Anne Frank Portrait

As I grow older and life gifts me experiences of all kinds, I am starting to become artistically attracted to a very different breed of subject. Consciously or not, I’m choosing people with a profound understanding of freedom, or lack thereof.

I first read 'The Diary of A Young Girl'  when I was very close in age to Anne Frank. Also, like her, I was a precocious, highly strung and overconfident diary keeper. Now, reading her again, everything is coloured so vividly by so many other experiences, all of them denied to her.

These are peculiar times, in which books are starting to become banned again, in quite the unfathomable turn of events. I refuse to allow politics to touch me, but this I will say. Anne is more important than ever. Let’s read and remember her for the way in which she refused to surrender her innermost soul to the darkness.

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again.”