There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.
ATTRIBUTION:
Anne Frank (1929–1945), Dutch Jewish diarist; born in Germany. Diary of a Young Girl, entry dated May 3, 1944 (1947).
Frank and her family were in hiding in Holland when she wrote this. On August 4, their hiding place would be raided by the police, and they would be sent to German and Dutch concentration camps. All of them except Otto Frank, the father, would perish; Anne died in Bergen-Belsen, a German camp, just two months before the liberation of Holland.
