Almanac of Story Tellers: Anne Frank

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of June 12th

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    It is the 163rd day of the year, leaving 202 days remaining in 2022.

   

    On this date in 1929, Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany.

    In her diary, she told her story about life in hiding from the Nazis for two years as a young German Jew in Amsterdam. Discovered by the Nazis and arrested in 1944, Frank was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. She was killed weeks before it was liberated in 1945 as World War II ended.

    Her diary was left behind when Nazis arrested her family. It was was found in the secret annex of her father's business warehouse in Amsterdam, where she and her family had been hiding. Frank documented their captivity in her diary, writing about everything from their fear of discovery and capture, to the mundane details and frustrations of her daily life. 

    She also wrote about growing up.

 

   The diary was published in 1947, in Dutch, as Het Achter-huis (The Secret Annex).

    It has become a classic, translated in to more than 70 languages, and adapted for the stage and screen. It is often required reading for any class about of the study of World War II. It has been praised for its literary merits, its depictions of the daily horrors of the Nazi regime, and its wise and moving commentary on war.

    The poet John Berryman said it gave a unique depiction of a child becoming an adult "as it is happening in a precise, confident, economic style stunning in its honesty."

     Frank has become a symbol of the brutality of the Holocaust, and perhaps its best known victim. The fact that she was a child when she started the dairy, and was still a young girl when she was captured and later died during a typhus epidemic in the concentration camps, reverberates strongly with readers.

    Her father, Otto Frank, was the sole survivor of the family. He was instrumental in getting it published, and until his death in 1980, upholding her legacy and working to expand the publications of her diary.