Hope

"I don't want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to people, even those I've never met… and that's why I'm grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop and to express all that's inside me!" 5th April 1944, Anne Frank

Writing is a gift. Sometimes I am blessed with inspiration for it, but often I am just a vacant existence amongst thought.

I have written extensively in another blog about my sources of inspiration; how writing about sadness does not make you a good writer, how it can merely be a method of self-indulgent self-harm. Since my late teenage years, I have always tried to give my writing an important meaning, a message or a moral. I often wonder how successful I am.
One of my inspirations over the years has been Anne Frank.

I wonder what you think of when you hear that name. For me, thinking about the Holocaust is like thinking about the expanse of the universe. The universe is so infinitely vast, so great that it is all-consuming to the mind, so incomprehensible, so far beyond my imaginative capability that it makes me sick to think of it. You can sum up the Holocaust in a figure: 11 million. 11 million innocent lives; 6 million Jews and 5 million disabled, gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners and Eastern Europeans.
"11 million" – It's just bunch of characters on a page, forming a word, forming a number, and thus forming something inconceivable, beyond imagination, beyond my use of language and communication.
How could human beings have been responsible for this?
Just, HOW?

And none of these figures even start to take into account the lives emotionally lost to heartache, trauma and agony: the survivors, the family members, the loved ones left behind…

And still, every day I read a new story about genocide, murder, oppression….the human race has been fighting a great civil war with itself since the beginning of history, and we never learn and we never change. Anne Frank’s message is loud and clear - full of inspiration, full of lessons to teach our children, full of so much hope: "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart." 15th July 1944
But what does her writing mean and more importantly, what is its worth? Can words of history ever have enough weight to change us and our future? Is it really possible to have hope?


I was quite young when my father died, and I have never really written about his death and how it effected me at the time. I either can't write about it or I won't. Again, language fails me. When I look back on it, I just see a fresh-faced girl of 11, writing a message on a card for a wreath of flowers on the coffin. I don't remember what it said and I only know that my crying and sadness was instinctive.

I am scared of death more than anything; not my own, but of others. If I were dead I would feel no pain, but when others die, the pain spreads out from where they fell, seeping deepest into the closest hearts around them. Even the most vibrant and vivacious person in our community can have his life snatched away in a moment, like the flick of a light switch – off - and its gone, contents and memories in darkness.

I am scared of what I see in the world and I am scared that we will always be helpless to make it better. Not just silent writers like myself, but the think tanks, the activists, the politicians, how much hope can they really have?

I feel so futile, just writing, just thinking, just getting upset about things completely beyond my control. In my Religious Studies lessons at High School, I remember we tried to write about why God allowed suffering in the world. I got A's in my essays but never really understood what I was writing. Some may say it is just nature and the circle of life - but no, surely not when death has been engineered by human vice or evil. And how could this evil have become so manifest?

I know good people, I see good deeds done, I know that goodness exists in so many! So why, why can't the goodness have outweighed the evil, then and now, why do we still continue to lose this battle?

"Sometimes I think God is trying to test me, both now and in the future. I'll have to become a good person on my own, without anyone to serve as a model or advise me, but it'll make me stronger in the end." 30th October 1943

Which leads me on to another inspiring figure: Vincent Van Gogh, a man whose madness was so incredibly beautiful. He may have been a manic depressive, fragile and unstable, he may have been terrible, ugly things; but he saw things in the world that the others didn’t – couldn’t. The normal people, the healthy people; they wake up in the morning, get out of bed and live – and by living, so carefree, so physically engaged in the world, they can’t see it or feel. They feel so little compared to the ones whose senses are so engaged and raw - not only to pain, but also to human strength and beauty.

It’s something I used say to someone I loved a long time ago. You don’t see the world like I do. He didn’t see pain and sadness, but similarly, he didn’t see beauty. And I mean real beauty – like Van Gogh saw it – the beauty in the complex magic of nature. Van Gogh didn’t paint flowers, he didn’t paint stars - they were so much more exceptional in his vision, and he captured it, he captured everything in his wild, untamed head beautifully. It is a similar beauty that I often see in so many people who have felt pain.

“He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world – no one had ever done it before – perhaps no one ever will again.”

There is so much goodness in the world, so much integrity – I have always looked for it and always cherished it in order to keep alive the hope that such virtues grow in me. This is what we write, think and debate for. We can't stop. We have to write. If we don’t write... if I don’t write, it’s because my mind is empty and emotionless, because lives don’t matter. If we stop writing we stop thinking, and then all that is left is just plain living and dying.

I don't want answers to my questions, I don't want to debate if I'm right or wrong - but I must desperately deny the futility of this writing, of Anne's writing, of all the people thinking and crying and writing in the hope that they will make a difference or save a life, so I just want you to think
and remember
and hope.

George Orwell: Why I write: Aesthetic enthusiasm... Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement.