Holocaust victim Anne Frank' personal recollections have commanded respect in school curricula and children's imaginations since their discovery and publication. However, her opinions inadvertently dispossess readers to treat her every wry and homely observation as gospel truth. The qualification which has instigated this hagiography? The fact that she endured a terrible childhood, attempting to hide from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic, only to be discovered and incarcerated in Bergen Belsen. More tragically, she passed away two weeks before the Allied forces arrived.
One of her personal reflections is not only questionable, by tragically misleading:
"Parents can only give children good advice or put them on the right path, but the final forming of character lies in their own hands."
Adolescent idealism at its most concrete, concentrated, and corrupted.
Much akin to the political dynamism of Thomas Paine, who charged that "we have it within ourselves to change the world," human character is a design fraught with faults, far beyond the mind and will of man to form or reform.
"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" Jeremiah 17:9
And the only hope for its transformation lies outside of us:
"And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 11:19)
Indeed, people can change, and our parents are not the final arbiters of the path that we take in this life; yet let us never presume that we alone can or must shape our destiny. The demands of our limited intellect and corrupted flesh weigh against the potential for greater glory, and only the intervention of the Divine can achieve that transformation.
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