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In this paper I want to discuss about the graphical images and monotonous reality which were far away from the fantasy and utopian imagination of the thirteen year old girl who was known as Anne Frank. She had hit hard upon her fantasy with the help of realistic circumstances which were happening around her during the Second World War. All of us have a proper knowledge about the holocaust and the castration of the race of Jews in that time so I want to portray her image as a blessing caliber who had given us the idea of the ‘Natural and self paced behavior among the people as we can’t expect that this was figure out by thirteen year old girl, which is totally different from the tactical writers of that time, because behavior is the root of friendship and enemy and I really admired with her behavior when I read her “The Diary Of A Young Girl”. She used the Diary which she remarked as “kitty”  mean her personal page in which she could trust without any loophole and she had a particular idea about this decision that ‘Paper is More Patient Than People’. I am not going to do detail analysis of the holocaust because each and everyone has a idea about that but I want to pick up the graphical images in which she had given puzzling picture of Love with ‘Peter’ and basic relationships with her mother, father, sister and other members of ‘Secret Annex’, that’s why I have put a title ‘Touchy Neurotic Spinster’.

One thing which is totally exceptional in this diary and compels me to think about that “How can one sacrifices of one’s desire specially when she was just thirteen year old”, in this age children has to gone through the various steps of fantasy and obstinate desires about foodie and entertaining things instead of she had in her mind that ‘War will be end and Peace will be Every Where’, this Hope symbolizes that she had a critical and cold eye of sense of perception which makes her absolute classical personality among the tactical writers of that time. She had a busy mind with German and French writers, especially when she was feeling uneasy then she read the poems of German writers like ‘Goethe’.

‘Neurotic’ the word which depicts the things in a way that is not normal , so in this diary the things were not going well for her in which she cried inside where she had to sacrifices the virtues of teenagers things but there was one thing in which she had taken interest which was running with peter. She loved him and she didn’t even hesitate to accept that visible truth which was felt by her, she kept her character in two sides of coin which was ‘inside and outside’, inside means the hidden conscience of her fantasy with peter, sister, talking about the periods and parents and second thing outside means the horror sound ‘BBC RADIO’ which provided them to the news of daily castration and decapitation of being Jews , as we know the ‘Jews’ were required to wear a yellow star; Jews were required to turn in their bicycles; Jews were forbidden to use trams: Jews were forbidden to ride in cars; Jews were required to do their shopping to frequent only Jewish – owned barbershops and beauty salons; they don’t dare do anything anymore, ’cause they afraid it’s not allowed’. She had plenty of dreams, but the reality was that she had to stay there until the war is over. The most specific thing in this diary I have found the rope of ‘Fear’ which created the dismal prospect in every moment and ‘Fear’ is the aching thing for the adolescent girl because ‘They were not able to go outside and continuously knocking the door that you will be shot.

1.     War is not beneficial for the Humanity.

2.     Half knowledge and Understanding can lead you in a wrong path like ‘Hitler’.

3.     Work for the ‘Humanity and Civilization’ is the real ‘Karma’ for every homo-sapiens.

4.     Each religion and every caste inculcate the process of ‘Equality and Brotherhood’.

5.   ‘Diary’ can be your best friend as we have read ‘Anne’s, dairy.

As we know that ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ depicts the horror of ‘Holocaust’ and the cruelness of dwarf ‘Hitler’, so my argument is that half knowledge and half understanding for anything can make the road of destruction because in diary I have seen a lot of misunderstanding of one man which leads the ‘Jews’ to sacrificed  their lives and they couldn’t do according to their desires. Some time before I have read the news of the disputes between two countries – Russia and Ukraine. So the war is not the ultimate and final decision of anything, we can loss the lives and happy faces of children, their education , dreams, hopeful work, etc. So here my convincing point is, avoid the situation of the war and make the peaceful country, decision which can lead you to hopeful way.

“Erin Gruwell” (1999), in ‘The Freedom Writers Diary’ describes how she used Anne’s diary and the diary(modeled on Anne’s) written by “Zlata Filopovic” (1994) in war-torn Sarajevo to motivate Gruwell’s own low-achieving high school students. They kept diaries of their lives that showed the violence, homelessness, racism, illness and abuse around them. This opens the door for building critical bridges with holocaust and genocide education. In time-worn phrases like” some of my best friends are Jewish” a subtle discrimination lurks just beneath the surface, as Anti-Semitism often does. As the part of the Canadian media’s coverage of the 60^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, National Post reporter ‘Mireille Silcoff’(2005) described her reaction to a visit there:

“I should like to remember the victims of the holocaust as human beings who had lives richly, often against all odds- for this is the truth. I do not want to remember them as brittle bones, totems of murder… We might do better to spend more time remembering- and teaching our children about- the people that existed before the numbers and the life that existed prior to the descent into horror”.(p.14)

‘Anne’ provided the bridge for the kind of remembering, she showed us how life was lived in a close-knit, loving, cultured Jewish family, who valued friendship, lived their ethics and tried to make the world a better place. As Jews had often done, Let us remember the holocaust in

these terms too against the barbaric atrocities of what the Nazis did. Let us remember with appropriate respect the magnificent achievement of this singular thirteen year old girl, only one of one and a half million innocent children brutally murdered in the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews and mourn what more she and they might have given to the world.

Further in the title I have put a catchy word ‘Melancholy Annex’, All we know that ‘Melancholy’ means ‘Dejection’, which reflects the state of ‘Anne’s’ mind where she felt her days in number, She didn’t know how many days were left for her but all she could do was only wait as calmly as possible for it to end. Jews and Christians alike were waiting and the whole community and many were waiting for death. I want to express my thoughts that ‘Secret Annex’ becomes melancholy because it portrayed the graphical image of ‘Dark Cage’ where ‘Anne’s family and other members were about to explode and they can’t even laugh loudly as far as they knew crying would help but they couldn’t cry. I found in the text where she mentioned:

 “Talks whispers, fears, stench, farting and people continually going to the bathroom: try sleeping through that, I wander from room to room, climb up and down the stairs and feel like a songbird whose wings have been ripped off and who keeps hurting itself against the bars of its dark cage. Let me out, where there’s fresh air and laughter, a voice within me cries. All I want to do, is scream ‘Let me be, leave me alone. I’ve to force myself to act normally and I’m in a state of utter confusion, don’t know what to read, what to write and do. I know I’m far from being what I should; will I ever be”? (p.249)

So here the excerpt of her dairy where she expressed her thoughts which she felt in ‘Melancholy Annex’, all the arguments were about going hungry, dying, bombs, fire, extinguishers, sleeping bags, identity cards, poison gas, etc, not exactly cheerful. They could think about the suffering of those, they could hold dear one which reduce them to tears: in fact, they could spend the whole day fear with crying. The most thing they could do only was pray to ‘God’ to perform a miracle and save at least some of them and they hope they did enough of that, further the daily core was in their little community to ‘Peeling Potatoes’. I’m speechless to say that “How they could manage the hunger, awakening nights, education of the children, survival of their lives and still they were looking for the ‘Hope’. What was the percentage of hope for them to stay alive, specially when they were surrounded by the misfortunes and we all know that ‘Misfortune’s never come singly’, So for me ‘Anne’s courage to develop her thoughts in a hopeful way was exceptional, and she mentioned in her diary:

 “Who knows, may be our religion will teach the world and all the people in it about goodness, and that’s the reason, the only reason, we have to suffer. Be brave! Let’s remember our duty and perform it without complaint. There will be a way out. God has never deserted our people. Through the ages Jews have had to suffer, but through the ages they’ve gone on living, and the centuries of suffering have only made them stronger. The weak shall fall and the strong shall survive and not be defeated! I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inner strength and a great deal of courage! If god lets me live, I’ll go out into the world and work for mankind! I know that courage and happiness are needed first! Work, love, courage, and hope, make me good and help me cope!”(p.255)

In all of these respects, the emergence of Anne’s Frank as a factor in postwar German Consciousness signaled something new indeed, she was among the first prods to public memory and began a debate that still continues and unresolved.“Deborah Britzman”(1999) brilliantly explains the power of Anne’s text as performing a “Rescue Fantasy”. Falling in love with ‘Anne’ through the medium of her diary, good Christians and Jews who lived outside the range of Hitler’s grasp, absolve themselves of any guilt about their “bystander” status, how they let the ‘Holocaust’ happen, how they did not love their brothers and sisters as themselves. Curriculum theorist “Marla Morris”(2001) offers the model of a “Dystopian Curriculum”:

“That allows the shadow of the object, the shadow of the Holocaust, to darken perspectives but darkening perspectives does not mean sliding into nihilism. A dystopian curriculum is an ethical one, a response to ‘Invocation’ of the other. A dystopian curriculum is a promise of remembering that attempts to cut through lightness and inauthenticity towards the dark”. (p.11)

In my view, there has been no more definitive insight into the persistence of evil in our world than ‘Anne’s’ naked call to individual responsibility. ‘Anne’, alerts me to the potential within our hearts and minds to lead with conscience, to ask how “Human Nature” has changed for the better since ‘Anne’ wrote in her words, to question perhaps why it has not, further to consider in what ways the theories of ‘Identity Politics’ have influenced the persistent reality of racial hatred, war and genocide. Seldom in our ‘Education’ do we teach what it means to be fully human, what we need to sustain bodies and relationships, how to raise a family, how to make the world a more peaceful place. In time worn phrase like “Some of my best friends are Jewish” a subtle discrimination lurks just beneath the surface, as anti-semitism often does. We must do more than pay lip service to “Social Justice” by laboring to contend with, interrogate, and amend the situated perspectives that would coopt this noble banner for purpose of exclusion rather than inclusion. “My vision of an inclusive classroom centers on daily practice that

questions, reconceptualizes “received knowledge” from home, from church, from culture, from media to reveal the fault lines in our best intentioned attempts to cross the rackety bridge from self to other”(Phelan,1993,p.174).

I think ‘Anne Frank’s’ diary needs no introduction because this was beautiful autobiography of a young girl caught in the middle of one of the most horrific periods of human history, It is a testament to the indestructible human will to persevere and survive in the face of the most adverse of circumstances. ‘Anne Frank’ herself became one of the victims of the Second World War, her words, crowding every available inch of space in her dairy, survived to keep her story and her memory alive for the rest of the world through the ages.

Today, Anne Frank’s diary is one of the most important documents to have survived Hitler’s madness. Official records survivor’s voices alone that a human story can be woven out thirteen years old when she started writings, She had nothing to prove, no hidden agendas to achieve, no propaganda to spread. She wrote simply because she wanted to, she wrote with the great innocence and sincerity that only children can posses, but what she wrote was not as innocent as she herself was. Anne’s diary, one of the most meticulously maintained and revealing of documents to come from the victims side, has become a symbolic text of the Holocaust. Anne’s voice has reached out across continents and generations. It is said that the wound the psyche of a people suffers, cannot be healed by its closing up. It is only in keeping the memory of the wound alive, in remembering and in sharing, that the people find their true catharsis. ‘The Diary of Young Girl’, in as many times as it is read and discussed, in as many times as it inspires dialogue and historical debates, will bring this catharsis closer. His father devoted himself to sharing the message of his daughter’s diary with people all over the world. In her diary she hoped that she will be able to confide everything to dearest ‘Kitty’, as she had never been able to confide to anyone, and she hoped it will be a great source of comfort and support.  The title I have chosen “A Touchy Neurotic Spinster In Melancholy Annex” portrayed the various graphic images of survival, dreams, hope for justice and presence of mind in a dark cage, which adore us that she will be remember decade after decade in the history of Holocaust.

1. Frank, A. (1991).The Diary of a Young Girl: The definitive edition(S. Massotty, Trans.). New York: Doubleday.
2. Gies, Miep, and Alison Leslie Gold. Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of The Women Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family. New York: Simon and Schuster,1987.print.
3. Gruwell, E. (1999).The Freedom Writers Diary: How a teacher and 150 teens used writing to change themselves and the world around them. New York: Broadway Books.
4. Morris, M. (2001). Curriculum and the Holocaust: Competing sites of memory and representation. Mahwah NJ:Erlbaum.
5. Phelan, P. (1993). Unmarked: The politics of performance. New York: Routledge.
6. Silcoff, M. (2005,January 25).Only the deaths, not the lives. The National Post, pp.A1, A14.

Primary Sources:

1. ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ (Original text).
2. ‘Anne Frank Teaches Teachers About The Holocaust’ By “Lesley Shore.”
3. Anne Frank: ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’, ( Barter stage study guide).
4. Anne Frank. ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ Edited by “Otto H. Frank and Miriam Pressler”.

Secondary Sources:

1. Google Scholar and Wikipedia Content.