This Day in History: Anne Frank

I had planned on blogging about how Mercury in retrograde is kicking my ass until I read on historychannel.com that today was the day that Anne Frank and her family went into hiding.

13 year old Anne Frank and her family were forced to take refuge in a secret annex in the Amsterdam warehouse where Mr. Frank worked. The day before Anne's older sister Margot had received a call-up noticed to be deported to a Nazi "work camp." Anne had recently begun a dairy relating her everyday experiences, and observations about the increasingly dangerous world that she lived in.

Anne and her family had moved from Germany to Amsterdam after the Nazis gained power. They lived in the Annex for two years until they were betrayed and transported to the camps.

I read the Diary of Anne Frank for the first time when I was ten years old. Immediately I felt like I had found a friend in Anne, even though our lives were so different, our emotions weren't. I felt for her having to live in this small space, with strangers, having her first real crush on Peter, her difficult relationship with her mother, and her close relationship with her father. I loved the fact that she wanted to be a writer, and that she kept pictures of movie stars on her walls, the way I had pictures of Parker Stevenson, and pictures from Star Wars up on mine.

I kept hoping after I read it, that things had turned out differently, that she had managed to survive the camps, that her life hadn't ended at 15. I couldn't believe that someone who had effected me so deeply hadn't lived to grow up, have a family, to live her life in freedom. I could understand now why so many people wanted to believe that Anna Anderson was really Anastasia because it meant that what happened in that basement in Ekaterinburg hadn't wiped out an entire family.

I remember scouring the library at my school looking for any other books I could find on Anne Frank. I managed to find a book that not only had the diary but also her other writings that had been saved by Miep Gies. I read the play and I eagerly watched the movie when it was shown on the 4:30 movie on Channel 7 in New York.

She wrote in her diary that she still believed that people were good at heart. I try to remind myself of that when I read about some atrocity taking place in the world, or the latest policies of the Bush administration (by the way it's our fearless leader's birthday as well), or I read about how people in New Orleans are still suffering even two years after Katrina. I want to believe that those words are true.

If Anne could have that kind of faith, living in that tiny attic annex with seven other people, knowing what awaited her if they were caught, than I should be able to find it within myself to have faith too.

EKM