Girl in a Cage

Press, 20 April 1982, Page 18

Girl in a Cage

‘‘Believe me if you have been shut up for a year and a half it can get too much for you some day. Cycling, dancing, whistling, looking out into the world, feeling young, to know that I am free — that’s what I long for ... I am simply a young girl, badly in need of some rollicking good fun.”

The girl who wrote these words was Anne Frank and she was only 13 when she began to write what has become one of the best known books in the world.

HJr book has been translated into 28 languages and made into a play and a film.

The book — published from the diary she kept during World War II — tells what she thought about and what she did while she and her parents were hiding from the Gestapo, the dreaded secret Nazi police.

“I simply can’t imagine the world will ever be normal again,” she wrote. “I do talk about ‘after the war’ but it is only a castle in the air, something that will never happen again.” 4

Anne’s parents were German Jews. When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany it was not safe for the Jewish people. Those who could leave, the country did, Anne’s family among them. They went to Holland across the border when Anne was just four years old. Then the Germans invaded Holland and it was not safe for the Jews to live there any more. Tens of thousands were taken away to prison camps. Anne’s father decided to hide bis family in an old building. For two years the family stayed behind closed doors and shuttered windows. "The sun is shining, the sky is a deep blue, there is a lovely breeze and I’m so longing for everything,” Anne wrote in her diary.

Anne, her family and members of two other families had the radio to listen to, her father arranged lessons for her and there were celebrations when the radio announced a victory for the Allies over the Germans. In August of 1944 the secret hiding place was discovered. Anne, her family and friends, were . taken away by the Gestapo and sent to prison camps. In 1945 just as the war ended and just before her sixteenth . birthday Anne died. In her diary, which was discovered when the war had finished, Anne said, “My greatest wish is to become a journalist some day and later on a famous writer.” She was to become one of the most famous writers of all time.