Coming Of Age In Anne Frank's Diary Of A Young Girl '

Coming of age in a wartime environment adds many struggles and roadblocks on the path to growing up. As shown in Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar, and Elie Wiesel's Night, the struggle of maturation and identifying yourself are constricted by the hardship of war. Not only the adolescents can change due to this kind of environment, they can also create personal experiences and relationship as one overcome the wartime environment.
Anne wrote the diary faithfully and with a strong belief about her first-hand experiences in hiding and about her relationships with her family and those whom she shared her life in hiding with; and especially about her own personal development. Although her experience

Elie lost the chance to come of age normally the moment the Nazis invaded Germany. All the children at that time had to grow up faster and saw horrors no one of any age should ever see. In one of the camps, Elie talks of the children in the camp, “In Buna, the pipel (children) were hated; they often displayed greater cruelty than their elders. I once saw one of them, a boy of thirteen, beat his father for not making his bed properly. As the old man quietly wept, the boy was yelling: If you don’t stop crying instantly, I will no longer bring you bread. Understood?(pg 63)” This boy like Elie lost his childhood too early and became cruel and evil through the horrors of the camps.
Anne Frank, Jeanne Wakatsuki, and Elie Wiesel, all face different struggles as they were coming of age in the war and though different drastically, we can see how they all dealt with it and what it did to their lives. For Anne it meant death, but for survivors such as Jeanne and Elie, it meant facing a terrifying experience which for Jeanne meant feeling out a place in her own home and for Elie meant the loss of his family. Both of which started a new life for them. This is how a wartime environment can influence the characters in these