Categories: books
Date: 14 April 2008 18:49:32
My readers will probably be familiar with The Diary of Anne Frank. Anne Frank was a German Jewish girl whose family moved to The Netherlands in the 1930s. After the occupation of The Netherlands by the Nazis the family of four went into hiding with another four people in what she called The Annexe, a concealed part of the building where her father had formerly worked in the centre of Amsterdam.
While they were there, Anne wrote of the daily ups and down, stresses and strains of household life which were all the more intensified by the fact that no one could ever leave the rooms they occupied or even make a sound during the day for fear of the workers in the building hearing them. This included every noise you can think of from speaking at a normal volume to the clattering of the washing up to pulling the chain on the toilet. Anne describes how she longed to go out and how she would stand at the topmost window at night breathing in deep gulps of fresh air - or shake with fear in her bed at night when the aeroplanes came over the city dropping their bombs. Her fear was not so much of suffering a direct hit but a near-miss which would oblige the household to leave the damaged building and be discovered.
Anne writes beautifully and considering she was only 13 years old when she first started her diary, her standard of description is astonishing. Sometimes one has to remind oneself that she is confined to The Annexe and that she does not have any external social stimulation apart from the occasional visit from the people who were helping them by bringing supplies. Her diary entries are so interesting; she always finds something new to discuss. It would be understandable if her entries slipped into the mundane but we are spared the banality of "I got up, I had my breakfast and then I read my book..."
After approximately two and a half years of hiding, the household was discovered and transported to concentration camps. Of the eight, only Anne's father survived.
Zlata's Diary by Zlata Filopovic has been compared to The Diary of Anne Frank. Zlata began writing her diary at the age of 11 during the Balkan Conflict in 1991. Although (in my view) it does not have quite the literary merits of Anne's diary, it is nevertheless an interesting account of war through the eyes of child and the deterioration of normal life; school, friends, parties, swimming, etc. were replaced by self-imposed imprisonment. Zlata lived in Sarajevo which was extensively bombed. Her home was literally right in the line of fire between the warring sides. She was not allowed to practise the piano as bullets had smashed through the sitting room windows (where the piano was) and, eventually, it was too dangerous to remain in the flat at all. She and her parents as well as neighbours in the apartment block had to live in the cellar as best they could (no heating, no cooking facilities, no washing facilities and next to no food available). Zlata's story has a happy ending as a publisher heard of her writing activities and these turned out to be her family's passport to a safer country. I believe she now lives in Ireland.
"I want to live" by Nina Lugovskaya, The diary of a young girl in Stalin's Russia is by comparison a complete let-down. It is billed in the blurb on the back of the book as "poignantly revealing life at a time of political upheaval, betrayal and repression through the eyes of an innocent". I bought it on the basis that my knowledge of anything Russian is woefully inadequate and thought that perhaps I would understand more by reading Nina's diary. Her diary entries are perhaps typical of the trauma of the teenage years: does that boy like me, am I pretty enough, the slog of endless schoolwork and homework, squabbles with her twin sisters and mother and so on.
Although her father is in prison for his political beliefs, there is little explanation or even mention of him. Although the blurb promises insight into "political upheaval, betrayal and repression", there is barely a whisper of anything more than the ordinary life of an ordinary girl.
The most astonishing thing associated with this diary is the attitude of Stalin's secret police. Whereas when Anne Frank was arrested, the SS left her diaries scattered across the floor of The Annexe as the worthless witterings of a teenager, (as it says on the back cover of the book and not actually in the text itself) Stalin's secret police arrested Nina, her mother and sisters on the grounds of treason for the few criticisms Nina had made of the regime in her writing. They were sentenced to five years' hard labour and seven years' exile. Of course, there is no record of these years as Nina would have been banned from writing. Nina's few criticisms are highlighted in the text so that the reader can judge for her/himself how mild or severe s/he thinks Nina has been. Twelve years' punishment has got to rate as pretty harsh in anyone's book.
Sadly, despite the suffering Nina endured for writing her diary, I cannot recommend it whereas Anne's and Zlata's are well written (particularly taking their ages into account) and should be on everyone's reading list.