By Helena Zhu
Epoch Times Staff
Epoch Times Staff
A detail of the diary of the wax figure of Anne Frank and their hideout reconstruction is unveiled at Madame Tussauds on March 9, 2012 in Berlin, Germany. (Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)
The Jewish girl Anne Frank wrote the first entry of her famous diary during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands on June 12, 1942, her 13th birthday.
Decades after the horror of the Holocaust, Frank’s diary has now turned 70. Her first entry reads, “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”
Frank, one of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, was born in the city of Frankfurt am Main in Weimar Germany, although she lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam in the Netherlands. As a German national, she lost her citizenship in 1941 when Nazi Germany passed the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws.
Her family then survived by hiding in attics and hidden corners. Frank stayed true to her journal until she and her family were betrayed and captured by the Germans in August 1944.
Frank died in a concentration camp in March of the next year, at age 15. After the war, Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father and the only survivor of the family, returned to Amsterdam and published the diary that would touch the hearts and minds of generations to come.
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