Anne Frank’s diary is considered to be a valuable, historical record because neither it is fiction nor has it been composed after the incidents took place. It is the diary of someone who lived the history of the Second World War. She was an eye witness to the Holocaust, and she recorded her firsthand experience from a personal, political and social aspect. This record made by an ordinary citizen became a historical document because it was not a conscious project to document history taken up by a scholar. Rather it recounts the lived experiences of a young girl, living through the horrors of war and persecution on the grounds of ethnicity. As Anne didn’t share her feelings with anyone, she recorded them in her diary as if she were confiding to her diary named Kitty as it comforted her. She maintained it from June 12th, 1942 to August 1st, 1944. Initially, she only wrote about herself but later on she edited her diary for posterity after hearing a March 1944 radio broadcast from an exiled Dutch Government official who urged the Dutch people to keep journals and letters that would help to provide a record of what life was like under the Nazis.
The diary was considered to be authentic because Miep Gies had recovered five notebooks and some 300 loose papers containing Anne’s writings from the Secret Annexe shortly after the Frank’s arrest by the Nazis. She had hidden them in her desk and gave it to Otto Frank, the only survivor of the family, on his release from Auschwitz, who got the diary published.
Anne’s diary provides an invaluable insight into the times, lives and hardships. It shows a rare insight from a child’s point of view.
