Still a few hours before "Small Island" airs, so I will post just a few observations about Anne Frank's diary.
JoanG, the changes in the newly released edition remain true to the original, but more of a graphic description of Anne's growing interest in her body - and the conversations between herself and Peter are much more graphic than in the original... I wonder what school librarians will do with this newly released version. Otto Frank is said to have withheld whole chapters because he wanted to protect his daughter's privacy. Before he died, he released the missing chapters. I was very glad that I read the book - that PBS made it available to us.
On the one hand, I think that schools might want to withhold the new edition because of the graphic nature - on the other hand, I think that today's young people would not be at all shocked by the content - as their parents might be.
What really caught my attention was the fact that in the
Oct.9, 1942 entry in her diary, Anne writes this after hearing the BBC report:
p. 54 (new edition)
"If it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them. We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they are being gassed. Perhaps that's the quickest way to die."
I honestly don't know what to make of this information. All along I have thought that the " final solution" did not begin until the last year of the war. And that it wasn't known for certain. Yet, here is Anne Frank writing in her diary about something that she heard in 1942! What did you think when you read that? (It was repeated in the PBS version too, though the date was not given as in the diary...)
