For lack of a better definition in regards to how one determines a 'classic', it is, in my view, a story that transcends its own time and space. It is something timeless. When we are youths (the age when most of us are acquainted with these tales through our schooling) that 'timelessness carries no weight'; thereby, the story means little to nothing to the immature mind still grasping at straws for life's purpose. When we actually begin to assume a bit of the weight of our own day, the stories written from an era prior to our own begin to open and bloom to the mind, ready to pay them heed.
This particular story of the young Jewish girl who hides with her family from the Nazis is one I first became acquainted with during my own young school days. Precisely when, and from whom, I could not say. It is merely a reality which has always existed. I recall, at some juncture, a version of this story was read for some class, but whatever version I read, it was not this definitive edition I listened to. It may have been an adaptation; it may have been a script for a production. Whatever it was, it certainly was not this.
Three editions to the diary exist: one Anne herself edited; one her father Otto Frank edited and released; and the definitive edition here, which is the diary Anne herself wrote. Why edit the diary of a teenage girl? Simple. Anne was transparent in what she conveyed onto those sheets of paper; and for most people, that candid opening up of one's self is not a simple matter to digest. One person standing before another with nothing hidden (Anne before the audience of her words) propels a responsibility onto the other to reciprocate - no easy task for anyone, Perhaps there in lies the reasoning Anne felt she could have no confidence in her parents. She could have none to confide in but this diary (which she named 'Kitty' from its birth); and 'Kitty' became her best friend. She wrote what she thought; she wrote what she felt. Kitty heard it all - unfettered - and now we hear it through her today.
Naturally, we hear of the war; but even more so, we learn the ravages of war upon the people, the innocents, the bystanders, the families in hiding. A strong testament to thinking twice or three times against taking any country into war is this record of what it does to the people the fighting leaves behind.
For Anne specifically, she is a young girl, trapped in a dire situation, at a time of her life when sexuality reaches out for identity. Questions develop. Curiosity begins roaming about, stretching into fantasy here and there. A few things she can discuss with her older sister Margot, but most of her questions are shared with the older boy Peter, with whom some semblance of a romance is inferred.
Though this is a Jewish girl, living in another country, during a period of history far removed from our own, her problems are no different, I would imagine, from what most girls face with their own parents in any country today. She writes of her schoolmates. She records those who are her friends and those who are not. She writes about her mother and father, exuding a hatred of her mother at various points in the narrative, while admiring her father in the beginning while being disappointed at certain junctures later on. Remove WWII and the threat of the Nazis from the narrative, and her voice could be the voice of a girl across the street, in the next town, or even under one's own roof. Every parent should read this book to better understand their child; and every child should read this book to realize they are not alone.
The 'diary of a young girl' is more than a journal recording two years of the war. It is more than the tragic tale of the ideal young daughter who died in a concentration camp because of the horror that was the Nazi menace. It is a treasured map to a life all people can embrace. Anyone can relate to what Anne Frank confesses here. It is, in many respects, a prayer to God, conveying life as it plays itself out.
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