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World War II is no doubt very distant from our lives, but have you ever thought of how fortunate we are living here and now? I certainly have this feeling after I have finished reading Anne Frank’s The Diary of A Young Girl.

Anne Frank was a Jew who lived in Amsterdam, the Netherlands during World War II. The country was invaded by Germany, which was led by a political group called the Nazis. The Nazis believed that they were more superior than the Jews. They ordered that all the Jews should be sent to the concentration camps. Millions of Jews died in the concentration camps. Anne’s father, Otto Frank, decided to protect his family and himself by hiding all of them into the ‘secret annexe’, which was the back of a warehouse of his company. Anne was thirteen years old when she went into hiding with her family and for two years, she hid in the secret annexe with her family, a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel in the diary) and the van Pels family (the van Daan family). Unfortunately, someone betrayed them and they were arrested by the Nazis on 4th August 1944. They were sent to the concentration camps and only Otto Frank managed to survive. When he met his secretary Miep, who had helped him during his family’s hiding, she gave him Anne’s diary, which she had discovered in the secret annexe during her sneaking into the building after the arrest.

I was drawn into Anne Frank’s diary while I was visiting Anne Frank’s House last summer. The diary has remained an authentic account of courage and fear, hope and despair, peace and conflict of our humanity. Anne’s true story of how she, her family and the Jews dealt with their perils is a vivid one of the terrors Adolf Hitler had afflicted Europe during World War II. ‘Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle-trucks to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe ... The people get nothing to eat, much less to drink, and there’s only one lavatory and sink for several thousand people.’ Anne Frank, 9th October, 1942. Although you may not be particularly interested in world history, I would still like to encourage you to read this book of a teenage girl who had developed much resilience and inner strength in her struggle for survival. ‘I know what I want, I have a goal, I have opinions, a religion and love.’ Anne Frank, 11th April 1944. If she had not been arrested and sent to the concentration camp, she should have been awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature after the war.