From the Diary of Anne Frank

From the Diary of Anne Frank is an extract from The Diary of a Young Girl, the real diary kept by Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who was born in Germany in 1929 and grew up in Holland. The diary itself was a birthday present. She was given it on 12 June 1942, the day she turned thirteen, and the entries in this chapter were written later that same month, a little over a week after the birthday. What makes the opening unusual is that Anne does not begin with an event. She begins with a doubt.

She admits straight away that writing in a diary feels like a strange experience for her, and two reasons lie behind that feeling. First, she has never written anything before and has no habit of putting her thoughts on paper. Second, and more honestly, she cannot imagine that anyone would later be interested in the private thoughts of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. That doubt deserves a careful answer rather than a clever one. Anne is not fishing for compliments and she is not pretending to be humble. She simply cannot picture a reader.

Having admitted the doubt, she then sets it aside, because she finds a better reason to write. She wants to get things off her chest, meaning the thoughts and feelings that collect inside a person and have nowhere to go. Writing, for her, is release rather than performance. A diary does not need an audience in order to be useful; it needs only a writer who is willing to be honest in it. That single decision, to write for herself rather than for a reader, is a large part of why the book eventually became so readable, because nothing in it has been arranged to impress anybody.

She then explains why she chose a notebook over a human listener: paper has more patience than people. It is worth looking closely at what that short phrase actually claims. A person who listens to you will interrupt, glance at the clock, get bored, offer advice you never asked for, change the subject, or, worst of all, repeat what you said to somebody else. Paper does none of these things. Paper waits. It takes whatever you give it, in whatever order you give it, for as long as you want, and it never answers back. For a girl who felt she was not fully heard by anyone around her, a blank page was not a second-best option. It was better than the alternative.

There is also a practical point that students often miss. Anne says plainly that she did not intend to show the diary to anyone. That expectation of complete privacy is exactly why the writing is so frank about her family, her classmates and her own faults. It is worth remembering, when you read her, that a book now read all over the world was never meant to be read by anybody but Anne herself.

Before Anne can write freely she has to solve a problem: who is she writing to? Her answer is one of the most memorable choices in the book, and it grows directly out of loneliness. She takes stock of her life and finds that, on paper, she has everything a girl could want. She has parents who love her, a sister of sixteen, a comfortable home, loving aunts, roughly thirty people she could call friends, and a crowd of admirers at school who cannot keep their eyes off her and who resort to catching sight of her in a broken pocket mirror during lessons. By any ordinary count, she is popular.

And then she says the thing on which the whole chapter turns: with all of that, she still has no real friend. This is the difference between company and companionship. With the people around her she can do all the usual things, such as joke, gossip, discuss homework and talk about who likes whom. What she cannot do with any of them is talk about anything that actually matters to her. The conversation never gets past the surface, and she is honest enough to suspect that some of the fault may be her own. That is a very adolescent kind of loneliness. It is not the loneliness of being by yourself; it is the loneliness of being unknown while you are surrounded by people.

Her solution is imaginative rather than self-pitying. If there is no friend, she will make one. She decides that her diary will not be a dry list of what happened on which day, the way most diaries are. It will be the friend she has been missing, and a friend needs a name, so she calls her Kitty. From that point the entries stop being notes and become letters. They open the way letters open, they explain the things a friend would need explained, and they tease, apologise, confide and complain.

This decision matters for two separate reasons. For Anne, naming the diary gave her permission to be completely open, because you tell a friend things you would never put into a record. For the reader, it changed the book entirely. When you read the diary you are sitting in Kitty's chair; Anne is talking to you rather than writing near you, and that intimacy is a large part of why an ordinary schoolgirl's notebook came to be read so widely. It is also worth noticing what Kitty is not. Kitty is not a character Anne is pretending to be, and she is not an escape from reality. Kitty is a listener Anne invents so that she herself can finally be heard.

Having introduced Kitty, Anne notices a catch. A friend who knows nothing about her will not be able to follow a single letter. Nobody, she says, will understand a word of what she writes unless she first explains who she is. So she pauses the confiding and gives a short, brisk sketch of her life. This is a small piece of good sense worth noticing: the sketch is not a digression or a way of filling pages, it is the background information her imagined reader would need before anything else could make sense.

The facts she gives are these. Her father, described with obvious affection as the most adorable father she has ever seen, was thirty-six when he married her mother, who was then twenty-five. Her sister Margot was born in Germany in 1926, and Anne herself was born on 12 June 1929 and lived in Germany until she was four. Because the family was Jewish, her father moved to Holland in 1933, where he became the managing director of a Dutch company that made products used in making jam. Her mother went with him in September of that year, while Anne and Margot were sent to stay with their grandmother. Margot joined their parents in December and Anne followed in February, when, as she puts it with a completely straight face, she was plunked down on the table as a birthday present for Margot.

Notice how the humour survives even a paragraph of plain facts. A four-year-old being delivered like a wrapped gift is Anne's own joke about herself, and it tells you more about her personality than a page of description could. Her grandmother later came to live with the family and died in January 1942. Anne records that death in one short line and then adds quietly that she still thinks of her often and still loves her. The restraint is the proof of the feeling. She does not decorate the loss or perform her grief; she simply admits that it has not gone away, which is far more convincing.

Her schooling follows in the same brisk order. She went to a Montessori nursery school and stayed there until she was six, then moved into the regular school. In the sixth form her teacher was Mrs Kuperus, who was also the headmistress, and at the end of that year the two of them said a tearful goodbye, a small detail that quietly tells you Anne was liked by her teachers and was capable of real attachment. She then moved to the Jewish Lyceum, the school Margot also attended. Anne records the change in one plain sentence and lets it pass almost without comment, but the reason for it lay outside the classroom: by that time Jewish children in occupied Holland were required to attend separate Jewish schools, so the new school was a rule and not a choice.

On the surface this chapter is about a birthday present, a lonely girl and a funny teacher. Underneath it sits a piece of history that the extract itself mentions only lightly. It is worth knowing plainly and without exaggeration, because it changes how every line reads.

The Frank family was Jewish. From 1933, when the Nazi government came to power in Germany, laws were passed that steadily stripped Jewish people of their rights, their work and their safety. That is why Anne's father moved the family to Holland in the same year. In May 1940 Holland itself was occupied by German forces, and the same restrictions followed the family there. Jewish people were made to wear a yellow star on their clothing, were shut out of ordinary shops, cinemas, swimming pools and public transport, had to be indoors by a fixed hour at night, and Jewish children had to attend separate Jewish schools. Her move to the Jewish Lyceum was not a change of preference. It was a rule.

The entries in this chapter were written in June 1942. Less than a month later, on 6 July 1942, the family went into hiding. They moved into a set of concealed rooms at the back of the building where Anne's father had his business, reached through a doorway that was later covered by a movable bookcase. Eight people lived in that space in the end, and they survived as long as they did only because a few of her father's colleagues kept them supplied with food and news at serious risk to themselves. Anne went on writing to Kitty throughout the two years of hiding, so the diary that begins with school gossip goes on to record what it is like to grow up in a few rooms without once stepping outside.

The hiding place was discovered on 4 August 1944 and everybody in it was arrested and deported. Anne died in a concentration camp in early 1945, a few months before the end of the war, at the age of fifteen. Her father was the only one of the eight who survived. The loose pages of her diary had been picked up and kept safe, and he had them published in 1947, which is how a girl's private letters to an imagined friend became a book translated into many languages and read around the world.

Two things follow for your reading. The first is dramatic irony: you know what Anne did not. When she worries about a maths teacher and a school report, you are aware that within weeks all of it will be taken away, and that awareness is what makes the ordinary parts of the chapter moving rather than trivial. The second is a warning about answers. Do not turn every question into a history essay. Give the background in a sentence or two where it genuinely explains something, then come straight back to the text, because the question is almost always about Anne and not about the war.

The second half of the chapter changes gear completely. Anne stops looking inward and starts reporting on school, and her voice becomes quick, funny and slightly wicked. The whole class is nervous because the teachers are about to meet and decide who will move up to the next form and who will be kept back. Anne is reasonably confident about most of her subjects, though not about maths, and she describes classmates betting on the results, worrying aloud and trying to guess what the teachers will decide. The tension is real, but she treats it lightly, which is a good early clue to how she handles pressure in general.

Her maths teacher is Mr Keesing, whom she cheerfully dismisses as an old fogey. He had been annoyed with her for a long time for one reason only: she talked far too much in class. He warned her repeatedly, and when the warnings had no effect he set her extra homework in the form of an essay on the subject A Chatterbox. The title itself reads like a joke at her expense, and that seems to be part of the point: the punishment is meant to embarrass her a little as well as to correct her.

Anne treats it as an invitation instead. She writes three pages, and her argument is genuinely clever. She accepts that she talks and never once pretends otherwise, which immediately puts her on strong ground. But she argues that talking is a student's trait, something that simply comes with being at school, and that although she will do her best to keep it under control, she can never cure herself of it completely, because her mother talks just as much as she does, if not more, and there is very little anyone can do about a quality that has been inherited. It is a defence built on cheek and logic in equal measure, and it works well enough that Mr Keesing has a good laugh at it.

The laugh does not save her. In the very next lesson she is talking again, and a second essay follows with a sharper title, An Incorrigible Chatterbox. She hands it in, and for two lessons there is peace. Then, in the third lesson, Mr Keesing runs out of patience and sets a third essay with a title he has clearly enjoyed inventing: Quack, quack, quack, said Mistress Chatterbox. The whole class roars with laughter, and Anne, to her credit, laughs along with them even though the joke is aimed squarely at her. Being able to enjoy a joke made at your own expense is one of the qualities that defines her, and it is the quality that is about to get her out of trouble.

The third essay put Anne in a corner. She had already written everything she could think of about chatterboxes, and she had done it twice. If she simply repeated herself she would be handing Mr Keesing another easy laugh, so she decided she needed something original. Her friend Sanne, who was good at poetry, offered to help her write the whole essay from beginning to end in verse, and Anne took the idea up at once. That choice is the heart of the chapter. A mocking title had been handed to her, and putting it into poetry turned the mockery around and made it hers.

Anne does not copy the poem into her diary, so all we have is her own description of it. It was a small animal fable, with a mother duck and a father swan and three little ducklings. The ducklings quack so constantly that the father, unable to bear the noise any longer, bites them to death. That is the whole story, told lightly, in rhyme, as though it were a piece of nonsense written for small children.

It is not nonsense. Set against the situation that produced it, the argument is unmistakable. The young make noise because they are young; that is simply what they are. An adult who cannot tolerate that noise, and who answers it with punishment after punishment, ends up destroying the very creatures he is supposed to be looking after. The punishment, in other words, has grown wildly out of proportion to the offence. Anne manages to say all of this without once being rude, because a rhyme about ducks cannot be marked down for insolence. This is satire: criticism wrapped inside comedy so that it can be delivered safely, and it is a far more effective form of protest than sulking or arguing would have been.

Mr Keesing's reaction is what makes the incident a happy one rather than a bitter one. He took the joke exactly the right way. He read the poem aloud to the class, adding comments of his own as he went, and then read it to several other classes as well. After that Anne was allowed to talk and was not given extra homework again; on the contrary, he began making jokes himself.

Both sides win here, and it is worth being clear about how. Anne gets her voice back without ever having been defiant, since she never refused a punishment or answered back. Mr Keesing gives way without losing any authority, because he chooses to be amused rather than offended, and a teacher who can laugh at a pupil's joke against him usually ends up more respected rather than less. The episode also shows the quality that would carry Anne through everything that came afterwards. When she cannot change a situation, she makes it funny, and by making it funny she takes some of its power away from it.

Pulling the chapter together, four themes run through it. The first is loneliness inside a crowd. Anne is surrounded by family, classmates and admirers and is still not truly known by any of them, which is why the diary has to be turned into a person before she can speak. The second is adolescence, seen in her mixture of confidence and self-doubt, her sharp eye for the adults around her, her wish to be taken seriously, and her habit of examining her own faults honestly instead of blaming everyone else. The third is writing as release, the belief that putting a feeling into words makes it bearable. The fourth is humour as resilience, which the Mr Keesing episode demonstrates in miniature and which the rest of her short life would test far more severely.

On craft, three points are enough for any answer. The chapter is written in diary form addressed as letters, which produces a warm, talking voice and allows Anne to move without warning from a private confession to a piece of classroom gossip. It is written in the first person and is therefore limited: you only ever know what Anne knows, which is precisely why the historical background creates such strong dramatic irony. And the writing is deliberately unpolished. She is not trying to sound literary, and that plainness is exactly what makes her believable.

For answers, a few habits will lift your marks:

• Name people and incidents. Write Mr Keesing, Mrs Kuperus, Margot, Sanne and Kitty rather than "her teacher" or "her friend".
• Answer the question that was actually asked. A question about why Anne kept a diary does not need the story of the three essays.
• Use short phrases from the text only where you are explaining that exact wording, and put everything else in your own words. Long copied passages add very little to an answer.
• Take a clear stand on opinion questions and then justify it. If you are asked whether Anne was right that nobody would be interested in her thoughts, say plainly that she was wrong, and prove it from what actually happened to the book.
• Use both halves of the chapter when a question asks about her character, because the reflective half and the comic half show different sides of the same girl.

Finally, keep the tone right. This is a study page about a real child who died young, so write about the historical background factually and without drama, and give the same seriousness to the parts she found funny. Anne herself moves between the two without fuss, and an answer that can do the same is usually the one that reads best.