As anyone who has read Anne's diary knows, she was immensely gifted, both as a writer and as a person of great sensitivity. She could feel things deeply, sense the feelings of others and communicate all this to paper. Anne's personality sparkles and shines on every page of the diary — whether Anne is in the heights of ecstasy over her budding relationship with Peter Van Daan or whether she is in the depths of despair over the grim realities of her life in hiding; whether she is describing the constant irritation of being confined to the house and having to live at such close quarters with people whom she dislikes, or whether she is confessing her ambivalent feelings toward her parents and her sister.
Above all else, Anne's feelings are ordinary and so akin to those experienced by any teenager growing up and being confronted by situations and with individuals which he or she is not yet capable of dealing with in a detached or adult way. One of the most striking features that emerges from Anne's diary is the sense of the intensity of the emotions that she experiences as an adolescent.
On August 4, 1944, the Gestapo, apparently acting on information provided by an informer, probably one of the workers in the warehouse, arrived at the building where the Franks were hiding, entered the office and began to search the building. Although Mr. Kraler tried to convince them that there was nothing behind the bookcase at the end of the corridor, the Nazis pulled it away, and the secret door to the Franks' hiding place was exposed.
No one acted hysterically or violently when they realized what had happened; in numbed silence, they simply put together a few basic possessions which they thought they might need and left with their captors. The notebooks in which Anne had written her diary were scattered on the floor and left there when one of the Gestapo men emptied a briefcase in an attempt to find money or any other "valuables." Another instance of the irony of fate.
