Anne Frank’s Diary is an amazing documentary work created during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Any diary entry is valuable for its sincerity, openness and frank judgments about the events described. Regarding Anne Frank’s diary, we can safely say that it is simply priceless. After all, in it, without any embellishment, it tells about what happened to Anna and her family, who were forced to hide from the fascist terror for several years. Reading such records is hard and scary. In fact, millions of human tragedies related to the Holocaust are united in the fate of this brave thirteen-year-old girl. No wonder Anne Frank and her family are considered one of the most famous victims of Nazism.
Preface to the printed edition of the 1960 book
The fate of this book is unusual. It was published in Holland ten years ago, translated into seventeen languages, and sold in millions of copies. Plays and films were made of it; research has written about her. This is not a novel by a celebrated writer, but the diary of a thirteen-year-old girl; but it amazes the reader more than masterfully written books. Everyone knows that the Nazis killed six million Jews, citizens of twenty states, rich and poor, famous and unknown. The atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima suddenly, it was impossible to hide from it. For several years, the Nazis raided millions of people, as they would raid wolves. The Jews tried to hide, hiding in pits, in abandoned mines, in the crevices of cities; for days, months, years they were waiting for reprisals. Six million were strangled in gas chambers, shot in yards or on forts, doomed to slow death from hunger. They were separated from the world by ghetto walls and concentration camps with barbed wire. Nobody knows what they thought and felt. For six million, one voice speaks — not a sage, not a poet — an ordinary girl. Anne Frank kept a diary, as girls of her age often do; on her birthday, she was presented with a thick notebook, and she began to write down the events of her childhood. Children’s life, at the behest of adults, quickly became childish. The girl’s diary has become both a human document of great significance and an indictment.
Anne Frank admitted that she was of little interest in politics. She did not play either a tribunal or parliament. She wanted to live. She dreamed of love, she would be a good mother. She was killed. Her diary reminds everyone of the crime committed, warns: it must not be allowed to happen again! Millions of readers know Anne Frank as if they saw her at home. Six million innocent people died. One pure, childish voice lives on: it turned out to be stronger than death.
Ilya Ehrenburg
Performed by: Irina Starshenbaum
© translation by M. Wright-Korolev (heirs)
© & ℗ SP Vorobiev
© & ℗ ID SOYUZ
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