Anne Frank’s Response To The Likely Fate She Could Foresee
Letters by Anne Frank’s father will soon be revealed, showing his desperate efforts to get his family out of Europe.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070125/en_afp/usnaziannefrank_070125102207
Different people respond to bad circumstances differently. I want to highlight that when Anne Frank knew with a high degree of certainty that she may be rounded up like livestock and slaughtered at any time, her response was in part:
1) If I only have a short time left to live, I will use it to write the most truthful and substantive things I know.
2) I will love those around me as much as is allowed and be honest with myself about that love.
And those themes in her writings are what continue to inspire us. It’s amazing that an adolescent girl, who had to live a hidden life, still found ways to so positively effect the world. While she had aspirations of being a writer, she could not have reasonably thought her words would be published or famous someday. With those understandings, she did what she could do, and she wrote her intimate thoughts down - at least for her own peace of mind, if not also for the possible benefit of others.
Mere hope.
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Here are 5 related Anne Frank and Rutka Laskier posts (click on thumbnails to see the posts):
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I read Anne Frank’s diary when I was in junior high school; I just felt as if I had to read it then, so I could try, in some small way, to understand what she went through. I read most of the book whilst sitting on my front porch, staring out at the world, waving to the neighbor kids, putting aside the book and climbing on my bike and going with them if they beckoned … so, I didn’t really have a CLUE what Anne went through.
I understood it all a lot better in 2001 when I visited the house in Amsterdam where the Frank family hid, and I tried to imagine being a teen-aged girl who, instead of being able to romp around outside with my pals, had to keep quiet day and night, unable to go outside or to school or even to the front porch to read. I also remember being floored when I reread her comments about writing and what it meant to her.
Anne Frank’s life and what she accomplished in her relatively short time on earth are very powerful reminders NOT to take the freedoms we have for granted … especially the freedom to write and share and communicate with the world.
Mother talked about her experience of seeing her best friend, a Jewish young woman among a huge group of people being driven along the streets of Budapest by the Nyilos soldiers near end of WW ll. She never saw her friend again. Subsequently, I think she grappled with ambivalent feelings about her inability to act in that situation. She bought the Anne Frank,s Diary, and made it available for us kids to read even though she could not articulate or communicate her own feelings about her own experience. as a family we discussed Ann’s communications and what their results might be for people then and later reading them.
i really appreciate what you say here about Anne Frank. i hadn’t ever looked at her that way. When i was given my “education,” she was just a glossy footnote that people overdid but never really became all that real or “relevant.” It is somewhat with shame that i admit this, as i now feel a sense of identification with her via your words here…
“Scholastic Education” can be a terrible thing. Only as an adult am i seeing the great many things that always were important but which i had no context with which to understand its relevance in my own life.
i used to really enjoy this one quote i found in a SoundTracker MOD music file: “Sometimes visionary people are visionary because of the great many things they DON’T see…”
It reminded me that it wasn’t so bad to be personally blind to social and political games… But now i also think i have been too blind to too many things. Now i feel fully in place amongst the world’s abused and mistreated… yet i have little “historical context” with which to discuss it with others who need the bridge… and therefore little credibility to talk, despite my own personal expertise with my own personal experiences and an… understanding of many things that is more developed than the average person’s.
What right have i?
its very bad should have shown some incidents of her life it would make your site more attractive