Dear Musicals.Net Poaters,

While searching for images from the 1959 movie, "The Diary of Anne Frank", I found a picture of the real Anne....and her friend Laureen, who actually survived....and spoke about Anne during later years. Laureen was angry about the fact that during the computer age, researchers peeled away the pasted paper that had covered one of the pages of Anne's famous journal. The page had mentioned some adult subjects....from a teen's POV, and Laureen felt that Anne had been at a decided disadvantage where the diary page was concerned, because she (and / or her father) hadn't been able to just delete the information in the style of a computer user. Laureen felt that Anne had been sorely disrespected, because she had never been able to give her consent to those who had unveiled the secret, crudely-protected diary page.

I feel that it's almost even sadder than that! While I would always be curious about the contents of a secret diary page like that in Anne's private journal, I keep feeling extremely sad every time that I think about why Anne couldn't give anyone permission to read her entire diary: She had lost her freedom....and her life in one of the most hurried and unfair ways imaginable!!!

That diary is a time capsule of Anne herself. Her courage and her joy live on, but....that diary is the only real physical evidence of her life. It is all that's left of her deepest emotions, her dreams, and her privacy; its all that's left of Anne Frank as a person who once lived and planned for a future. It almost feels....wrong to reveal her secrets now....It's so tempting to know exactly what they were (The article that I read spoke vaguely of subjects like Sex Ed., etc., and slightly more adult stuff....like the kinds of subjects that teens would wonder about), and yet, it's somehow so wrong.

In Anne's case, it would've been so much better if the girl who had written her final story had lived to make even more of an impact on the world; if her diary made as much of an impact as it made, imagine what she could have done, had she survived. Now, she survives only in our hearts and minds....and in the hearts and minds of her relatives.

Thanks in advance for your replies, and please remember that this is a serious topic, and that it is too sad to carry an intent that's anything except for serious.