WORDS THAT LIVE ON

‘Unless you write yourself, you can’t know how wonderful it is; I always used to bemoan the fact that I couldn’t draw, but now I’m overjoyed that at least I can write. And if I don’t have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. But I want to achieve more than that. I can’t imagine having to live like Mother, Mrs van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring en-joyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me!

‘When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?’

The words above were written on 5 April 1944, exactly 80 years before the publication of this issue of Writing Magazine, and published in The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank.

Frank’s words demonstrate that the pen is mightier than the sword, that she did ‘go on living even after [her] death’, that she did not just become a writer, but one of the most famous and celebrated of the 20th century. Her words take on an incredible poignancy when we know that they were written by a 14-yearold girl while she was in hiding from the Nazis with her family in Amsterdam, and that she died with her sister Margot in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp 10 or 11 months later, weeks before the end of the war in Europe.

Anne Frank’s passionate desire to be a writer should inspire us that great writing is possible even in the most difficult of circumstances. GD