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"How noble and good everyone could be if, at the end of each day, they were to review their own behavior and weigh up the rights and wrongs.
They would automatically try to do better at the start of each new day, and, after a while, would certainly accomplish a great deal. Everyone is welcome to this prescription; it costs nothing and is definitely useful. Those who don't know will have to find out by experience that a 'quiet conscience gives you strength!'"
Anne M Frank Thursday, July 6, 1944
That was how Miss Frank finished what would be the fifth to last entry in what is one of the most famous personal journals in history.
I just finished a book many of you read during junior high (now more commonly known as middle school); there is no spoiler alert to offer, anyone picking up this book knows how it ends before you open it.
This particular edition was updated in 1998 when five previously unknown pages were discovered by the former director of the Anne Frank house until Anne's father died.
Prior to that, there were originally three versions of the diary. One was the unedited journal, the second was edited by Anne herself while she was still writing it; and the third compiled by her father. That was the version published in 1947 in Dutch, a German version was printed in 1950 but it left out large sections where Anne wrote about what she didn't like about fellow housemates (including her mother) during two years in hiding and what Anne wrote about her changes from a girl into a young woman.
The diary begins with an entry on her birthday, June 12 1942; July 9 she and her family moved into the Secret Annex in the building that housed her father's business.
It reads like you might suspect a teen-age girl would write, critical comments about her mother, sister, and other family that moved in with them their second day in hiding. She is misunderstood and resents the way she is treated by her housemates.
She loves her father, although he doesn't escape criticism; and becomes very close with Peter, the son of their guests.
It's an interesting account with as much shared about the day-to-day dreariness of surviving with seven other people locked inside for their own safety as there is about the never-ending concern of being discovered by the Nazis.
Sadly, the families nearly made it; they were discovered August 4, 1944 and deported shortly thereafter. Anne's passing was likely between late February and early March in 1945. Anne and her sister, Margot, died of typhus which killed thousands of those imprisoned. The concentration camp where she was held was liberated April 15, 1945.
Here final entries were more philosophical than most of them as she wrote about feeling like she had two personalities, one cheerful and flippant, the other more serious and quiet when called on to speak which is the side she wanted to show the world.
"...if I'm quiet and serious, everyone thinks I'm putting on a new act... and berate for being in a bad mood... because when everyone is hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if... only there were no other people in the world."
Anne Frank Tuesday, August 1, 1944 (her final entry)
Her father was the only one of the group to survive and made it his mission to publish her diary, sharing both sides of this young woman with the world.
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