On Anne Frank’s birth anniversary, check out a book, film, and online tour which take a closer look at the 16-year-old’s life
Anne Frank. Pic courtesy/Wikimedia Commons
On her 13th birthday, German-born Anne Frank was presented with a diary. In it, she wrote about her feelings and her life in the Secret Annex. This was a place within an office building in Amsterdam, where the family hid during the Holocaust years of the 1940s. Dealing with her loneliness, she decided to give the diary a name. “I don’t want to jot down the facts... I want the diary to be my friend, and that’s why I’m going to call this diary kitty.” While Anne died when she was 16 years, after a police raid drove her family to a concentration camp, her diary was preserved and published as The Diary of a Young Girl. It continues to be read by readers across the world. On her birth anniversary today, we bring recommendations for you to check out.
A still from the movie. PIC COURTESY/YOUTUBE
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READ
Behind the Bookcase: Miep Gies, Anne Frank, and the Hiding Place: Miep Gies was a Dutch woman who worked for Otto Frank, Anne’s father. She was the protector of the Frank family and retriever of Anne’s diary. The book takes the reader behind the bookcase where the Gies (Miep and her husband Jan) helped the family hide. The words are accompanied by illustrations. The latter fill in the silences between the lines. Otto’s worry, for example, is written in his frown lines, when he asks Miep for help to hide in the rooms above his office building. “Miep knew what war meant.” Having survived World War I as a child, she felt deeply for the children, Anne and Margot (Anne’s sister).
Available Leading bookstores and e-stores
WATCH
My Best Friend Anne Frank: Directed by Dutch filmmaker Ben Sombogaart, the film shows life inside the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where several Jewish women and children were imprisoned. The story looks at the experience through the eyes of Hannah Gosler, a close friend of Anne Frank’s. The moments of the camp are punctuated with fragments from their life in the Jewish Quarter in The Netherlands, much before they were brought here. Gosler’s perspective adds another layer to the world we read about in the diary, alongside offering additional details.
Available Netflix
EXPLORE
The Anne Frank House: Take an online tour around the Secret Annex in Amsterdam. We learn haunting details about the bookcase which acted as a secret doorway, why people in hiding couldn’t use the toilet and wash basin for half an hour in the morning, Anne’s room, where she wrote her diary, the posters she put up; her parents’ room, and the Van Pels family room where they celebrated birthdays and anniversaries. Viewers can also take a guided video tour, which contains fragments of the video diary created inside the Anne Frank House using some of her writing.
Log on to annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/secret-annex
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