One day, one of the BBC broadcasts contains a suggestion by one of the Dutch leaders in exile that after the war the diaries and letters of people who have been through the war should be published. This causes quite a stir among the members of the group in hiding, and Anne starts to entertain serious thoughts of publishing her diary at a later stage, remarking that "it would seem quite funny ten years after the war if we Jews were to tell how we lived and what we ate and talked about here" (March 29, 1944). This sentence is strangely prophetic, as Anne's diary is, indeed, one of the most vivid documents — and perhaps the best-known-that has survived from that period, giving us a painfully honest, human "inside view" of what it was like to be Jewish and to be hiding in perpetual fear during the war years.
Time and time again, Anne wrestles with depression, struggling to hold back tears when she is with Peter, bravely endeavoring not to sob out loud when she is alone. She tries to reason with herself, and eventually she succeeds, writing, "It was over!" (April 4, 1944). On the same occasion, she gives us a far more hopeful and more positive account of what she wants her future to be, so that the gloomy entry which began "For a long time I haven't had any idea of what I was working for any more; the end of the war is so terribly far away, so unreal, like a fairy tale" becomes more optimistic: "I must work, so as not to be a fool, to get on, to become a journalist, because that's what I want! I know that I can write."
This same entry reveals Anne becoming a more mature young woman, one who is able to appraise herself and her surroundings clearly and also critically. She knows that she is the best judge of her own work, and she also realizes that she wants more from life than being just a homemaker, as her mother is, and as the women of her class generally were. Here, too, Anne exhibits an awareness of the position of women, an attitude which is far ahead of her time and her immediate environment.
