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73 years ago today, on June 12, 1942, a young teenager received an autograph book, a book she had seen in a shop window and picked out herself as a birthday present. An enticing empty book, with lines. And like many teenage girls and all writers everywhere, that girl looked at those empty lines and began to fill them up with words. A diary recounting her everyday life, her family, her teenage crushes. Altogether ordinary.
But this was 1942 and she lived in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation and she was Jewish. She and her family had moved to Amsterdam from Germany to escape the Nazis, but unfortunately, their escape was not to last long. Her name, as you might have guessed, was Anne Frank. That diary became her outlet, her secret friend, as she went into hiding with her family. She drafted the diary in the form of a series of letters to “Kitty”, and it is on those pages that she recounts her hopes and dreams. In 1944 she heard a radio broadcast encouraging people to preserve their observations of civilian life in wartime Amsterdam that they might have in the forms of diaries or letters. She went back over her entries and began to organize them in a way that would make sense to future readers.
Anne’s family was betrayed and they were arrested in 1944, mere months after that radio broadcast. Anne and her sister ended up in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she survived in that hellish place until August 1945. In February or March of that year, a few months before its liberation in August, both girls died, probably of typhus. Anne was 15.
A Jewish girl died in a concentration camp during WWII. That particular tragedy was magnified by the weight of so many more lives snuffed out by the horrors of the war it would have gone unnoticed, except as one of the numbers that make up the 6,000,000 exterminated by the Nazis in their Final Solution. Can we just pause for a moment and think about those luminous lives, and let our heart ache just for a moment?
Young survivors of Auschwitz, January 1945. Most children under 15 were gassed right away. Perhaps these had arrived shortly before the liberation? Anne had just turned 15 a couple months before her arrest, so barely escaped the gas chamber.
Those precious papers, Anne’s diary, continue to teach us so much about those dark times and the suffering and bravery of the people who lived through it. And all because Anne picked up a pen and started to write, two days after her birthday, about the things that made up her life. And because Meip recognized the value of those left-behind papers and saved them for Anne, and so for all of us.
Anne writes in her diary:
I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me!
When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?
had not known some of this story in such detail. my spouse listened to me retell this and, before i’d finished, said much as you did about treasure. this insight had not entered my head as the story unfolded. thank you! cannot help but think she was aware of it, after all. there’s more meaning to that saying. after all 😉
wd. she have been too immersed in the Bergen-Belsen experience to write of it? was her captivity in confinement the necessity? wd. she have kept up so long had her days been full of youthful activity and places?
There are those who speculate that without the confinement in the Secret Annex (the attic), Anne would never had spent so much time writing and developing her literary skills. It’s so hard to think of the “what-ifs” – if they had only been able to stay in the Annex a couple more months,they would have avoided being sent to Auschwitz, for as it turned out, they were on the last transport to Auschwitz from the Westerbork Internment Camp where they were first housed after their arrest. 🙁
Update – in doing a little further reading on Anne, I discovered that the papers ended up on the floor because they were in Otto Frank’s suitcase, which the Gestapo emptied in order to take valuables from the Annex. They truly were discarded to make room for something “better”…