Anne Frank

This blog wouldn't be complete without a page dedicated to a girl who had a big influence over me when I was growing up.
Let me tell you how I met her:
One day, when I was about 10 years old, I went with one of my older sisters to the house of one of her classmates. They had to study, but for some reason, I had to tag along (believe me, I would rather have stayed at home playing with my dolls or watching the TV). Claudia - that's the classmate - took pity on me and lend me a book she had enjoyed as a girl.
That book was "The Diary of Anne Frank".
As I laid curled on the sofa, while my sister studied, I was swept into another world. Suddenly, I was the recipient of the confidence of this girl, who told me about her birthday, her school, her friends and her family. She even took me with her when she had to hide in an attic, and I laughed with her at her neighbor's silliness, and became angry on her behalf with her mother.
I had no idea how the story would end, having never heard before of Anne Frank, and her experiences in the attic seemed to me like a marvelous adventure. I didn't know anything about the Holocaust, the millions of people killed, or that this girl was "the poster girl", so to speak. The only Jews I knew were my neighbours, who, beside lighting some candles and singing prayers on Fridays, were nothing out of the ordinary.
Needless to say, I took the book home with me, and finished it in a couple of days. Except... there wasn't a real ending. After Anne's last entry, there was only a short paragraph that said that Anne and her family had been betrayed to the Gestapo and that she had died of typhoid in a concentration camp named Bergen-Belsen.
Many years later, when I was at the University, I came across a small volume of Anne Frank's stories. Some were anecdotes from her diary, others were tales she had created while hiding. It rekindled my interest in her, and in her unfinished story. What had happened to her after she had been caught?
By that time, Amazon reigned supreme, and I was able to get hold of a book called "The last seven months of Anne Frank". Aha! Now the mystery would be solved.
Except it wasn't. The book was a collection of remembrances of girls who had been with Anne Frank in the camps, or had gone through similar experiences and related them. As much as it answered questions, more popped out, much like cutting Hydra's head. I came face to face for the first time with the inhumanity of Auschwitz, the selections, the mass murders, and the cruelty of men to men.
I couldn't find my friend's voice among the memories of these other girls. The Anne I had come to know through the pages of her diary, courageous, quick tongued, chatty, always struggling to become a better person and to understand the world around her, who dreamed of writing, who admired her father and had huge rows with her mother, wasn't there. Maybe I didn't want to imagine her there, inmersed in misery, cold and hungry, and utterly hopeless.
But as I read the experiences of these other girls, I struggled to understand. And the truth is, that many years and a lot of books and internet searches later, I still can't.
My readings have widened. I discovered that not only Hitler treated people worse than animals, but also Stalin in his infamous Gulag, Mao with his crazy agricultural schemes, and Pol Pot in Cambodia have done much the same, in the name of, let's say, ideas.