Primary sources are the original documents that allow analyzing real facts about a certain epoch. They reflect the mood of real people who were eyewitnesses of events. Letters, films, posters belonging to the time period in question can serve as primary sources for historians. Anne Frank’s diary is one of the multiple documents reflecting the life of people during World War II. It became one of the most famous documents related to the Holocaust, the genocide of Jews by the Nazis.
The Diary of Anne Frank (2003) is a diary of a teenage Jewish girl that lived during the period of the Holocaust. It is dated 1942 and describes the life of an ordinary girl in the period of World War II. Anne writes about her life in the “Secret Annex”, where she and some other Jewish people was hiding from Nazis. Most of the diary is dedicated to Anne’s love for a boy called Peter and to adolescent problems, such as her perception by parents and by other people.
However, some grave details concerning the concentration camps and the death of thousands of Jews are also present in the text. The diary gained huge popularity, having been translated into sixty-five languages and read by millions of readers. This is explained by the fact that the text allows learning about the Holocaust through the eyes of an ordinary girl and to learn more about the feelings of people during that horrifying period of human history.
The secondary source analyzed in this paper is “The Nation Behind the Diary: Anne Frank and the Holocaust of the Dutch Jews” by J. L. Forray (2011). The research describes both the Diary of Anne Frank and the events associated to Holocaust that are related to Anne and her family. In the document, a wide range of facts and statistics are provided. The document also presents one of the points of view, according to which the diary cannot be called a representative source of information concerning the Holocaust. As Forray puts it, “the wartime situation of the Frank family was too far removed from the horrors” such as gas chambers and ghettos (Forray 331).
However, the diary was never meant to be a representative source documenting the suffering of all Jews in Europe. Still, it reflects the real experience of a young Jewish girl, which is very valuable, even despite the fact it does not fully represent the experiences of other Jews that died during the Holocaust.
As for the accuracy of the primary and secondary sources, the secondary sources reveal more full information concerning the Holocaust. The diary provides only a limited point of view which is not scientific, whereas during a historical research some statistics and facts would be very useful. For this reason, I would prefer to work with secondary sources. However, it is impossible to deny the importance of primary sources, as without them any historical research could not have been made. Nevertheless, primary sources can sometimes be more valuable from the point of view of art, as they allow to plunge into the atmosphere of the epoch and to imagine the feelings of particular people. In conclusion, both types of sources shall be used by historians during the research, as it allows to present the full picture of a certain period or event.
Work Cited
Foray, Jennifer L. “The Nation Behind the Diary: Anne Frank and the Holocaust of the Dutch Jews.” History Teacher, vol. 44, no. 3, 2011, pp. 329–352.
Frank, Anne, 1929-1945. The Diary of Anne Frank: the Revised Critical Edition. New York: Doubleday.