“Contagious Laughter” Photo credit Ed Schipul

We people are a funny sort. We can emulate the feelings and expressions of others, even when we ourselves are nowhere near that particular emotion at that particular time. For for the most part we can easily identify with it.

Smiling, let alone laughing, can be such a contagious thing! You sit in a subway car and see someone start laughing out loud - and then not being able to stop laughing - and you may find it very hard, if not impossible, to prevent a smile spread across your own face. It is such a human thing to identify with the joys and plights of our fellow beings - or animals for that matter. We care. And we share our caring.

So perhaps we can stretch this idea to the quotation made by someone who obviously was in a very dire situation herself, and knew what she was talking about:

“Whoever is happy will make others happy too."

And who said that?

Like said, she lived in difficult circumstances, and witnessed first hand both the extent of human cruelty, and of human caring. Where one smile could alleviate pain, one laughter bring hope, and one happy face spread happiness.

The quotation is by

Anne Frank (1929-1945), the German-Dutch diarist and one of the countless of Jewish victims of the Holocaust who died at the age of 15. She gained fame posthumously with the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944 in Amsterdam, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.