I'm late getting to this book. I read the play version when I was in 9th grade, but this is the first time I've read Anne's actual diary. I don't think I've ever read a more impactful book. Such a remarkable person, and yet so ordinary at the same time. So much potential and zest for life, lost forever. Times this by 11 million and the Holocaust is a staggering, incalculable loss for the world. Yet somehow, this is a mostly hopeful book, despite the terrible circumstances Anne and her annex-mates lived in for two years. Anne's diary has so much to teach us. Little wonder, then, than everyone in the world knows her name. ( )

The cover is not quite right. ( )

I really think the Anne Frank story has been somewhat robbed of its meaning by being used constantly as a teaching aid. I just took in the story as it was, trying not to think about Anne Frank the symbol as opposed to Anne Frank the real human girl who died for no good reason. If you properly understand it, this is a great, powerful primary text. ( )

It was truly sad to read about Anne Frank having so much optimism for a future after the war that she would never have. And that her mother and sister also died in the Internment camps. And truly it seems that Anne could have had a very promising future as a writer. I was surprised to find a diary so well written and by someone as young as 14 and then 15. I wish I wrote as well in my diary entries. I love the way she interacts with her diary like it is a person she finds such solace in confiding in.

Anne was very reflective, particularly of herself. She had a great awareness of her strengths and weakness and strove to better herself. As I read, I began to remember what it felt like when I was younger and had the same kinds of thoughts and feelings as Anne expressed. It is a gift that Miep and Anne’s Father were able to save Anne’s Journal and share her story, as well as part of their stories, with the world. It gives a look into the life of one family affected by Hitler’s reign and his spread of Antisemitism. And though she had to die so young to this hatred and discrimination, her story was thankfully able to live on beyond her, just as she wrote about wanting for her future. Sometimes it is the connection to just one such person’s personal story that brings a better understanding of a such a large scale event in history.

By looking into Anne’s life as she tried to be a “normal teenager” whilst having to hide in fear before eventually being found by the secret police, we see many similar lives that had to be lived this way and that were taken too soon for these same reasons. At the same time, we are able to see through Anne’s story, not just the hate of antisemitism, but the courage of those who took in Jews in defiance of Hitler’s regime. The courage and optimism of Anne, her family, their roommates, and those who helped them, in the face of such hate, is indeed a story not to go untold.

( )

It made me smile, cry, and caused my heart to break. It was a true look into what this Jewish girl, her family and her friends went through hiding from Nazi's. ( )

You already know how this book ends: an afterword explaining how the people described by the precocious and chatty young author and all of the people hidden away with her from the Nazis, were discovered, and sent to concentration camps to die. Only her father survived to edit and publish his youngest daughter’s narrative of enforced confinement. In it, Anne reveals her frustrations, small joys, a growing awareness of her own sexuality and a crush that develops into love with the shy teenage Peter with whom she is confined. She also expresses her desire to write and become a novelist so that she would be known as a writer when she was liberated.

Ironically, she died when 16 of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and was buried there with her older sister in a mass grave. Posthumously, she is an author whose diary has been translated into seventy languages and sold thirty-five-million copies. ( )

Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank’s remarkable diary has since become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit.

In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the “Secret Annex” of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and amusing, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.

There are three main versions of the Diary: Version A, as originally written by Anne Frank; Version B, as edited by Anne Frank herself; and Version C, as edited and abridged by her father Otto Frank. Version C is the one that is best known; however, all three versions were published in The Critical Edition. This ‘Definitive Edition’ is for general readers that has been compiled by Mirjam Pressler from Version C, supplemented with approximately 30% additional material from Versions A and B as well as material from five pages that were discovered in 1998.

I first read the Diary of a Young Girl also known as The Diary of Anne Frank when I was a teenager and contemplated the same things Gatti texts.

“Anne, who were you? What were you dreaming of? Where are you taking me?”

As the haunting documentary rounds out, we see how survivors like Helga Weiss coped with the atrocities of war by drawing pictures while others like Anne Frank wrote their feelings down on paper.

Anne started her spirit-filled diary in 1942 and like many of us, she had fictional friends, with Kitty being her favorite. Here are a few of Anne's entries.

"Dear Kitty...I like writing to you most, you know that don’t you, and I hope the feeling is mutual."

"It seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old girl. Oh well, it doesn't matter. I feel like writing."

Anne's final Diary entry: "As I’ve told you many times, I’m split in two. One side contains my exuberant cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life and, above all, my ability to appreciate the lighter side of things. By that I mean not finding anything wrong with flirtations, a kiss, an embrace, an off-color joke. This side of me is usually lying in wait to ambush the other one, which is much purer, deeper and finer. ….”

Anne showed a great sense of purpose in editing her own diary. Her writings are an emotional read and many of us know very little of the fear Anne must have felt. Anne and the victims of the Holocaust taught us a great many things about hope for humanity. We know history has the power to repeat itself so I'll leave you with a few final quotes from Anne.

”What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it from happening again.

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” ( )

The audiobook of this was well compiled and narrated. ( )

I read this book as secular Judaica, as opposed to Judaism, in the sense that it speaks to a group history that all Jews share, the Holocaust, regardless of their beliefs on religion. And on one level Anne Frank certainly is a Jew hiding out in Nazi Europe. (The “why have I been chosen to live” entry is just so beautiful.)

But especially since she’s in hiding and not in a camp yet, most of it concerns the other level—the Girl of the 1940s, back when Things Were The Way They Should Be, and teenagers had no way out of the whole chauvinist adult thing.

Which is different, for me. I was geeky and withdrawn when I was younger than twenty and not much of a teenager, but I was a sulky teenager when I was 23 or 24 because I wanted a whole lot more love from the world than I was getting, which is embarrassing in my memory, since I had things that a lot of people never get, and now my default position is that teenagers should grow up. (Anne got that eventually, which is nice.)

But reading Anne Frank, the Girl of the 1940s, living in the world that was still The Way It Should Be, and I have to admit the obvious, right.

(Of course, it’s not really obvious what it /is/; it’s just obvious what it’s /not/.)

…. It is sad when they fall in love and it’s the Holocaust, so there’s that; it comes back.

…. And the other thing is, her adolescence would have been easier to navigate if they hadn’t been cooped up, but nobody harangued about Hitler: they turned on each other.

We don’t talk about the king; it’s the 1940s and that’s just the way it should be!

(I’m not suggesting that hating your enemy is a good, but I am suggesting that hating your brother because you’re so afraid that you can’t admit that you have an enemy is an evil.)

…. Anyway, it’s a good book:

Six million is just a statistic, but one girl’s death is a tragedy.
~Stalin, sorta

(And Narnia Jack said most people who do some thinking start before the age of fourteen.)

…. It’s striking that one of those in hiding said that she thought that the Germans would win in the end—Hitler’ll get us all in the end, right. The Germans certainly did a good job at killing and destroying in that war, and the Axis killed what tens of million of people, in Poland (eleven) and Russia and Ukraine and so on, and the Franks certainly had the terms of their existence dictated to them by Hitler’s war, the Nazi armies. He’ll get us all in the end…. And in a certain sense the Germans certainly did win, at least compared to the Jews. At least if you’re going to count bodies, the Germans won, and as far as the military dictatorship style goes, they won in style. The Jews had to hide, then get slaughtered. It’s famous that the Germans decided not to do that again, but equally too the Jews.

As for Anne Frank herself and her philosophy of beauty, I don’t know how to find beauty in this world, frankly. Her mother was probably an awful Pharisee but I like her pre-jazz philosophy better: it could be worse, so be glad it’s not worse. You’re in hiding, but be glad you’re not in a camp. Be glad you’re alive. I suppose in a way that they’re both forms of gratitude, but the gratitude of the flirt and the beauty-lover is just not as suited to me as the gratitude of the Stoic or the Religious (to use the technical form of that word in the most domestic possible way, ha).

…. But sometimes I am sufficiently ‘jazz’ to eat a donut.

…. When she does say something big, it’s pretty good.

There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Shakespeare

Honestly, things are only as bad as you make them.
Anne Frank

Or when she says, you know, Maybe when the war’s over if there are still Jews people will start to respect our religion.

Too bad God has this ugly partiality when it comes to religion, and the man is no Jew, right. (You know, the thing about the honest relativist is, they’re the only one who cares a whit about what a body is in the absolute, and not just, Relative To Me.)

But see the above. It’s always been like this, for as long as books remember.

…. She thought that it would all be over soon and, in a way, she was right.

(Oh, the horror and the sadness.)

…. But she lived before she died, right, if only for a little while, and that is all that can be said of us mortals, you know.

I never got to read this in school and reading it as an adult was interesting, both from a historical point of view and from a personal story/character study perspective.

It's amazing how real Anne felt, like a real person. I doubt my prose at her age could have achieved such vivid imagery. The logistics of 8 people hiding in such a small space for such a long time and in such difficult circumstances were fascinating to me, too. I do have to say that some passages felt... not genuine. Perhaps Anne was trying on different personas and opinions as she was developing and growing as a person but every now and again there'd be a passage that just didn't ring true. The diaries have been authenticated so I suppose it was all her work. I would have loved to see what kind of adult she would have grown up into and I can't help picturing their arrest and how Anne must have felt, her emotions about being found and arrested, and then going to prison and the camps. Was she optimistic till the last moment? I hope so. ( )

I recently visited the Anne Frank house while I was vacationing in Amsterdam. Was inspired to read the diary. Pretty amazing seeing the conditions on what they lived in the Annex. I think I would give this five stars if I was still an adolescent and it resonated more with me as it’s a pretty eye opening book given the time at which it took place. ( )

"I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again."

Anne Frank was truly an incredible young person. Her writing is so full of wisdom and intelligence for someone so young, as well as genuine wit and hope despite everything she faced. It's no wonder her story has moved millions. ( )

I read this book as part of Dead Writers Society Literary Birthday Challenge for 2016. I selected this one, and three other books because I feel like I have been slacking lately on my challenges on Goodreads. I first read version b of The Diary of a Young Girl when I was a teenager. I recall being sad and upset that someone that felt so alive to me was taken away and murdered. Reading about World War II and the Holocaust as a teen, I remember feeling sick. I can't imagine the atrocities that people had to live through. I read "Night" a few months ago and that book devastated me for days.

I feel very weird not giving this book five stars but here is my reasoning. Although I loved the historical aspect of this memoir/diary, I thought the whole thing started to read a bit samey after the first 50 pages or so.

That said, I love that as readers we get to see an in depth look of a 13 year old girl who had her whole life turned upside down because she was Jewish.

Because she was Jewish, she, her family, and others had to go into hiding with fear that they would be discovered which would mean the Nazis would find them, round them up, and send them to concentration camps where they knew they would surely be killed. I can't imagine living with that terror day in an day out.

I am fascinated that I had no idea for years that the version of this memoir I read decades ago had been edited. In my version, I don't recall any angst by Anne. I don't recall her having any fights with her mother or sister or any of the other occupants of the Annex where they all remained hidden for two years. I just remember thinking she sounded like a sweet girl who still saw the best in people and hoped to one day be allowed to go outside again. The definitive edition gives you the real Anne Frank. A 13 year old girl that at times was self centered, mean spirited, and moody. She felt more real to me in this version than she did in the version I had read decades ago.

Heck, I can see why she was moody. To be locked inside for two years, to have no privacy, to have to set up times for people to nap and study. To do all of that for two years would have left me bad tempered and ready to yell at anyone who breathed on me wrong too.

The ending though I knew what was coming was sad. ( )

Right here is a book that I have heard about all the time, but was never assigned to read when I attended public schools. Even when I took a class on genocides in college, it was never mentioned, much less assigned. Because Frank’s story has transcended into popular culture, I decided to pick up a copy of her diary and rectify not reading it. Since she is stereotyped as just hiding in an attic, I assumed her diary would be boring and not have anything interesting to say; luckily, I was wrong. While parts of it do come across as the musings of an angst filled teenager, other entries come across as wise. Even though I chastised other books in this list ending abruptly, here it is excusable because of her unexpected capture. While I cannot speak for the countless other translations and versions of Anne’s diary, this one helped convey why this impactful story is still being mentioned and taught a near 80 years after it was written. ( )

This is a moving book that should be read as a history of life under German occupation as a Jew. It is hard to believe the conditions that they lived in. We've all probably heard Anne's story, but hearing it in her own words is even more poignant. At times, she gets to rambling about inane things and that is a little difficult to read through. But Anne has some very profound insights as well. ( )

I don't know how I managed to get this far in life without reading Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. I've even been to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam but I had not read the diary. I finally got around to it this summer. I listened to the audio recording of the definitive edition, which includes several pages that were purposely omitted from its initial publication. Anne went through puberty during her time in hiding. Her diary transcends the bounds of time and space, documenting the rites of passage of teens in every time and place. Anne writes of conflict with her mother and older sister, of the joys and despair of first love, of her dreams for her future and her life's work. Although her life was tragically short, she fulfilled one of her dreams. Through her diary, she achieved worldwide and lasting fame as an author. Like many readers before me, I grieve for what might have been and the many more books that were never written. ( )

Anne Frank is a Jewish girl who has to go into hiding during World War Two to escape from the Nazis . Together with seven others she hides in the secret annex at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. After more than two years in hiding they are discovered and deported to concentration camps. and she trys to hide but they find her and send her off to a camp

i rated this book a 5 because it decribes all of history and the stragize between her and hiding was crazy and it made me very sad and down becase of what happed. ( )

This diary struck me, deeply.

Profound, and so, painfully, honest.

So real.

If you keep the title in mind while reading instead of the historical outcome, this really is a fascinating look into the mind of a teenager from wartorn 1940s Holland (but it is also an important historical document, too). ( )

Anne Frank was Jewish. She kept a diary during the Holocaust of her feelings and what went on in the Annex.

You can't deny she had talent and would've made it as a writer. Such a shame. ( )

(9/10) I have seen numerous film and tv adaptations about Anne Frank over the years but none of them quiet convey her tragic story like her diary.

It was wonderful to read her intimate thoughts and watch her grow up on the page. While we don't all experience the same life events the pangs of adolescence transcend time and culture making this relatable to anyone who has been a teenager.

I am sure that Anne would have fulfilled her wish of becoming a writer had she survived the war, her writing improved as time went on and she was certainly a very gifted young girl.

Nothing could be sadder than the sudden end of the diary, cruelly symbolic of the sudden end to a young life taken far too soon. ( )

Read this the week before visiting the Anne Frank house. Of course it's coloured by the knowledge of what was to come and there are several quotes in the diary that seem innocently prophetic, but what was most striking was the intelligence and awareness in one so young. There is much in the diary about herself being the most hard done by and being a victim to the unreasonableness of some of the adults in the annex. However, I saw in an interview with Otto Frank that she was the most unreasonable and the hardest to live with! That made me smile as a certain precociousness does come through in the book. After reading this you can only think of all the other holocaust victims who equally had their own lives, thoughts and feelings. ( )

A remarkable piece of writing by a young teen age girl living through part of a remarkably tragic era: Anne Frank's diary reveals her evolving mental and physical maturation whilst also displaying her ability to seemingly flourish in spite of the most restrictive and nerve-racking of circumstances for any young individual to experience.
This is not the Diary of the Holocaust - as some dimwits in their reviews try to lump it with - it is the written word of a child about a personal set of appallingly claustrophobic circumstances in which she finds herself and thus it expresses every sort of emotion through her eyes concerning extremely close confinement, shortages of food, clothing, entertainment, social inter-action, even fresh air, and the many other things a normal teenage life would take for granted.
Through all of it the character and grace of Anne Frank dominates the pages and adds to the History of Humanity. ( )

“The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank is an amazing diary about Anne whose life got turned upside down because of the Nazi Germans and causing her to hide for 2 years. This diary is amazing because as you read the book, you feel like your with her during those 2 years where she spent hiding from the Germans that took over her home. Here are the strengths and weaknesses that I’ve found throughout reading the book.
The strengths are Anne Frank who lived through this experience, writing in her diary as she experienced things. It was real fear, real issues, and the way they actually lived their day to day life in hiding. It shows her emotions, personality and interests before the war and how they change during the war. However, I think the weakness is that Anne Frank was a very young girl when he started writing the diary. She may have misunderstood things or just not had any idea what was going on. Her diary may not be a complete reality of what being in hiding was like.
I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in reading historical, war, or mystery books as it is so interesting. This book would be suitable for people aged ten upwards since there are some very sad things that took place in the diary. Reading this book kept me very interested, as well as continuously make me think. Reading this book is a must for people who are interested in such events during the war.