When Otto Frank read his daughter’s diary, after her death in a concentration camp in 1945, he discovered something new about Anne.

“Every parent should realize that it is not possible to entirely know your children,” he said in an interview in 1979.

This is a surprising observation, considering that the Frank family — Otto, Edith and daughters Margot and Anne — along with four other neighbors, lived together 24 hours a day for more than two years when they hid from the Nazis during World War II.

Not only were they each other’s only companions, they lived in a tiny attic space about the size of a one-car garage above Otto Frank’s factory. Workers making pectin, a substance used in jelly, continued to work on the floors beneath them, requiring the fugitives above to be silent during work hours.

Only a select few who worked below knew about the secreted inhabitants above.

Anne was 13 when she, her older sister and her parents went into hiding in Amsterdam. Anne already aspired to be a writer. Initially, the red-plaid fabric covered diary she kept while hiding was the continuation of a writing routine; she began recording her thoughts and observations on her 13th birthday in June 1942, unaware that within a month she would climb three steep flights of stairs to a space called the “Secret Annexe” where she and her family would enter isolation to avoid discovery.

When Anne started her diary she wrote, “Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a 13-year-old girl.” She chose “Kitty” as the recipient of her words, a device that freed her from the loneliness of private writing. Kitty was the imaginary listener who offered her unconditional regard and acceptance.

For the next two years she wrote detailed descriptions of daily life including overheard conversations, the behaviors of her companions, her opinions of herself and others, her moods and desires, and inferences about what might be going on in the world. A radio was the only connection to world news and the family listened intently in the evening after the workers below had gone home.

One broadcast, a year into their seclusion, encouraged people to keep diaries and letters so that they could be published after the war. This news sparked Anne to go back and revise her diary entries to include everything she could remember.

She also wrote short stories and kept a log of “great sentences by famous writers” but it was in her notes to “Kitty” that she stored her ideas that could be shared with no other person at the time – and she shared prolifically.

In 2017, when I visited the cramped rooms, now preserved as a museum, where the Frank family and four others lived in hiding in Amsterdam, I tried to imagine what had kept them going day after day. Was it hope for a return to normal life?

I marveled that nothing kept Anne from writing her story. She used writing to create privacy, self-comfort and a world greater than the tiny space in which she was confined. She read, she wrote, and revised her work until August 4, 1944, when the eight people hiding in the Secret Annexe were arrested.

Fortunately, her diary and other writings did not go with her to the concentration camp where she died of typhus in 1945. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, two secretaries working in the building below, found Anne’s diaries strewn over the floor and hid them in a desk drawer.

Otto Frank survived the camps and read Anne’s diary for the first time when he was able to return to Amsterdam. An edited version was published in 1947, and the complete edition, called the Critical Edition, was released in 1998. The diary has also been brought to life digitally in the Anne Frank App. Visit annefrank.ch for more information.

Today, I’m experiencing a taste of what it is to be isolated from the world as I live in quarantine with my extended family during the COVID-19 virus crisis. We are six adults and my 2-year-old granddaughter navigating each day in a house that is 20 times the size of the Frank’s Secret Annexe and with minor discomforts compared to their extraordinary challenge of the daily threat of discovery and death and the strain of living like prisoners.

But unlike Anne, I find writing extremely difficult. I avoid the page more than I have at any other time in my writing life. In search of an answer to my resistance to write, I went to my bookshelf and that’s where I found a copy of “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.”

Perhaps, now, each time I’m lost for words, I’ll ask myself, what would Anne do?

Ruth W. Crocker lives in Mystic. Visit her website at ruthcrocker.com.