Class 10 English First Flight Chapter 4 From the Diary of Anne Frank Notes in English

1Getting Ready for the Chapter

1.1 Who Was Anne Frank?

The “Before You Read” section introduces the writer. Her full name was Anneliese Marie ‘Anne’ Frank. She was born on 12 June 1929 and died in February/March 1945. She was a German-born Jewish girl.

• Her family moved to Amsterdam after the Nazis came to power in Germany. Later the Nazis occupied the Netherlands too, so the family was trapped.
• As the cruelty against Jews grew, the family went into hiding in July 1942, in secret rooms in the office building of her father, Otto Frank. Four friends hid with them.
• After two years in hiding, the group was betrayed and sent to the concentration camps. Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen, within days of her sister Margot Frank.
• Otto Frank was the only survivor of the group. After the war he found that her diary had been saved, and he had it published in English as The Diary of a Young Girl.

The diary has since been translated into many languages and is among the most widely read books in the world. Films, TV and stage shows, and even an opera, are based on it. The book calls it the work of “a mature and insightful mind”, because it shows, from very close, what daily life was like under Nazi rule. Anne is one of the best-known victims of the Holocaust (the mass killing of Jews by the Nazis).

1.2 Diary, Journal, Log, Memoir

The book’s first activity asks you to tell apart four kinds of personal record. This is a favourite short question.

2The Diary, Part by Part

2.1 Part 1: Why Anne Starts a Diary

Anne finds diary writing a strange experience for two reasons:

• she has never written anything before, and
• she feels that later on nobody, not even she herself, will care about the “musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl” (musings = private thoughts).

Still, she wants to write, because she needs to “get all kinds of things off my chest”, that is, to let out feelings she has kept inside.

She thought of this saying one day when she sat at home with her chin in her hands, feeling a little depressed, bored and listless (with no energy or interest), unable to decide whether to go out. Meaning: people get tired of listening to us, but paper never gets bored. You can write as much as you like, for as long as you like, and it will “listen” quietly. She also does not plan to let anyone else read the diary, so it stays private.

She calls the diary a “stiff-backed notebook” with the grand name of “diary”. Then she gives the real reason for it: she does not have a friend.

So she decides the diary itself will be that friend. She will not just note down facts the way most people do. To make this long-awaited friend feel real in her imagination, she gives it a name: Kitty.

2.2 Part 2: A Brief Sketch of Her Life

Anne knows that nobody would understand her stories to Kitty if she began straight away (“plunge right in”), so she first gives a short sketch of her life, although she does not like doing it.

2.3 Part 3: The Entry of Saturday, 20 June 1942

This entry begins “Dearest Kitty” and ends “Yours, Anne”, like a letter to a friend.

The class is nervous. The whole class is “quaking in its boots” (shaking with fear and nervousness). The reason is the coming meeting where the teachers decide who will move up to the next form and who will be kept back.

• Half the class is making bets. Anne and G.N. laugh themselves silly at the two boys behind them, C.N. and Jacques, who have bet their entire holiday savings.
• The two boys argue all day: “You’re going to pass”, “No, I’m not”. Neither G.’s pleading looks nor Anne’s angry outbursts can calm them.
• Anne thinks there are so many “dummies” that about a quarter of the class should be kept back, but “teachers are the most unpredictable creatures on earth”, so no one can be sure.
• She is not worried about herself and her girlfriends; the only subject she is unsure about is maths. Till the result, they keep telling each other not to lose heart.

Her teachers. Anne gets along pretty well with all her teachers. There are nine of them: seven men and two women.

2.4 Mr Keesing and the Three Essays

Mr Keesing is the maths teacher. Anne calls him an “old fogey” (an old-fashioned person). For ages he was annoyed with her because she talked so much in class. After several warnings he gave her extra homework: an essay.

3Characters

3.1 The People in the Diary

3.2 Anne and Mr Keesing, Side by Side

3.3 How Anne Feels About the People in Her Life (Thinking about the Text Q4)

4Themes and Message

4.1 The Big Ideas

5Key Lines and What They Mean

6Thinking about the Text: Short Answers

1. Was Anne right that nobody would care about her musings? No. Her diary was translated into many languages and became one of the most widely read books in the world.
2. Compare with the Before You Read entries. Those are short, factual records of events. Anne’s diary was written in Dutch and is different because she writes to Kitty as to a friend, sharing feelings and thoughts, not just facts.
3. Why the family sketch? Insider or outsider? Kitty would not understand her stories without the background, so Kitty is treated as an outsider who must be told everything from the start, though Anne wants her to be a close friend.
4. Father, grandmother, Mrs Kuperus, Mr Keesing. See the table in 3.3: she loves and respects them all in her own way, which shows she is warm, sensitive and good-humoured.
5. Her first essay. Talking is a student’s trait; she would try to control it but never cure it, as her mother talked as much as she did and inherited traits cannot be helped.
6. Is Mr Keesing unpredictable? Yes. He punishes her again and again, yet he laughs at her arguments, enjoys her poem, reads it to other classes and then lets her talk and starts making jokes himself.
7. What the statements show about Anne: (i) she is honest and willing to blame herself; (ii) she is imaginative and wants a real friend, not a record book; (iii) she has a sense of humour about her own life; (iv) she is frank and a little cheeky in judging others; (v) she is clever and does not do a job half-heartedly.

7Language Points from the Book

7.1 Words to Know (Book’s Glossary)

7.2 Compound Words

A compound word is made of two or more words: nouns (headmistress, homework, notebook, outbursts), adjectives (long-awaited, stiff-backed) or verbs (sleep-walk, baby-sit). The book’s matching exercise:

7.3 Phrasal Verbs

A phrasal verb is a verb followed by a preposition or an adverb, and its meaning is often different from its parts (for example, “run out of”, “reach out to”).

7.4 Idioms

An idiom is a group of words in a fixed order whose meaning is different from the meanings of its words put together.

7.5 Contracted Forms and Diary Language

Contracted forms are short forms used in speech, written with an apostrophe: can’t (cannot), I’ve (I have), she’s (she is). Some stand for two full forms: I’d = I had or I would. Diaries, plays and novels use them because they sound like real speech.