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what can we learn about it? 

We can learn many things from The Diary of Anne Frank.  This book is about survival.  It's about prejudice.  It teaches how there is nobility in human compassion.  And it's also about a young girl trying to survive adolescence.  Many teens can relate to such a book because Anne goes through all of the normal adolescent trials in life, even though she's locked up.  Anne has a difficult relationship with her mother, as most young girls do.  She often says things to hurt her mother, yet she can't help her temper and continues to do so as time goes on.  She also goes through the beginning stages of love.  She and Peter enjoy each others company, and that leads to a very close bond that many teens experience in their lives.  Anne also struggles with her identity.  She finds through her writing that there are two Annes: a good one and a bad one.  She longs throughout the story to find someone who will relate to her.  All of these feelings she has can relate to most teenagers, no matter what year it is.  It is a universal book.  Although it teaches of the Holocaust and what the Jews went through, it reaches out to the reader to make the story more realistic and believable.  We never want such a historical blunder to happen again.

Firstly, Frank's diary gives us a unique perspective of what it was like to be in hiding during World War II. Secondly, in not only provides a bit of first person history, but it extends a beautiful global truth. As the Nazis are taking Anne away to die in a concentration camp, she writes in her diary that despite everything, she still believes that people are good. The fact that the protagonist can have such a pure belief in the goodness of mankind despite the horrors she sees makes Frank's diary a great piece of literature as well as a great piece of history.

This book is important because it is a first hand account of one of the most vicious acts of inhumanity in the history of this planet.  Anne Frank's diary is an honest, intimate portrayal of a unique individual living in an extremely difficult and dangerous time in history.  She shows us that no matter what is occuring in the world around us, we as humans all share many of the same qualities--emotion, passion, love, desire, hope, fear, and strength.  Not only does her story educate us about an important historical event, but it reminds us of the importance of learning to accept our differences and embrace diversity.