Sunday, October 19, 2014

Reading “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank

One of the victims of holocaust, ANNE FRANK was born on June 12, 1929. Last Tuesday I ordered her book “The Diary of a Young Girl”, and today I finished it. I think this is one of the books that must be read by young children as well as adults. It has a great deal of observations of a young girl, who lived in hiding in a house during Nazi occupation of Netherland, from 1942 to 1944. In the end she was captured by fascist forces, and died in a labour camp in 1945, in the age of 15.
I am posting two brief paragraphs from the book to highlight some side of what is there in it:
 “Chins up, stick it out, better times will come!”

Written on 3rd May 1944:
“What, oh, what is the use of war? Why can’t people live peacefully together. Why all this destruction?”
The question is very understandable, but no one has found a satisfactory answer to it so far? Yes, why do they make still more gigantic planes, still heavier bombs and, at the same time, prefabricated houses for reconstruction? Why should millions be spent daily on the war and yet there’s not a penny available for medical services, artists or for poor people?
Why do some people have to starve, while there are surpluses of rotting in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people, so crazy?
I don’t believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that have been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.

Written on 6th July 1944:
Quite honestly, I cannot imagine how anyone can say, “I am weak.” And then remain so. After all if you know it, why not fight against it, why not try to train your character? The answer was: “Because it’s so much easier not to!” This reply rather discouraged me. Easy? Does that means that a lazy, deceitful life is an easy life? Oh no, that can’t be true, it mustn’t be true, people can so easily be tempted by slackness … and by money.
A type like, finds it difficult to stand on his own feet, but it’s is even harder to stand on your own feet as a conscious, living being. Because if you do, then it’s twice as difficult to steer a right path through the sea of problems and still remain constant through it all. I’m just drifting around, have been searching for days, searching for a good argument against the terrible word “easy”, something to settle it once and for all.
How can I make it clear that what appears easy and attractive will drag one down into the depths, depths where there is no comfort to be found, no friends and no beauty, depth from which it is almost impossible to raise oneself?
We're all alive, but we don't know why or what for; we're all searching for happiness; we're all leading lives that are different and yet the same. Laziness may look inviting, but only work gives you true satisfaction.

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