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Most of all, Anne studied her parents with intense interest. She decided that she loved only her father: "I long for Daddy's real love: not only as his child, but for me—Anne, myself." With amazing acuteness, she analyzed her relation to her mother: "We are exact opposites in everything; so naturally we are bound to run up against each other. I don't pronounce judgment on Mummy's character, for that is something I can't judge. I only look at her as a mother, and she just doesn't succeed in being that to me; I have to be my own mother. I've drawn myself apart from them all; I am my own skipper, and later on I shall see where I come to land."
Through the tense months Anne kept firm hold of her sense of humor. When Mrs. van Daan appeared with an injured rib, Anne wrote: "That's what happens to elderly ladies who do such idiotic exercises to reduce their large behinds." When Dentist Dussel went to work on Mrs. van Daan's molars, Anne was gleefully reminded of "a picture from the Middle Ages entitled 'A Quack at Work.' " But she could make fun of herself too: her beloved diary she called "the unbosomings of an ugly duckling."
The Cremated Pen. As the war dragged on and news trickled in of mass deportations of Jews, Anne became desperate. She had terrifying fantasies about the death of Jewish friends. Often she saw "rows of good, innocent people accompanied by crying children [walk] on and on . . . bullied and knocked about until they almost drop." With appalling prescience she wrote that "there is nothing we can do but wait as calmly as we can till the misery comes to an end. Jews and Christians wait, the whole earth waits; and there are many who wait for death." When her pen fell into the fire, she wrote that it "has been cremated."
Though not much interested in politics, Anne tried to understand what was happening to the world. "I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war," she wrote. "Oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged ..."
But sometimes she cried out from the heart, as if for all the Jews of Europe: "Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up to now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again."