101 Books, Number 13

Favorite Books Throughout My Life

13: The Diary of a Young Girl, 1950 (1^st American edition, 1952), by Anne Frank (1929–45)

And so I flew to Amsterdam

To see the famous place where Anne

Had hidden—sacrificial lamb

To Nazis—most disgusting Klan.

I’d started teaching kids the play

Based on her splendid diary,

So off I went (vacation days!)

To see all that there was to see.

I saw the house—the lines were long.

To Germany I went and saw

Where she had died*—so very wrong,

So counter to all human law.

But human hope’s a feathered thing

(As Emily in the poem wrote)—

And so that brutal fatal sting

Reminds us of the antidote.

*the camp at Bergen-Belsen, Germany