Video of Anne Frank Surfaces on YouTube

The only existing film footage of Anne Frank has been uploaded to YouTube by the Anne Frank House. The Amsterdam museum is hoping to bring attention to Anne’s story and diaries and reach a new generation who may be unfamiliar with her story.

IMG_3629.JPG by chjab

I felt compelled to check this new book out. I’ve never read the diary of Anne Frank.  In my high school the regular classes had one reading list, which included it.  But the AP classes had a different reading list, which did not include it.  It seems odd that in other school systems everybody reads it; and it occasionally becomes a topic of conversation among adults because nearly everybody has read it.  And yet I have not.

But I didn’t check it out.  I couldn’t do it.  I read three paragraphs about Nazis and I nearly cried in the library, which is just pathetic.  Usually, I can at least get home in an academic frame of mind before I freak out and can’t read something that is tragic, but that I feel I should read for historical value.

Such is the baggage of spending a lifetime with survivors of WWII.  And I’m sure my family, being middle class Catholics had it very well compared to Anne Frank.  Still, three paragraphs and all the people I knew who had survived the war as children (but elderly by the time I came along) were spinning in my head, in this diary, as it’s characters, suffering.

Ugh.

Instead I came home, and watched Law and Order SVU after dinner.  Like that’s so much less brutal than the diary of – not Anne Frank but a suffering little Polish girl, except she survived to write the book decades later.

It really would be better if I could remember the names of things.  Yesterday I couldn’t remember the name of the attorney talking about David Letterman.  Now I can’t remember the book title.  Over a book that I could have sobbed over!