Does anyone know any other famous people besides Anne Frank that wrote a famous diary?

Answer 1

I read this a few weeks ago. It's pretty shocking:

Diary of 'Polish Anne Frank' published 64 years on

A teenage Jewish girl living under the Nazis in Poland during 1943 feared she was "turning into an animal waiting to die", according to her diary, which documents the final months before her death in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Rutka Laskier, 14, the same age as the Dutch girl Anne Frank, wrote the 60-page diary over a four-month period in Bedzin, Poland. The diary, published by Israel's Holocaust museum, documents the steady collapse of the ghetto under the weight of the Nazi occupation and deportations, as well as the first loves, friendships and jealousies of an adolescent girl growing up during the war.

News of the concentration camps, and the brutal killings of Jews, filtered through to her. Writing on February 5 1943, she said: "I simply can't believe that one day I will be allowed to leave this house without the yellow star. Or even that this war will end one day. If this happens I will probably lose my mind from joy.

"The little faith I used to have has been completely shattered. If God existed, he would have certainly not permitted that human beings be thrown alive into furnaces, and the heads of little toddlers be smashed with the butt of guns or be shoved into sacks and gassed to death."

Later she wrote: "The rope around us is getting tighter. I'm turning into an animal waiting to die." Her final entry is brief: "I'm very bored. The entire day I'm walking around the room. I have nothing to do."

The last entry is dated April 24 1943, at which point she hid the notebook in the basement of the house her family were living in, a building confiscated by the Nazis to be part of the Bedzin ghetto. In August that year, the teenager and her family were transported to Auschwitz and it is thought she was killed immediately.

The diary was found after the war by Stanislawa Sapinska, a Christian whose family owned the house, and who had met Rutka during the war. Ms Sapinska took the diary and kept it secret for more than 60 years until one of her nephews last year persuaded her to present it to Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust museum. "She wanted me to save the diary," Ms Sapinska said. "She said 'I don't know if I will survive, but I want the diary to live, so everyone will know what happened to Jews'."

The diary was authenticated by Yad Vashem which published it as Rutka's Notebook in Hebrew and English. Rutka's father, Yaakov, was the only family member to survive. He moved to Israel and had a new family. He died in 1986. His daughter in Israel, Zahava Sherz, who has written a foreword to the diary, knew nothing about Rutka before the journal surfaced. "I was struck by a deep connection to Rutka," said Dr Sherz, 57. "I was an only child, and I suddenly have an older sister. I immediately fell in love with her."

Extract

Diary entry by Rutka Laskier, 14, February 20 1943

"I have a feeling I am writing for the last time. There is an Aktion [a Nazi arrest operation] in town. I'm not allowed to go out and I'm going crazy, imprisoned in my own house. For a few days, something's in the air. The town is breathlessly waiting in anticipation, and this anticipation is the worst of all. I wish it would end already! This torment; this is hell. I try to escape these thoughts, of the next day, but they keep haunting me like nagging flies. If only I could say, it's over, you only die once. Despite these atrocities I want to live, and wait for the following day. That means waiting for Auschwitz or labour camp."

Answer 2

The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom is an amazing book that isn't as well-known as Night, but wonderful!! It's a true story, the author is the main character, she wrote an autobiography kind of, but it's written as fiction. She lived in Holland I think, and her and her sister along with their family, hid Jews in their house... anyway, it's a really incredible book. She and her family were Christians, and wanted to help the Jews. It's a must read- there was a pretty good movie about it too, called the same thing. She's getting to be almost as well-known as Anne Frank- her house in Holland is a museum and stuff. After you read Night, check this one out!

Answer 3

Ronald Reagan

Answer 4

Samuel Pepys (London, 1660–1669)

James Boswell (1740 - 1795)

Mary Chesnut (Civil War in South Carolina)

Aleister Crowley, British occultist

Adam Czerniaków, head of the Warsaw Ghetto's Judenrat

Fyodor Dostoevsky, author

Marguerite Duras, author

Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer

Buckminster Fuller, designer and engineer

Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's Propaganda Minister

Carolina Maria de Jesus, Brazilian slum survivor

Franz Kafka, writer

Frida Kahlo, painter

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of the aviator

Thomas Mann, German novelist

Matsuo Bashō, haiku and renga poet (1644 - 1694)

Iris Murdoch, author

Anaïs Nin, poet

Sylvia Plath, poet

Siegfried Sassoon, poet and author

Sir Walter Scott, novelist

George Bernard Shaw, Nobel Prize-winning playwright

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), author and philosopher

Hester Thrale (1740–1821), author, friend and confidante of Samuel Johnson

Sophia Tolstoy, wife of Russian author Leo Tolstoy: they read each other's diaries

Alice Walker, author

Richard Wagner, composer

Andy Warhol, artist

Virginia Woolf, author and feminist

Dorothy Wordsworth, poet, sister of William Wordsworth

Answer 5

Mary Chesnut's Civil War

Answer 6

Anais Nin, Maria Barshkitseff. There are others

Answer 7

Yes I like to read to Cornelia Ten Bum

Answer 8

yes, someone named alicia

Answer 9

kurt cobain, ronald reagan