Feisty Female Friday: Anne Frank

The FFF this week is Anne Frank.

Anne was born in Germany, a Jewish girl whose diary of her family’s two years in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands has become a classic and read by students everywhere.

Early in the Nazi regime of  Hitler, Anne’s father, Otto, a German businessman, took his wife and two daughters to live in Amsterdam where Anne was required to transfer from a public to a Jewish school which was soon closed. When Anne’s sister, Margot, was faced with deportation to a forced-labor camp, the family went into hiding in the backroom office and warehouse of Otto Frank’s food business. With the aid of a few non-Jewish friends, among them Miep Gies, who smuggled in food and other supplies, the Frank family and four other Jews lived confined in the secret annex.

For her 13th birthday, Anne received a red-and-white plaid diary. She immediately began writing in the book, confiding all her thoughts and feelings. from ordinary teen annoyances to the fear of capture, and her hopes for the future, which included becoming a journalist or a writer. Anne felt that the diary would be a great source of comfort and support to her as she endured the hardships of the war while living in the annex, never ever imaging how it would be the most read book in the world about the Holocaust. Anne’s thoughts were typical of teenagers of then and today and so relatable to all people of all ages.

Anne’s last diary entry was written on August 1, 1944. Three days later the annex was discovered by the Gestapo, which was acting on a tip from Dutch informers.
The Frank family was sent to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz. Margot was transferred to Bergen-Belsen the following month, where she died. Anne and her mother died in a typhus epidemic just before the evacuation of Auschwitz. Her father was found hospitalized at Auschwitz when it was liberated by Soviet troops. Friends who searched the hiding place after the family’s capture later gave Otto all the papers left behind by the Gestapo. Among them he found Anne’s diary, which was later published as, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, originally in Dutch. The diary chronicles her adolescence and emotional growth amid adversity; a pictorial representation of the diary has also been published with both books being banned in some schools in the US. The Diary, which has been translated into more than 65 languages, is the most widely read Holocaust book.

Miep Giles, who helped hide Anne Frank's family from the Nazis, spoke for many years about the horrors of the holocaust. A memorial to Anne Frank and her sister is located near the villages of Bergen and Belsen in Germany. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam features the building where she and others hid and a museum detailing their lives in the annex.

The Diary of Anne Frank is the subject of a play, which is often performed in high schools throughout the world, first premiered on Broadway and won both the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize. A film version was also created and a new English translation of the Diary which contains material that was edited out of the original version make the revised translation nearly one-third longer than the first.

We should all re-read her diary and remember her words about how wonderful it is that no one should wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. Wisdom from 14 year old Anne for all of us to live by today.