Yes Anne Frank, 'people are really good at heart' — even in this turbulent world

Several years ago, when I read out an entry from Anne Frank's diary to my 10th grade class at a Delhi school, I did not fully understand the meaning of being 'good at heart', despite my English literature teacher's usually extra-ordinary explanation.

As the years passed, and journalism gave me the chance to contextualise Anne Frank's observations, it allowed me to question Anne's principles of humanism amid the second World War.

How could she be a practitioner of idealism despite the looming threat of death? The threat being none other than being killed inside Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's devilish death camps spread all over Germany and occupied European territory at the time. 

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"It's really a wonder that I have not dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out," Anne,14, wrote after months into hiding at an Amsterdam annex while escaping what we today know as Holocaust, the extermination of over six million Jews in Europe during the second World War due to Hitler's racially motivated extermination method. 

Inside that crammed space as Anne craved for freedom, she fell for the goodness of human heart, partly due to persevering nature of the ones around her, the Franks, Van Pels (which she refers to as Van Dans) and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer. 

In that blooming state of writing her heart out, Anne rationalised the suffocated state of her surroundings with idealism — while constantly dealing with the pressing question of making sense between the situation that exists, and the situation that ideally should be.

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The world isn't an ideal or fair place, a modern human being of 2024 is often told amid the reigning state of inequality, exploitation and discrimination. Ask a Palestinian at a refugee camp somewhere in Gaza or the protesting Kenyans who have just vandalised part of their parliament in Nairobi as I write this piece — is the world an ideal or fair place?

But shouldn't there be a sincere effort, or a constant state of striving towards the ideal? Isn't it the crux of what our representatives at the United Nations call "rules-based international order" —  striving towards the ideal?  

Perhaps, Anne Frank implicitly believed in the perpetual state of the world striving to reach an ideal. 

She further added in that entry: "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

The 'everything', in Anne's terms, was the vitriolic discrimination Jews faced in Europe at the time amid Hitler's reign. The very reason that forced the Franks and an unaccounted number of Jewish families into hiding during the years of second World War. 

Most of them, like many members of the Frank family including Anne, perished to Hitler's tyranny — to the Holocaust.

But Anne's message of the goodness of human heart stayed on. People are really good at heart.

World War diarist Anne Frank's diary was published on June 25, 1947 — just over five years after Anne's 13th birthday. Anne perished in Holocaust at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. 

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)