Various thoughts occurred as I turned the pages, not least wonderment at how eight people could survive for over two years without giving themselves away and also how their friends managed to feed them etc over that time.

Anne writes of the things that any girl of her age would do but, apart from the privations of captivity, there is little to glean from the book about the war and the outside world - one would not expect a girl of her age to be able to write of such things.

The great tragedy is that Anne did not survive to see the end of the war and enjoy the life to which she was entitled.

The book has sold in its millions and if I could pass a world-wide law, it would be that it was compulsory reading for every human being in the hope that it ended man's inhumanity to man everywhere. Anyone who had anything to do or any connection with the Holocaust should be forever haunted by their conscience.