Anne Frank would have turned 80 today...

[DrTeeth]

and this is what she would have looked like:

I think I'm going to read her diary again next week. I was browsing the interwebs and I found the website of the last remaining helper, Miep Gies, who had her 100th birthday this year. Very interesting.

Miep Gies :: Home

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

That's a beautiful book, great idea to read it again

 

[coemgen]

This is sad, but a good reminder of her work. I was fortunate enough to visit the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam several years ago. It was chilling. You actually get to go through the bookcase area and into where they hid. You can still see the marks made on the wall showing how tall she was getting while there.

Definitely worth a trip to Amsterdam: Anne Frank Museum - the official Anne Frank House website

 

[the iron horse]

elevation

 

[A stor]

When, I was a young child. I went to the World's Fair in New York. Ann's diary was on display in one of the buildings and I remember seeing it. All these people were crying. I didn't understand why. That was when my mother told me about the Concentration Camps and how Ann had died as a little girl. Very sad, indeed.

 

[Zoobaby14]

I still think Anne Franks Diary is one of the most amazing books I have ever read.

 

[domo-kun]

Anne frank is a part of our national history,
a story that should never be forgotten.

 

[Bonoa]

Anne started to write when she was 12 and the diary is so well written! She was very talented, even at a young age. Her story must never be forgotten!

I've read 'Het Achterhuis' several times, but I think I'm going to read it again!

 

[yolland]

"There is no proportion between the pity we feel and the extent of the pain by which the pity is aroused: a single Anne Frank excites more emotion than the myriads who suffered as she did but whose image has remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is necessary that it can be so. If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live. Perhaps the dreadful gift of pity for the many is granted only to saints; to the monatti, to the members of the squadra speciale, and to all of us there remains in the best of cases only the sporadic pity addressed to the single individual, the Mitmensch, the co-man: the human being of flesh and blood standing before us, within the reach of our providentially myopic senses."

--Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved​

(Monatti were the men tasked with collecting and burying the dead during the plagues in medieval Italy; sqaudra speciale is an Italian term for the Sonderkommando.)


Coincidentally my father's oldest brother (b. Amsterdam 1929, d. Auschwitz 1942) would have been 80 as well, as of this coming weekend.

Amazing that Miep Gies is still alive, I wasn't aware of that. I don't know that I can think of anyone more admirable than those who willingly accept constant risk of death to themselves over such a long period, for no compensation, in order to protect people they have no particular obligations to.

 

[Diemen]

I don't know that I can think of anyone more admirable than those who willingly accept constant risk of death to themselves over such a long period, for no compensation, in order to protect people they have no particular obligations to.

Well said. My grandparents on my mom's side were both a part of the Polish underground resistance during WWII. Both were imprisoned by the Nazis, and my grandfather along with 3 others barely managed to escape a train headed to Auschwitz. The stories my grandma has shared with me (grandfather died when my mom was just a teen)... I can't even imagine facing the situations she faced at her age (just 21), let alone putting so much at risk in order to save others.

 

[Bonoa]

I think we should never forget the ones who risked their lives to protect others and to stand up against the oppressors!
My grandfater's brother was in the Dutch resistance. He had to flee the country after the Germans were coming for him. He first went to Canada and later to the US where he joined the navy.

My other grandfather was in the Dutch navy in Indonesia where he fought against the Japanese. He also had been in a Japanese concentration camp. For some reasons he was released, though. He never wanted to talk about what happened to him back then. Many Indonesians who suffered during the Japanese occupation are of the generation who don't speak about it. The mentality is 'sudah', which means 'never mind' or 'that's the past'.
I've never known him, because he died when my mother was 14 years old.

 

[karinlv]

"It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart."(July 15, 1944)


I read this passage and a longer portion from it every year at Passover for 15 yrs. Now my younger sister reads it. What an amazing young girl she was, indeed. An inspiration.