When I read Anne Frank’s diary as a young teen, like so many other girls my age, I wept at the injustice, the horror, the arbitrary cruelty of her death. Typhus was the last insult, the one that killed her at Bergen-Belsen after months at Auschwitz. That fact created a little doorway for me, from which I began to understand the enormity of the Holocaust.
We girls were enchanted by the diary of the vivacious, articulate, sometimes moody, often saucy Anne. And even while we fell in love with her bright spirit we knew in advance that her hopes had been crushed and her life extinguished, and that there was nothing we could do to change that fact.
Today, June 12th 2009, is her 80th birthday. If she were alive today (and she could have been, I keep telling myself — she’d be significantly younger than my own parents) perhaps we could honor her courage in a way that might be meaningful to her. I think of the shooting yesterday at the Holocaust Museum in D.C., and then, I have to think of other June 12ths — in the 1930s in Frankfurt or Amsterdam—when Anne would have had games, gifts, flowers and friends.
In honor of her 80th birthday, her diaries are being brought to the Anne Frank Museum — returned to the place they were written — the hiding place at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. Until today, the Anne Frank Diaries have been sealed in archives at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation.
I place a pale pink peony, just breaking from the bud, in a water glass on my desk, and think of Anne Frank at age 13, climbing up for a glimpse of the horse chestnut tree in bloom, and the blue sky.
Tags: Anne Frank, birthday, diary, Holocaust
A few years ago when I was in Amsterdam, I visited the Anne Frank museum. On the tiny strip of green next to the street, at the back, the chestnut tree was in full bloom with those white candle-like blossoms. One of the things that brought tears was the thought of that girl, in bloom like the chestnut tree, but hidden away in that dark attic. Now I hear that the tree is dying from disease. I hope they can save it.
Thank you for remembering this important date. When writing a diary, one wonders what possible value there could be in the seemingly small details of one little girl’s life. Anne Frank’s story provides an answer.
Anne’s diary will forever keep her alive. The middle school girls are my daughter’s school continue to read the book and learn about the world from her perspective and her life. The senior girls at the school have the opportunity to take a course that focuses on genocide. These types of discussions plant the seeds for change. We can only imagine what Anne would think about her influence in the world that resulted from one young woman having written down her opinions and thoughts.
What amazes me is how timeless her diary has proven to be. Each generation finds their way to that extraordinary document, and the experience of it keeps morphing. But it doesn’t seem to fade from view as so many other books popular when I was a kid did.