The diary of Anne Frank

I started keeping a diary at the same age as Anne Frank. She was confined to the back of an office building in Amsterdam, with seven others, during the German occupation. I was confined to a family at liberty in a small town. Anne Frank's need for a friend with whom she could be completely open; that was the thing. Her diary was 'you' not 'it'. No one would believe she felt alone in the world, she said, she was such a chatterbox. 

On behalf of my much younger self, I believed her. Like her I needed to create myself on the page, though for the first few years I was cautious in the extreme, creating an unexceptionable schoolgirl and her daily life. I was certain that my diary would be read, most likely by my sister or my mother. 

Anne Frank, living in extremely close quarters with seven other people, never mentions the possibility of her diary being read. Open it at any page: intimacy and assurance leap out:

Relations between us here are getting worse all the time. At mealtimes, no one dares to open their mouths (except to allow a mouthful of food to slip in) because whatever is said you either annoy someone or it is misunderstood. I swallow valerian pills every day against worry and depression, but it doesn't prevent me from being even more miserable the next day. A good hearty laugh would help more than ten valerian pills, but we've almost forgotten how to laugh. I feel afraid sometimes that from having to be so serious I'll grow a long face and my mouth will droop at the corners.

As well as the Diary, I read The Footsteps of Anne Frank by Ernst Schnabel, bought the same year. He interviewed 42 people, almost everyone still living who had known her, before and during the two years she was in the Secret Annexe, then at Auschwitz, then Belsen. 

One of the interviewees, Mrs de Wiek, said how most people in the camps as they neared death had faces that were no longer human.

.... they looked like garrotted angels and no longer belonged to this world. They were already on their way back, with grey, ugly faces and their sallow, translucent skin. I think now that angels are grey and ugly, and their wings are only something our imaginations have added.

Many people lost their faces, she said, but Anne Frank still had her face. With shaved head, dressed in a sack, or naked, emaciated, her life still there in her large eyes.

I read The Diary of Anne Frank a month into my own diary, and said I found it to be a very interesting story. And that is how subterranean my expression was just then.