Almost one month ago, precisely on 12th June, the Jewish refugee Anne Frank would complete 90 years-old, so this post is a tribute to her. For her writings we can understand well the horror of injustice, the sadness from lack of freedom, and the consequences of abuse of power. Therefore when we learned about the horror of any authoritarian regime we started to realize how is important, essential and worth to fight for human rights, democracy, rule of law and justice. Sometimes the horror of systematic abuse of power and injustice can happen in democratic regime as well. And when this happens, we all should fight for justice and help the victims, because if not you can be the next victim. This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/anne-frank-90th-birthday-diary-holocaust-hiding-nazis-second-world-war-teenager-a8946491.html. The second was published at https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Anne-Franks-Diary-reading-to-honor-her-90th-birthday-in-Venices-Ghetto-592000. The third was published at https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/anne-diarist-icon/
Anne Frank, the Jewish schoolgirl whose diaries of her time in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands stands as one of the most significant documents to arise from the Holocaust, would have celebrated her 90th birthday on 12 June. The Frank family had relocated to Amsterdam in 1943 to escape rising antisemitism in their native Frankfurt, part of a mass exodus that saw some 300,000 Jews flee Adolfo Hitler`s Germany between 1933 and 1939. Settling in an apartment, Otto and Edith Frank and their daughters Margot and Anne adjusted to their new surroundings relatively comfortably at first. Anne attended a Montessori school, learned Dutch and demonstrated a particular aptitude for reading and writing. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler`s Germany took the Netherlands on May 1940, the occupying government moving quickly to introduce the same prejudicial laws the Franks had already been subjected to in Frankfurt. When the state attempted to confiscate Otto`s business, he transferred his shares to a gentile friend, and resigned as director. Margot and Anne had meanwhile been removed from their respective schools and sent to the Jewish Lyceum. A month later, Margot received a letter from the Central Office ordering her to report to a labor camp. On July 1942, Otto moved the family into a secret annex he had furnished at the rear of his workplace. Until the Gestapo stormed the annex on August 1944, arresting the occupants, jailing their assistants and dispatching the Frank family to Auschwitz, Anne found solace in her diary. In her diary, she recorded her most intimate thoughts and feelings. Anne Frank would no doubt have been both delighted and stunned to learn of the publishing sensation her diary would become after it was salvaged by Miep Gies following her death from typhus at Bergen-Belsen in February 1945, aged just 15.
Had the Holocaust never happened, Anne Frank could have turned 90 on June 12. To honor the occasion, a marathon reading of her well-known diary will take place in Campo di Ghetto Novo, the main square of Venice`s Ghetto. Ninety people, as many as the years she would have celebrated, will take turns reading the whole volume in the Italian translation over several hours. All participants, including religious and political leaders, athletes, and artists, will each read five or six pages of the book. After the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, the Franks went into hiding. They were discovered and arrested in 1944, Anne, her sister Margot and their mother did not survive the death camps. The diary that she had kept from her 13th birthday to the day of her arrest was first published in 1947 and is considered one of the most powerful pieces of literature about the Holocaust. The event, "90 voices for Anne Frank," has been promoted by the Italian writer Matteo Corradini. The reading will be broadcast live by the Italian national public radio.
How did a diary, abandoned in a fragmentary state, become one of the world`s most widely read books? And how did its author become a figure of international renown, despite having died two years before the book was first issued? As remarkable as Anne Frank`s diary is, the story of its publication and its engagement by millions of readers around the world over the past seven decades is equally powerful. The book was first issued in 1947 and translated in French and German in 1950 and English in 1952. Within a few years, a dramatization of Anne`s diary was staged on Broadway, then performed internationally and filmed in Hollywood. The Frank`s former hiding place became an museum, the Anne Frank House, in 1960. by then, Anne`s life story had become widely familiar around the world, establishing her as the most known victim of Nazi persecution. Today, when people read Anne`s diary or visit the building in which most of it was written, they not only encounter an extraordinary work, created during the Holocaust. They also discover that they are joining a vast international body of this book`s readers. there is much to learn from the story of this young woman amid the terrible times in which she lived and died. In addition, the wealth of responses that Anne Frank has inspired is itself instructive, revealing the many possibilities of finding meaning at this powerful confluence of remembrance and imagination.
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