Changes

Anne Frank died in March 1945 at Bergen-Belsen, just three months before her sixteenth birthday; one month before the liberation of the camp. The diary she left behind is the tale of a typical teenaged girl, who lived in a very untypical time. This book begins with her first entry on June 12, 1942 and ends on August 1, 1944; three days before she and the others in hiding were taken by the SS to prison, en route to Auschwitz. The Frank diary is heartbreaking in that prior to her life in hiding, Anne wrote about her family life, school, friends, and love. Amazingly, she continued to write with optimism through her time in hiding and maintained the air of a whimsical teenaged girl. There is an ominous shade over the text as the reader is aware of the girl’s fate. Her fresh, smiling face is indelibly imprinted on one’s mind even as Anne is transported to the death camps. Her story is a remarkable testament to the human spirit and prompts the reader to imagine what her future might have held. Anne Frank’s ''Diary'' can be read and taught from elementary school through graduate school. It is an indispensable tool for teachers of history, psychology, sociology, literature, and numerous forms of cultural studies.

[[File:Elie_Wiesel_age_15 1943.jpg|thumbnail|200px|Elie Wiesel age 15, 1943.]]

trans., Marion Wiesel (1958; repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).

No criticism can be brought upon this brilliant work. Elie Wiesel was a teenage boy when he endured the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald with his father. Wiesel not only recounts the daily atrocities and unfathomable events he witnessed, such as the beating death of his father, he also illustrates his own transformation as a devout Jew and human being. What happens to faith in the context of the Holocaust? How does one recover? What happens to the hate? Wiesel confronts these questions as both a sixteen year old boy and grown man. Not much need be said to advocate for this masterpiece to be included in the Holocaust canon. The slim one hundred page text is both the beginning and end of a semester of study in various disciplines. Indispensable.