Reflection: Anne Frank's House
When I was in grade school, I was required to read The Diary of Anne Frank. Well, that’s a lie. I was required to read parts of the play based on The Diary of Anne Frank. Not the same, but I was able to gather the general concept and background of what happened to her. I didn’t even bother an ounce of thought about the girl who hid for 2 years until I decided to visit Amsterdam. And those who have been there, know that going to the Anne Frank house is not only necessary, but mandatory, if you’re visiting this part of the Netherlands.
All throughout middle school and high school, I was deeply fascinated by WWII. I wrote my research papers on it, I read autobiographies from that time period, and I even went vigorously out of my way to learn every possible thing I could about the tragedies that occurred during this war, specifically the Holocaust. Knowing my travel plans, I immediately found the book online and began to devour it, page by page. By this point, 7 years had passed before I had read anything about Anne Frank, and 4 years since I had seriously even thought about anything that dealt with the persecution of Jews during this time period.
As I read through the pages, I was first incredibly bored. I don’t want that to come off as insensitive, I literally was rereading pages that I had to dissect in detail during grade school. But as I continued through the book, I was touched in ways I can’t explain. Between Anne’s personality, the way she wrote, her thought process, her outlook on life, I was beyond stunned. It was almost as if she had taken the words straight out of my mind and delicately rewrote them into her diary 60 years ago. Never had I felt so connected and had such an understanding with an author on such personal and intimate levels.
Page after page, I was astonished. This was written so long ago, yet she understood me like no one else had. Her circumstances were vastly different from mine, her lifestyle, the persecution she endured, and the hardships she faced were some that I never have, nor could image ever undergoing. But who she was as a woman, the way she felt about herself, her views on those around her, her energy just resonated with me and reverberated through my entire being. Rereading her story amplified my trip to her house 10 times over, and I’m so beyond grateful that I did so.
As my feet lightly creaked through the infamous house, waves of emotion collapsed over my lungs, rising up through my airways, and periodically tightening small knots inside of my throat. My hands trembled as I took raspy breaths to make the puddles welling in my eyes subside. Reading words on a paper that resonate deeply within me was one thing. But to have these words materialized before me was different. Astronomically different. I can’t even begin to recount the thoughts that haunted me as the stairs beneath me groaned with their crumbling old age.
How could anyone harm such a beautiful young woman, ambitiously chasing her dreams, embracing all of the joy still left in her days, eager to begin living? How could a person rip these dreams, aspirations, memories, goals, experiences, flaws, plans, thoughts, emotions, and the purest of happiness from a young woman, just barely touching the surface of who she would grow into, what she would become. How could anyone force her into a box? Force her into living a dampened, excruciatingly fearful, and painstaking life? How could a person create such mass destruction and pain in the world? How could humans have allowed any of this? Did they not understand the searing wound they would leave? Did they not realize they were stealing all of the good left over from their destruction, bottling all that they could grip their finger on, and leaving it in a darkened corner, locked away from the world, from those who needed it most.
But, the contrasting reactions I felt were staggeringly more powerful than the negative, often taking the sheer breath out of my lungs. Look at all of those that wanted to help, that wanted to bring the light back into the world. The one’s that leapt at opportunities to protect the sanctity of human life. The people that resisted. The one’s who fought to defend those who couldn’t defend themselves. The one’s that simply just tried to make a difference. The one’s that protected. The one’s that made only a slight ripple in the pond, but nonetheless, a ripple. The one’s that endured, and yet never lost hope, never lost their faith. The one’s that remember.
She taught me so much more than I could have imagined. The world can be crumbling down in heaps of ashes around you, but there’s so much to be happy about, to smile about. There’s always something, tethering you to the ground, to keep you digging for the light, despite how buried it may be. She was just one person amongst millions. She was an average girl, who was forced to mature into the woman she had become in a secret annex. She had so much to mourn. So much to be miserable about. But she didn’t and she wasn’t. She was such a powerfully positive force amongst those around her, despite her circumstances, despite the amount of times she wanted to curl into herself, the amount of times she wept. She inspired. She was a force to be reckoned with. She is a lesson for each and every one of us.
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