Annelies Marie Frank or Anne Frank, was a Jewish girl born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany. Her diary, which is the most widely read diary of the Holocaust, with Anne herself being the most widely known of Holocaust victims, became a classic of war literature as she accounted of her family’s two years in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands.  The Diary has been translated into more than 65 languages and became a controversial Broadway play in 1955.

When Anne’s parents gave the lonely girl a diary for her 13th birthday, she was thrilled and began writing in it right away. The diary, which she named Kitty, was to become one of the most poignant memoirs of Jewish life during World War II in occupied Europe. For over two years, the hideaways in the annex shared a confined space and lived under constant dread of detection by the Nazis. A hinged bookcase was all that separated the occupants of the annex from the outside world, and it was through this door that Miep and Bep passed along scant food and news to the eight people. Despite the discomforts, they tried to lead as normal a life as possible. For Anne, this meant studying and doing homework. During the years in hiding, Anne developed from a girl into an adolescent who harbored uncommon depth and complexity, and her diary became her best friend and confidante. She described the ups and downs of daily life in hiding and was candid about the others and unusually honest about the changes in herself. She wrote some of her diary notations into little stories, and rewrote a large portion of her diary from March to August 1944 after learning from a Dutch Free Radio broadcast that her diary could be of historical interest to others. The diary entries portrayed the adolescent Anne as a smart, free-spirited girl with a keen interest in boys and in cinema, who remained optimistic and dared to dream glamorous dreams despite her harrowing confinement.

Anne Frank lived to be just 15 years old and died somewhere around February/March 1945, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (near Hannover). Her life, though short, was very profound and should be remembered. So, this June 12, 2018 on what would have been Anne’s 89th birthday, we remember the girl who in spite of everything still believed people were good at heart.

Happy Birthday Anne Frank!

**Read more about Anne Frank here on the Alabama Virtual Library (AVL)

You can check out the book Anne Frank: the Diary of a Young Girl  |book|audio-book|e-book|DVD|