Teen girls in Kabul are meeting in a secret book club to read the diary of Anne Frank — despite the Taliban's ban on secondary education.
"The diary helps us recall our common humanity no matter what our differences may be," Stevick says."Anne's strong spirited determination not to give into despair has inspired people around the world."
"Something is in common with me and Anne Frank," Arzou says."We are both the victims of war. I mean, Anne Frank is suffering from war and I am too. And Anne Frank cannot go to school, cannot, like go out very freely. And I have the same situation." She's 17, but her hair is streaked with gray – a startling sight set against the pimples on her teenage face. She thinks the grays are because she holds in the suffering she's experienced.
Another girl, 17-year-old Masouma, wearing a lavender headscarf and purple robe, raises her hand to talk. She says she relates to how Anne Frank faced the real fear that she'd be killed even as she wrote about her typical teenage problems, including her crush on a teenage boy who shared their hiding place and her clashes with her mother.
"To enhance the image of this long-awaited friend in my imagination, I don't want to jot down the facts in this diary the way most people would do, but I want the diary to be my friend, and I'm going to call this friendMasouma says she admires Anne Frank for trying to have a sense of perspective: She was sad because she couldn't go to school in hiding. But she knew it was worse out in the world.
"But there were too many of us," Masouma says. She says the school principal feared local Taliban security forces would notice the girls coming in and out, and so they were told to go home."The girls were all crying," Masouma recalls."My sister is still traumatized and now she doesn't want to try to get an education."
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