Every Day Is Special: June 12 – Anne Frank's Birthday

June 12 – Anne Frank's Birthday

Posted on June 12, 2015

One of the most famous “Anne”s in the world, Anne Frank had a short, tragic life:

She was a victim of the Holocaust.

Yet, in the face of the horror of the Holocaust, she did something that made her that famous:

She wrote about her life.

And her writings are surprisingly life-affirming. She was able to record spirit and hope in the face of violence and hatred.

This meme displays Anne's words but her mother's photo.

Anne Frank was born on this date in 1929 in Germany. Her Jewish family moved away from Germany when the Nazis gained control over the nation, in 1933, moving to Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

But in 1940, Germany seized control of the Netherlands, too, and the family was trapped in the city. Seeing the Nazi persecutions of the Jewish people, the Frank family went into hiding in some concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Mr. Frank worked.

And she lived that way, in hiding, for two years. That's when she started writing a diary.

When the family was betrayed and the Nazis found their hiding place, the family was split up and sent to concentration camps. Both Anne and her sister Margot died (probably of typhus) in one camp, and their mother died in another camp. Anne was just 16 years old when she died.

Anne's father survived the war and returned to Amsterdam. There he learned that Anne's diary had been saved by one of the Dutch citizens who had hid and helped the family for years. He felt that others should read the diary, should get to know his daughter through her words, should learn from this first-hand account about the horrors of genocide and fascism. He made sure that it was published under the name The Diary of a Young Girl.

Since then the diary has been translated into more than 60 languages, has been adapted into a movie and a play (called The Diary of Anne Frank), and has been called one of the top books of the 20^th Century.

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