THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK

Today is the birthday of Annelies Marie Frank, born 12 June 1929.

Anne Frank became a Jewish victim of the Holocaust. She gained fame posthumously following the publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Anne’s diary is one of the world’s most widely known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.

For her thirteenth birthday on 12 June 1942, Anne received a book she had shown her father in a shop window a few days earlier. Although it was an autograph book, bound with red-and-white checkered cloth and with a small lock on the front, Anne decided she would use it as a diary, and she began writing in it almost immediately. In her entry dated 20 June 1942, she lists many of the restrictions placed upon the lives of the Dutch Jewish population.

Here are a few quotes from her diary.

“I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

“Whoever is happy will make others happy too.”