How one teenager's diary has touched our lives

Department of English Studies, University of Stirling

I read Anne Frank’s diary when I was about 11. What I remember most is its intimacy. Here was a young girl describing her feelings - especially her feelings about her body - in vivid, unselfconscious prose: "Whenever I have my period ... I have the feeling that in spite of all the pain, discomfort and mess, I’m carrying around a sweet secret". This was liberating stuff, given that in the mid-60s we had no Just Seventeen and puberty was a biological matter. Anne’s attitudes formed my own.

Of course, the diary makes for ironic reading now, around the time of the D-Day celebrations. Anne’s entry for 6 June records the news of the landings with joy: after years hiding with her family from the Nazis in the secret annexe, here was the promise of release. But, at the beginning of August 1944, they were found and taken to Auschwitz. Anne later died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen.

Often presented as a hymn to the indomitable human spirit, the diary has become slightly kitsch. Admittedly its vision of Jewish suffering is limited. But it is nevertheless a remarkably uncloying account of a young girl’s ordinary existence under extraordinary circumstances: coping with boredom and the pressure of living indoors for too long with your difficult family. It belongs to an important tradition of autobiographical women’s writing.

RAINI SCOTT, 17

Member of the Scottish Youth Parliament

I first read the book when I was about 12 or 13 years old, then I read it again last year after visiting Anne’s house in Amsterdam. Previously, I had some background knowledge about the Holocaust from school, but when you read it you actually get a really personal insight into what it must have been like and it really hits you hard because it makes you realise just how lucky we have it nowadays. It puts the whole issue of discrimination right into perspective. The young people who read it today are going to be the people who stop it from happening again.

It’s a very valuable book and I think it actually helps you to understand there are different races and religions and cultures and this is an extreme version of how that can escalate into something huge.

When you read the book there’s always something in the back of your mind saying: ‘It’s just a book’. But when you go to the house, and you see the tiny little space that she had to live in, it really makes you feel inspired by her courage.

HANS WESTRA

Director, Anne Frank House, Amsterdam

I have mixed feelings about Anne Frank’s diary. On the one hand I feel sorrow because we know that she died at a very young age in the concentration camp. At the same time, I feel the power of her heritage. The diary that she wrote has been published in more than 60 languages and the museum receives nearly one million visitors a year. There are a lot of schools that have her name and wear that with pride. I think the most important thing to know is that the diary of Anne Frank, even today, inspires many people to think about her life, their own life, and society as it is developing - with a lot of things in it, unfortunately, that remind us of the time when Anne became the victim of a system that had intolerance and hate at its core.

TREVOR PHILLIPS

Chair, Commission for Racial Equality

In her diaries, Anne Frank said: "I often lose my cue and simply can’t swallow my rage at some injustice." Any reasonable person living in today’s world should feel the same rage at the rise of the political racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia creeping across Europe.

When I was chair of the Runnymede Trust we published twin reports on the resurgence of anti-Semitism and the rise of Islamophobia. I never imagined that these ugly sisters would grow so fast and spread their poison across our continent so quickly. But they have.

In today’s world, we need Anne’s rage more than ever before. Everything that her legacy teaches us about yesterday tells us something about how we should behave today.

ZLATA FILIPOVIC

Author of Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo

I read Anne Frank’s diary before the war began in Bosnia. I read it as a testimony of somebody growing up under the war, living in fear, having to deal with completely new experiences, having to grow up quickly. So I was very touched by it and saddened by it, obviously thinking that war happens to other people. I had no idea anything similar would happen to me.

I had no idea that one day people would call me the "Anne Frank of Bosnia". There was a girl who wrote a diary in Afghanistan and she was the "Anne Frank of Afghanistan", and recently an Iraqi diary also. She’s a symbol of a young person in war and everyone will be compared to her even though everybody’s stories are different. She writes really beautifully and it saddens me when I think of her and all the things she could have achieved.

(Communicado’s production of Zlata’s Diary is at GilmorehillG12, Glasgow, 10-12 June, and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 15-19 June)

LESLEY WARNER

Media director, Amnesty International UK

I remember the chilling sense of unease when I read Anne Frank’s diary. Disquiet and outrage that was heightened by visiting the house some years later, after attending a Jewish friend’s wedding in Holland. We all know the history, but reading it in one individual’s account reminded me - as I am reminded every day in our work - that genocide and human rights atrocities are not mere terms or themes for intellectual discussion but have a very real impact on individuals. That it really is about ordinary people and their lives and that everybody has a responsibility to fight oppression, torture, genocide or other abuses. "Never again" is sadly frequently stated, but only if people speak out and act in whatever way they can will it really be never again.

TONY REEKIE

Director, Children’s International Festival

Over the years I have been able to see a number of productions of Anne Frank but I have never found one I have been willing to programme into the Children’s Festival because I’ve never seen one that really connected with the audience. This isn’t to say that they have never connected at all, but in the main the productions get caught up in being truthful about what the diaries were about rather than celebrating a little girl’s life. They end up becoming a very important history lesson and a bit worthy and don’t match up to what she deserved.

I grew up knowing that Anne Frank was a very important girl, but I wonder if it still has that relevance for children today. Books like hers have such an important role to play in that memorial process, but I do question if it is best left in the original form, read as diaries, and not seen on stage.

EVA CLARKE

Education officer, Holocaust Educational Trust

I knew about the Holocaust at a young age from my mother, who is a survivor and gave birth to me in Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria just before the end of the war. The diary was the first book I read about the subject. Similarly to Anne’s family, my paternal grandmother came to Holland from Germany and was sent from Westerbork transit camp and ultimately perished in a Nazi concentration camp. I read the diary as a girl of the same age as Anne and what struck me was its immediacy. Apart from the obviously unique backdrop and setting, it is timeless. It has never lost its pertinence and relevance to young girls everywhere. Students of all ages identify with Anne as a person even if they cannot identify with the experience she went through.

Studying the Holocaust through the eyes of one person can be more accessible than facts and figures. Anne was one ordinary girl living in extraordinary circumstances whose tragic bravery is an inspiration to all.

The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, is published by Penguin