This week's book was a memoir or journal. I could've done some research, I'm sure there are lots of journals out there that would make interesting reads for children. I've tried to keep this list full of child friendly books as I feel it makes the challenge more interesting.
But there are weeks when it is going to be a real problem. As soon as I started this piece of text, I realised this might well be one of those weeks.
The story of Anne Frank is well known, extracts from it are often used in primary school teaching. It's her own personal diary written between June 1942 and August 1944. It talks of events in the secret annexe: a hidden 'apartment' in an office building/warehouse where she and seven other Jewish people were forced to live in hiding.
It tells everything about her daily life from her struggles with being kept in hiding, to her often difficult relationships with the other occupants of the annexe. But more importantly it pours the very deep secrets of her heart on to each line and page as she confides in the diary, using it as a way to express herself and deal with the very normal issues of adolescene.
For years it has been in my house and I have never read it. I have had all sympathy with her plight and I've pretended to have a decent understanding of it. After all, as I used to say 'she was just a normal girl, going through something unimaginable and horrible' as if that was justification for my ignorance of the text itself.
What a niaeve fool I was! From the very first entry I felt like I was seeing things through her eyes. Her relationship with her own parents as she grows older and away from them was something tangeble, I could identify with it. There were passeges where I simply couldn't bring myself to accept the sheer extremes of the life within the annexe's walls. They were at one point relying on rotten veg for their daily meals, twice a day. There were moments where I could feel the claustrophobic environment that she found herself in every single day for two whole years.
Nothing I can say right now can do it justice. What made it more harrowing for me was knowing the outcome. In fact, the afterward told in plain detail of Anne's fate, along with the fate of the other residents. It became a solemn reminder, something I would go back and reread every time I felt a glimmer of hope or an ounce of unrealism. I needed to keep grounding myself in it's gravity.
This book is great as a point of reference for children at the top end of a primary school as an introduction to the topic. But I don't feel it would be right for children of a young age to read it from cover to cover, not without being able to grasp some of the more mature, adult themes within it.
It might be niaeve of me to say it but I feel a little as though I've grown with her; that in my reading the 350 pages of her life I have come to know a little more about what she experienced.
After the war had ended, her father (the annexe's sole survivor) was at the forefront of a campaign to keep and restore the building where she had spent those final years. He was quoted as saying it was intended as 'an earnest warning from the past and a mission of hope for the future'.
I think the lesson of this book is that in the face of incredible adversity there is always hope. Anne was often hopeful for an end to the war and a bright future. She wanted to live on after her death.
If in some small way I am helping that to happen and to promote a piece of text that should never dwindle into obscurity then I'm glad.
Book 21 of my 52 book list and a book that counts as a memoir or journal.
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