John P. (desertwing) reviewed on 5/24/2010

I have a read a lot of first-person account books about the holocaust, but this is not really one of them. I don't really understand why this book gets such high praise. It is not an account of the suffering of the holocaust, it is an account of what it is like to live in hiding and seclusion, in confined space, as a teenager, with people who are often not friendly. Anne Frank does write quite well, for a 14-year-old, but here she was writing her diary, with no expectation that it would be published. As such, I found much of the content to be trivial and tedious. The very fact that she dwells so much on the "relatively" small hardships of living in hiding only demonstrates that this was really her only frame of reference to that point. She and her living partners were usually comfortable, warm, well fed, with access to many forms of diversion and entertainment. This is quite a contrast to those millions that were imprisoned, starved, tortured, and murdered by the Germans. Of course, Anne was a smart and sensitive person, who I'm sure was genuinely concerned about the suffering of her fellow jews, but here she writes almost nothing about the horrors being inflicted on her fellow jews, while she was simply trying to find her teenage identity. After reading many first-person accounts written by survivors of German atrocities, I found Anne's diary to be more than just a little superficial. Of course, again, Anne's final fate was just as sad as any of the others, but this is not a book that finds a place in my permanent libarary. I recommend many holocaust books ahead of this one, such as, "I Have Lived A Thousand Years", "Dry Tears", and "The Cage". If I wanted to help my children understand the reality and meaning of the holocaust, I would present any one of those books - far ahead of this one.

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