For fear of disappointment and lack of time, I rarely reread. Sometimes I will flip through an old book for a quick memory or moment of nostalgia, but I usually avoid it.  However, some books reveal their depth only the second time around because we have more distance or simply because our mindset is different.  This is exactly what happened when I read Anne Frank‘s diary again – it was an unexpected and very different experience.

During a recent trip to Amsterdam , I visited the secret Annex where Anne, her family and other companions spent more than two years in hiding. Was it the silence that besieged my throat as I climbed the stairs to the Frank’s bedroom? The narrowness of the rooms? The dignity of the walls that saw years of waiting for a hypothetical end of the war? I’m not sure what it was specifically, but all of a sudden I felt an obligation to reread Anne Frank’s journal .

From my first read as a little girl, I remembered a big faded blue book and an ideal heroine who reported her daily hidden life of long days spent in silence in the rooms of the “Annex.”  But the second “read around”, in  an attempt to keep my childhood memories at a distance, I not only chose an English version of the book, but also a revised edition achieved by Otto Frank (Anne’s father, and the only survivor of Frank family) just before his death, which reinstates the passages expurgated in 1947.

Reading the Journal again, my entire perception changed: Anne Frank was and is much more than a universal symbol, much more than an innocent figure destroyed by the Nazi regime.  Far from the plain polite and cheerful young girl that we usually remember her to be, Anne was a complex and incredibly insecure character. She had chaotic relationships with her mother and her other companions and often felt misunderstood, sometimes rejected. In her letters to Kitty you recognize a modern woman, independent and rebellious. And as she conveys her rage and incomprehension, she proposes a quasi-sociological analysis of the “Annex” fellowship.

What is even more striking than Anne’s temperament is the writer in her that we gradually discover.  Behind the very passionate paragraphs, surfaces a curious woman obsessed by literature and words. Demanding and hard on others, but above all, hard on herself, Anne is this extraordinary author who finds her salvation in writing as the world is falling apart around her.

Re-discovering Anne Frank as an aspiring writer, made of desires and contradictions, gives her back her singularity.  Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: a search for six of six million*, lost a whole part of his family in the Holocaust. During family reunions he would very often hear about his family as Holocaust victims, but all other memories seemed to have disappeared behind their fate. Convinced that no detail on their personalities would lead to oblivion, he went on a long journey to find out the specificity of each of these family members. In that respect, to read Anne Frank’s diary with the distance of adulthood, away from the sepia snapshot we have in mind, leads to remember a personality that would have had a life and voice. That she was a woman before becoming a victim.

FRANK Anne (Edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler), The Diary of a Young Girl. The definitive edition, 2007, Penguin Books, London

*MENDELSOHN Daniel, The Lost: a search for six of six million, 2007, Harper Perennial, New-York