In an interview on Books that Changed the World

Your last book is The Diary of Anne Frank.

I am half Jewish, and when I first read this book I was about ten and totally unaware of what had happened in the war. The Holocaust is something that even in the 1960s people were reluctant to talk about, especially in front of children. Like Jane Eyre, Anne is someone you fall in love with as a person. Her enthusiasm and her innocence and the blossoming of this tender, sensitive, inquisitive young woman in the most adverse of conditions speak to you so directly. As a consequence of reading her diary, I began to keep my own and have gone on keeping it every day ever since. I have also always had an interest in direct testimony and the importance of bearing witness.

There was the complete horror of not just the constant fear of discovery but also the claustrophobia and irritation of being locked up with a whole lot of people who have nothing in common with you. The people who shared the tiny hidden flat with the Franks were irritating and bigoted and smelly and boring, and yet, amidst all that, she managed to fall in love with the one other person who was there of her age.

It’s both inspirational and agonising. Here is a person who cannot possibly be blamed for anything that was going on and yet she suffers both in hiding and then afterwards when she was murdered after the diaries end. 

I think it shows people our common humanity, and it reminds us as adults what it is to be young and passionate about life. We all hope we would try and be as noble as she is in adversity, to remember that there is something indomitable about the human spirit and youth.