While it was easy for me to be enwrapped by the narrative flow and personality of Anne Frank's writing, I am often reminded that I am reading a real individual's confessions, whose thoughts and words have meaning to a reality that I too share and inhabit (to some degree). Her entries act as not just a window into her and her coinhabitants of the annexe's experience of the war where they endured through an aura of caution, elusiveness, and claustrophobia, but it also served as an intimate view of her insecurities, disappointments, misunderstandings, and revelations.

We can identify the personal purpose of her diary, or Kitty as she has named it. One can note the connection she shares with an inanimate object, finding solace in her confessions and often touting the pages of her diary as "more patient than people". Through our reading, I was treated to a young girl's insight into the ever-changing world, both from a macro view (the planet, her country, and her race's future) and from a micro perspective (familial relationships, romantic pursuits, puberty, personal philosophies). All of this is through the written reflections and letters of her life in hiding.

By its end, an overwhelming sadness came before me as I read through the afterword, to hear the outcomes of her and those who were with her in hiding; a tragedy that they were not able to escape from despite having endured through already most of the war. Everything suddenly resonated with me in that the last thing left of her legacy and her experience was this diary, acting as a capsule of that particular moment. I was confronted with the idea that this young person with aspirations, feelings, and intelligence was stripped of her opportunity to self-actualise, all because she lived through a world that was unwilling to see her for what she truly was - a human being.