Annotated Bibliography
Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. New York: Bantam Books, 1993. The diary of Anne Frank is a first person account of the life of a young girl living in a dusty attic for over two years hiding from the Nazi regime during a period of time known as the Holocaust. Her journey of writing this diary was not based on a notion of having a piece of history for someone to leave or for someone to find. It was made with the present in mind, a way for her to have a safe space to acknowledge her feelings while living in hiding from persecution. Because Anne documented the events that happened in real time, while they were occurring, this diary allows for readers of future generations to learn about the life of a young girl who at the time had no idea how her story would end. And one day it did. The entries stopped. They were eventually found and her diary didn’t continue. This text is essential to the curriculum because it demonstrates how something as simple as a diary can become the voice that keeps echoing about one of history’s most horrific time periods. Teachers are encouraged to use selected passages that fit their curriculum basis from the diary to examine how her voice plays roll in certain times of her life while in hiding. It allows for readers to grasp tone, and personal testimony. Students will eventually see that through her diary she is able to confine in a friend that she can tell her deepest thoughts to. It also allows for people to reflect on Anne’s thoughts, fears, emotions, and herself.
Freedom Writers, and Erin Gruwell. The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. In this unit, I pair the diary of Anne Frank with The Freedom Writers Diary because they can see how they can use writing to tell people how they should process whatever experiences they deal with every day. Much like Anne Frank does in her diary. The theme of resistance and tying these two texts together to show how writing can resist silence, how writing can allow for history to be changed, and how voices can still be heard when used in context.
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