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 Anne Frank
Born
on June 12, 1929, Annelies Marie Frank was the second
daughter of Otto and Edith Frank, middle-class Jews from Frankfurt,
Germany. When Anne was four, the Franks fled the Nazis
to Amsterdam. Seven years later, Germany invaded the Netherlands, and
Otto, who ran a business selling pectin and spices to
Dutch women, immediately made plans to hide his family in
the attic annex of a warehouse he leased in Amsterdam’s
narrow old quarter.
The Franks and four associates survived undetected for
25 months with the help of some of Otto Frank’s
employees until an informer, most likely a warehouse clerk tipped
off the Nazis.
Anne and the others were sent to
Auschwitz. Nine months after they were arrested, she and her
sister ultimately died of typhus and starvation in Bergen-Belsen, another
camp, in March of 1945. She was fifteen years old.
Of the eight, only Otto Frank survived.
After the war, Otto
Frank returned to Amsterdam, where he received Anne’s diary, saved
during the war by one of the family’s helpers, Miep
Gies.
“No one will be interested in the unbosomings of
a 13-year-old schoolgirl.” Anything but uninteresting, Anne Frank’s diary stands
as perhaps the single most poignant human document of history’s
most inhuman event, the Holocaust. During the time she spent
hiding from the Nazis with her family, Anne recorded her
innermost thoughts and musings on life, puberty and family. Over
every word – written with an honesty, fluency and freshness
of insight that would be impressive in a mature writer
and are astonishing in an adolescent – the Gestapo threat
hangs ominously. Yet a tender and touching optimism pervades the
young writer’s pages. The fact that her ultimate fate was
such a repudiation of her optimism makes reading her story
at times almost unbearably painful.
Anne Frank’s diary was first
published in 1947. In 1953, the notebooks were released in
the United States as the Diary of a young Girl.
Today, her diary has been translated into 67 languages and
is one of the most widely read books in the
world.
One could say that Anne Frank’s adolescent “unbosomings” are an
extraordinary testament to humankind’s dual capacities for bottomless inhumanity and
irrepressible hope in the face of such brutality.
Sources:
Ladies’ Home
Journal
Anne Frank Center USA |
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