The last few entries in Anne's diary are concerned with the various daily events that Anne has written about all along — the moods of the members of the group, their preoccupation with food, the books they read and discuss, Anne's relations with her parents, and her feelings toward Peter.
Anne's last entry, on August 1, 1944, three days before the "Secret Annexe" is raided by the police and its occupants are sent to concentration camps, is one in which Anne analyzes herself and her situation, displaying considerable powers of perception. She concludes, after acknowledging that her flippant behavior is just a front to help her cope with the people around her, with the statement that she keeps 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."
At the end of the period of hiding, Anne is clearly a very different person from the girl who started out to write in the red-checkered diary; especially during the second year, she has matured greatly. Of course, there has been the growing love between her and Peter, and this has certainly left its mark. But in addition to the self-confidence she has acquired, Anne is less quick to judge the other people around her; she has a greater self-awareness now, and she has thought deeply about a great many subjects.
Anne has not wasted her time while she has been in hiding. Under her father's guidance, she has continued studying various subjects, skills, and languages. She has developed her writing, especially, so that the style in her diary has become more varied and vivid. In fact, her diary contains descriptive passages, conversations, character analyses, and honest introspection that we would not expect from such a young girl; this is one of the reasons why it has managed to capture the interest of so many people over such a long period of time; very simply, it is well-written. Anne's ability to analyze people and situations has grown as we watch, so to speak, so that we do not feel that we are reading the maudlin confessions of a "mixed-up" teenager; rather, we are eager to find out what this intelligent young woman has to say about the varied subjects which she chooses to write about. Being forced to remain in hiding for two years is obviously too high a price to pay for precocious maturity, but how much poorer our world would have been had we not been granted this glimpse into the inner workings of a young girl's mind in the years that were so fateful for her and for the whole world.
