The Diary of Anne Frank July/August 1944

Thursday, 6 July, 1944

She is disappointed in Peter for saying that it is easier not to change his weak nature. She does not want him to lean on her. She wants him to understand that what is easy can drag him down. She wishes everyone would think about how to improve themselves.

Topic Tracking: Optimism 26

Saturday, 8 July, 1944

They get a huge amount of strawberries. They lock the doors and mass-produce jam, and for two days, eat nothing but strawberries. They also get nineteen pounds of peas, which they must shell. Anne is sick of peas by the end of the day spent shelling them.

Saturday, 15 July, 1944

Anne reads a book that criticizes youth as superficial and lazy. Anne takes it personally. Daddy treated her struggle as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. She is often irritable because she still feels guilty about the letter. She realizes that she built up the image of Peter in her mind, and wishes he would stand on his own. She remembers a quote about how youth is lonelier than old age. Ideals meet truth and shatter, especially now that people are showing their worst side, yet she trusts that peace will return again.

"It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again." Saturday, 15 July, 1944, pg. 237

Topic Tracking: Optimism 27
Topic Tracking: Family 23

Friday, 21 July, 1944

Someone tried to assassinate Hitler. She is glad that the German officers fight among themselves. Hitler tells the armed forces that they must obey his Nazi police, the Gestapo. Anne does not want to be too hopeful, but she is excited at the prospect of returning to school in the fall. She calls herself a little ball of contradictions.

Tuesday, 1 August, 1944

Anne talks more about her duality, the cheerfulness, and the deeper, purer side that no one knows. She worries that people think she is superficial, and the deeper Anne cannot withstand that. Clown Anne takes over even when she tries to be good. She behaves as if she does not care about things, but inside, she cares so intensely.

"[F]inally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if... there weren't any other people living in the world." Tuesday, 1 August, 1944, pg. 241

This is her last entry in the diary, for on August 4, 1944, the Secret Annexe was raided and they were taken away to German and Dutch concentration camps.