Margot Watson's story about The Diary of a Young Girl

I first read Anne Frank's Diary when I was eleven years old. At that time it had a profound effect on me as we were around the same age.I was able to get into her head and really experience everything that happened to her.

In a way it seemed to me that her life was quite exciting, an adventure really. I think she may have felt the same initially and tried through her diary to turn it into a positive event.
It was possible to relive the tensions and also the love that was generated in the "attic". I could identify with the stirrings of affection for Peter and also the start of puberty since as I have already stated we were of a similar age.

Of course it must have been truly frightening and horrific but there was always this sense of achievement. I was fascinated by the book and devastated at the outcome. To think the family had held out for so long only to be discovered so near to the end of the war. To die in such tragic circumstances I shudder to think of it. I have since read as much as I can of Anne's previous life and the stories told by Mieppe Guise who helped to conceal them and was instrumental in their survival. Also other friends and of course her father Otto who published the Diary which had been discovered and kept in safe keeping by Mieppe.

This book fired my lifetime interest in the Holocaust and the unthinkable fate of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis. I have since read dozens of wartime experiences all of them inspirational but none so poignant as that of the young girl who was plucked so mercilessly from her safe happy environment and never made it into the adult world and the career she dreamed of.