Writing to Defeat Fear: Anne Frank Was Born 80 Years Ago
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For the young girl from Frankfurt the dividing line between hope and desperation was often a very thin one indeed.
"One day this terrible war will be over. The time will come when we'll be people again and not just Jews!" wrote Anne Frank on April 9, 1944.
She was 14 at the time and had been hiding in the annex of a building in Amsterdam for nearly two years along with her parents, her sister and four other Jews.
On June 12 Anne Frank would have turned 80.
Hardly anyone who has read her world-famous diary has any doubt that she would have gone on to become a great writer.
She wrote repeatedly in a bid to dispel the oppression of her hiding place and the constant fear of being discovered, betrayed, deported and murdered in a concentration camp.
"What I like most of all," Anne confided to her imaginary friend Kitty on March 16, 1944 "is that I can at least write down what I think and feel, otherwise I would be completely suffocated."
Not long afterwards she wrote: "You've known for a long time that my greatest whish is to be a journalist, and later, a famous writer."
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Her heartfelt texts were written to help defeat the fear of death. "The English radio says they're being gassed. I feel terribly upset," reads one entry.
The passages in Anne's diary have made a particularly deep impression on young people across the world, even though many of them may have only come across the book because it is taught at schools.
"I just couldn't put it down," say many of those who visit the girl's former hiding place at the Anne Frank Museum in Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam.
Today's teenagers feel a particular empathy with the way Anne thinks and this becomes immediately apparent when she complains about unfeeling adults: "The fact of the matter is that we are more sensitive and our thoughts go much further than any of them can possibly imagine."
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The horror becomes even more vivid when the reader realizes that these lines were written at a time of acute personal danger.
Anne's diary entries of what she dreads but is unable to comprehend in its full inhumanity are separated from reality at first by months, then weeks and finally by only days before she has to endure it for herself.
Her diary ends on August 1, 1944. On August 4, 1944 German "security police" in Nazi-occupied wartime Amsterdam received a tip-off from a caller whose identity is still unknown to this day.
"Some Jews are hiding in the Prinsengracht 263," the person on the end of the phone line revealed. Anne and her family were arrested shortly thereafter.
She died in March 1945 only a few weeks before she would have been liberated from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Emaciated and in a state of desperation after the death of her mother and her sister Margot, Anne no longer had the strength left to combat typhoid. Anne's father Otto was the only one to survive. Her faithful friend and confidant Miep Gies, who recently marked her 100th birthday, risked her life to conceal Anne's diary and preserve it for posterity.
The work has been translated into 65 languages and has been read by millions of people around the world.
"Of the multitude who throughout history have spoken for human dignity in times of great suffering and loss, no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank," former US President John F. Kennedy told The New York Times in 1960.
Nelson Mandela, the former South African president and Nobel Peace Prize winner who was incarcerated for many years with other anti-Apartheid activists in a prison on Robben Island off Capetown, said in 1994: "Some of us read Anne Frank's diary on Robben Island and derived much encouragement from it."
