Here was a personal journal meant only for Frank’s eyes – both banal and intimate – not unlike the one I myself sporadically kept. Of course, that alone was enough to make the experience utterly absorbing. But Anne and I were both 13 – and I got to peek inside her secret diary. ![]() Meanwhile in 2004, I was living in a large, comfortable house in Canada, filled with every material desire I could want. In 1942, Jews like the Franks, had fled to the shelter to escape the Nazi occupation, forming a makeshift community where they made do with whatever necessities they could smuggle in. Frank received the treasured journal as a birthday gift while hiding out in the Secret Annex in the Netherlands. W hen I first read Anne Frank ’s Diary of a Young Girl, I went through the same rite of passage as all girls who pick up the young Holocaust victim’s volume of compiled scribblings do. ![]()
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