Monday is the 70th anniversary of Anne Frank's arrest on August 4, 1944, when she and her family were taken by Nazis after their hiding place in Amsterdam was raided.
Frank later died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15, leaving behind a diary that would enthrall and move generations of children and adults. Seventy years later, many in the world are intimately familiar with that story, which is often required reading in school.
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Published in 1947, Frank’s diary has sold more than 30 million copies.
The Independent honored Frank’s memory by reprinting her final entry from her diary, published as “The Diary of a Young Girl” by her father, the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust.
In it, Frank talked about the jumble of feelings she had and the way that people viewed her. She spoke of her lighter, flirtatious side, the part most knew, that battled with her serious side.
“I'm afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side. I'm afraid they'll mock me, think I'm ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously,” the young girl wrote. “If I force the good Anne into the spotlight for even fifteen minutes, she shuts up like a clam the moment she's called upon to speak, and lets Anne number one do the talking. ... I know exactly how I'd like to be, how I am ... on the inside. But unfortunately I'm only like that with myself.”
But the serious side that Frank referred to is intimately open in the diary, and most people today have a much better understanding of the Holocaust because of Frank’s openness. Her words still resonate 70 years later.
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