Sarah Gibbard Cook
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The Diary of a Young Girl

3/26/2018

10 Comments

 
When Sandy responded to my second-anniversary invitation with a suggestion to blog about Anne Frank, I felt a jolt. Why did Anne, whose diary was so important to me, rarely occur to me among authors who influenced me most? In my mind, authors were grown-up writers of stories for readers like me. My relationship to Anne was more intimate, as though we were one girl thrown into two very different circumstances.

It started with noticing that she and I shared the same June birthday. She wrote her diary, which I first read at thirteen, in a book she received in 1942 for her thirteenth birthday. Weeks later she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis. Others joined them, for a total of eight Jews in a confined space they could never leave. Though I knew she later died in a concentration camp, what captivated me at thirteen wasn’t the cruelty or injustice—what we know about Anne—but her diary itself.

She and I had so much in common: our birthday, our age, our love of writing, our occasional loneliness. Our differences were situational. I could go outdoors, make noise, choose my playmates, get away for an hour. What would it be like to live cooped up, nonstop for two years, with a handful of people I didn’t choose and didn’t always like? Would I still believe, like her, that people are really good at heart?

Anne introduced me to the possibility of a diary as more than a log of the day’s events. My earliest diary dates from age thirteen, probably after I read hers. It’s full of adolescent ramblings. Now I write morning pages for myself and this blog for you who read it, continuing a personal tradition that began with the diary of Anne Frank. 
10 Comments
Lisa Imhoff
3/26/2018 09:12:11 am

I wonder what Anne would have done had she survived the war. Would she have become a writer, storyteller, missionary, psychologist? Or merely someone's wife and mom, leaving no bigger mark on the world?

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Sarah link
3/26/2018 11:45:57 am

I want to believe she would have left a deep mark on those around her, whether or not she pursued a profession or became famous. It might make a difference whether she survived because their hiding place remained undiscovered or if she entered but survived the concentration camp, as her father did.

One aspect of the question, what would she have done, may be the kind of role model she did or didn't find in her mother. During the period of the diary, Anne's relation with her mother Edith was strained, but apparently they became close in the camp. Would Anne have grown into that appreciation of her mother, and been influenced by her, if they hadn't been imprisoned together?

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Corrine
3/26/2018 10:16:03 am

As of yesterday, my morning pages have become “Dear Rhonda” pages. I feel the need to talk to her and it enriches my focus when I write. I have so many questions that really no longer need answers. Her death is such a mystery to me.

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Sarah link
3/26/2018 12:02:02 pm

Anne's diary entries began, "Dear Kitty." She wanted to think of it s a true friend, to whom she could confide anything and count on comfort and support--unlike conversations with her human friends, with whom said said she discussed only ordinary things. Talking (or writing) to a close human friend now absent offers a similar invitation to honesty, focus, and depth. I used to write letters sometimes to a loved one no longer alive. It would have been hard, maybe impossible, to write the same thoughts in any other form.

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Charlda
3/26/2018 04:11:58 pm

Thank you for this Corinne. I talk to Rhonda in my head, and also a bit on paper.

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Sarah link
3/26/2018 04:54:37 pm

I wonder if Rhonda had any idea how much she would live on in the conversations of those who talk or write to her after her passing.

Walter Hassenpflug
3/29/2018 07:54:18 am

I wonder how much thought she gave to being Jewish. The Franks were German citizens. Otto was a German officer who fought in World War I for Germany against the Allies. German was her first language. Otto saw what was hovering and brooding in and over Germany and decided to move his family to the Netherlands (Holland). That meant learning the Dutch language (not too far distant linguistically from German.) Yet it meant being displaced from Anna's "everything she knew and felt comfortable with." She was displaced from her school friends, etc.

Now at age 13, she developed into womanhood with monthly cycles, something Margo was already acquainted with. Even with a seven others, that sudden isolation from those outside, Jews and Gentiles, she must have entertained many thoughts: why do others hate us so much?

In her journal, did she address all of her deepest thoughts and emotions? Or only address some sporatically? And keeping the more serious ones private?

OTHER: In college, in a course of Central European History, the professor, on the final exam, asked the question: Knowing what you learned in this course, could the holocaust take place in America? We were not studying American history. Yet he posed the question (40% of the final exam grade), Whether yes or no, explain your answer fully. I will never forget that question.

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Sarah link
3/29/2018 08:29:17 am

Do you remember what answer you gave, and would it be the same now? My college German history professor, in a lecture not an exam, walked us through a scenario set in Oberlin, our college town: If the town council moved black families to the south side, would you do anything? If they then save part of town only for whites, and on and on. (Back before most of that was illegal.) That has always stuck with me, too.

As you suggest, Anne must have thought of herself as German first. I don't recall if their life in hiding included any sign of religion, but secular Jews would have to have been very conscious of their Judaism as a social identity. My first husband's paternal (Jewish) ancestors had come to the US from Germany in the 1800s; my father-in-law was no way religious, but said, as a pilot in WWII, he could never forget that the Germans wanted to kill him.

We'll never know if Anne wrote all her deepest thoughts and emotions. I never had the sense that she was holding back. The thoughts and emotions that feel very deep at 13 may not always strike an adult that way. I recall, rediscovering my 13+ diary in my 20s, being somewhat embarrassed by parts of what I'd written so seriously. At that stage, parts of Anne's diary embarrassed me in the same way! Which only goes to show how deeply I still identified with her.

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Walter Hassenpflug
3/29/2018 02:39:50 pm



I wrote that the same scenario COULD happen in America. Germany went through the depression and was hard hit. Millions out of work. The Germans "needed" someone to rise to the occasion to "save" them from their current plight. Hitler "talked" a great story,, promising changes that they could believe in. Each could put his or her own thoughts to work. Start some construction projects to give a semblance of being on the right road under the leadership of the right person. Pass laws to prohibit gun ownership. The populace acquiesed in the hopes of loaves of bread, and other forms of subsistence.
So many politicians and military leaders all sat back hoping that "someone" or "some agency" would step up and push Hitler out of power.
The rest is history.

I was able to ACE the final and received "A" for the course.

Sarah link
3/30/2018 08:59:22 am

Walter, your argument is scarily persuasive. My German history professor likewise gave me a chill to realize how plausible such a scenarios might be, even in our own little town.

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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