Turning into an alley beside the square in the city center, I glanced over an array of shops selling souvenirs, and stopped by a store with a two-meter-high photo of Anne Frank (1929-45).

I was not in a European city, but in Lima, the capital of Peru.

The Jewish girl who became famous across the world because of her diary is watching tourists from around the globe with a sweet smile.

I walked into the store and found that many pictures themed around The Diary of a Young Girl (also known as The Diary of Anne Frank) were on show. A group of students led by their teacher were also looking around.

The scene is common across the world. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has launched global tours in more than 40 countries and regions ever since 2005.

Since its initial publication in 1947, The Diary of a Young Girl has been translated into 67 languages and sold more than 30 million copies in different editions.

The diary is not only one of the most important books for elementary and middle school students, but also the subject of serious academic study.

It's often a first step to reading further about the Holocaust and the other crimes of the Nazis. And reading through the diary serves as a painful reminder of the misery of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit.

We don't lack moving stories about World War II, but why does the diary have such powerful vitality? It is because Anne's stories came from the truest sense of humanity.

As she scribbled in her diary about her crushes, her changing body, her relationship with her parents, and her hopes for the future while confined to the "secret annex" in hiding from the Nazis during the occupation of the Netherlands, she expressed her joy in life and her will to survive.

It is the will that we need in order to curb neo-Nazism and the resurgence of militarism nowadays. And it is exactly such a spirit that prompts us to be sensitive about the remarks and actions made by old and new fascists who are attempting to repeat the poignant history.

Conquering fascism called for a fierce war and maintaining permanent peace requires real and touching stories, as described in The Diary of a Young Girl.

For decades, the diary has been the best textbook of humanity, peace, anti-war and anti-racism thoughts as well as a living example of the history of the Holocaust. Through the book, children see the damage to innocence done by fascism.

Today, Nazism is rightly taboo in Europe, but we cannot stop a certain number of Japanese nationalists from visiting the Yasukuni Shrine. Why?

Germans are ashamed of the Nazis, but some Japanese still view those cruel war criminals as martyrs, which might be partly explained by the fact there is no well-known equivalent of Anne Frank's diary in Asia.

We have never been short of stories about victories in World War II in our school education, some of them full of exaggerated descriptions.

But what we need is stories of ordinary people like the diary that could strike a chord in people's hearts.

While Frank was from a Jewish family, the book was deliberately presented by publishers in the US as a story of the suffering of all the victims of the Nazis.

We need a Chinese version of The Diary of Anne Frank to resist the growing militarist trend instead of intoxicating ourselves with our own triumphs.

The author is a senior editor with People's Daily. He is now stationed in Brazil. dinggang@globaltimes.com.cn           http://twitter.com/dinggangchina