The Diary of Anne Frank

"I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out."---Anne Frank

Picture credit and on-line history of the teenaged writer Anne Frank and her times

Anne Frank died because ordinary people were terrorized, confused, or blinded by lies and didn't speak up against ignorant academics and criminals who spread an ideology based on lies, extremism, and hatred-- Nazism.

Throughout human history, there have always been demented teachers who have sought to spread their evil, ignorant, fanatical teachings. Sometimes these teachers of hate have been religous, and sometimes they have been secular. The teachers of hate usually have talked a lot about peace, freedom, and justice; but they always have created chaos, oppression, terrorism, and war.

Anne wrote in her diaries that she dreamed of becoming a writer. Hiding from the Nazis in an attic behind a moveable bookcase, Anne would never know that her little diaries, where she unlocked her heart to an imaginary friend "Kitty," would become one of the great books of the 20th Century.

Anne and her family were eventually denounced to the Gestapo, arrested, and deported to a concentration camp. This talented child died of typhus a few months before her 16th birthday in Bergen Belsen concentration camp.

More than 25 million copies of Anne's diary have been sold,
and the book has been translated into more than 50 languages.

According to Wikipedia:

Frank's already budding literary ambitions were galvanized on March 29, 1944 when she heard a broadcast made by the exiled Dutch Minister for Education, Art and Science, Gerrit Bolkestein, calling for the preservation of "ordinary documents—a diary, letters ... simple everyday material" to create an archive for posterity as testimony to the suffering of civilians during the Nazi occupation, and on May 20 notes that she has started re-drafting her diary with future readers in mind.

Here is a poignant slideshow about Anne's life set to Itzhak Perlman's music from the film Shindler's List, which is based on the book originally titled Shindler's Ark by the Australian-Irish writer Thomas Keneally.

Here is a narration with slideshow about Anne's life and fate.
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3