excerpted from The Diary Of A Young Girl

I’d forgotten what an inspiration Anne Frank’s diary [Dog-Eared Page, June 2019] was to me when I was about her age. I remember thinking how I could never have been as brave as she was, and being sad that she hadn’t survived. My mother gave me Frank’s book after I learned about the Holocaust in school, where they showed film footage of what the soldiers found during the liberation of the death camps. The shock of finding out what hatred and genocide really meant changed me forever.