Lesson From a 15 Year Old Girl.

“It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.

It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty will too will end, that peace and tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I must hold on to my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I’ll be able to realize them!”

Yours, Anne M. Frank

That was an excerpt from The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank; the last two chapters from Anne’s third last entry written July 15, 1944. Two and a half weeks later, Anne and the seven other people were arrested and taken out of their secret annex where they had been in hiding for more than two years and put into concentration camps.

It seemed so powerful to me, that after living 25 months in a small attic with 7 other people, without the option of going outside, being at the mercy of their helpers, feeding off scarce rations of food that had often begun to rot, Anne still had a drive and hopes of a brighter future when they would be liberated. She often wrote about the trials and tribulations of life in The Secret Annex, but never gave up hope for herself, her family and all of humanity.

A lesson for all of us, maybe?

In March of 1945, nine months after she was arrested, Anne Frank died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. Roughly one month before that concentration camp was liberated by British troops.

She was fifteen years old.