Day Six

Day 06 – A book that makes you sad

It's fairly easy for a book to make me cry, I am a hopeless crybaby when it comes to books and films. Recent tear jerkers for me were Markus Zusak's The Book Thief which I just cried buckets over and J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows which had me in floods (the reasons for which I can't go into without plot spoiling.) The book that makes me most sad though is Anne Franks The Diary of a Young Girl, just to read all her private thoughts and feelings, all her hopes and aspirations wrapped up with her fears and anxieties and resentments and worst of all is that you know the outcome so when she's chattering on about her hopes for the future, such as how she would love to be a writer, and how she longs to be outside again, a part of you breaks because you know she never will or will never be conscious of it anyway. Her diary lives on but it's a bit like Van Gogh and his paintings, you just wish they could see how much their work is revered now. Of course if Anne had survived her diary would probably never have been published but then I'm sure she would have written because even at a young age there was talent there. She is known to have died shortly before the camp at Bergen-Belsen was liberated and it's also thought that, having witnessed the death of her sister, she believed both her parents to be dead. If she had known her father was still alive perhaps there would have remained a small spark of fight which might have kept her alive for a few more weeks .. we'll never know but that thought just adds to the sadness. She wanted to live on and be remembered and in that she succeeded which is the only shred of hope to be gained from her story .. there must have been thousands of other 'Anne Frank's' who were wiped away as if they'd never existed.