On re-reading the searing Diary of Anne Frank.... For Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1, listen to The Great Teenage Testament of Nazism's Most Famous Martyr, by Emer O’Kelly above.
I was thirteen when I was given a present of a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, and I was immediately struck by the coincidence that I was the age she had been when she began keeping the diary that was to become one of the most searing and eloquent memorials to the Holocaust.
I was also overwhelmed as much by her ruminations as by her extraordinary mastery of sophistication and prose. To my unsophisticated Irish eye and ear Anne Frank was a revelation. It wasn't that this German Dutch Jewish girl of my own age had been in one way no different to me, but she had been better.
Despite being locked away from all normal experience for the last two years of her life, almost from the light of day, she was more mature, more thoughtful, more questioning, infinitely more aware....
Listen to more from Sunday Miscellany here.
