Anne's diary ends before her own direct experience of the concentration camps, so she gives her readers only an indirect picture of that period's specific terrors.
By contrast, her account of the difficulties and frustrations involved in her painful transition from a child of thirteen to a fifteen-year-old young woman of surprising wisdom and self-confidence is often shockingly immediate and candid. Written as a series of letters to an imaginary friend, Anne's diary expresses her profound longing for affection and understanding as she wrestles with her changing self-image, sexual curiosity, religious belief, intellectual goals, and, above all, the need to define herself as a person independent of her parents despite being unnaturally constrained to be near them.
The "Secret Annex" in which her family hides becomes a microcosm of the world at large in many ways and Anne struggles to define her position within its charged atmosphere. Her observations and assessments of her family members and the other people in hiding with them are at times funny and, just as often, brutal. The passages about her conflict with her mother, whom she saw as lacking the maternal skills necessary to earn the love she so obviously desired from her daughters, upset her father Otto enough for him to have them removed from the original published editions of the diary.
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