by Robert Killam

Created on: May 19, 2009

It could be said that Adolph Hitler's ideals had many enemies, but perhaps none was more fierce than the enemy which was personified in a little German Jewish girl who died at the age of fifteen. In two years of writing (in what came to be roughly 220 pages), Annelies Marie Frank brought down the facade of Nazi propaganda and dared to reveal the failed Third Reich for what it was-not from a Jewish perspective and not from a war survivor's perspective, but from the vantage of a teenage girl just trying to live her life and figure herself out in the process. Where Hitler's tanks brought down armies, Anne Frank's posthumous publication lifted hearts. She did not set out to cause the world to remember, but her life's solitary greatest victory was to show that the spirit of a little girl can change the world. It is then our responsibility to remember Anne and her trials, as well as her joys, and it is with that in mind that I hope you read what follows.

Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany to Otto "Pim" Frank (a spice store owner) and Edith-Frank Hollander on June 12, 1929. At the time of her birth, her older sister Margot Frank was already three years old. The family lived most of Anne's life around Amsterdam (where they moved in 1933). After the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, the family watched and waited to go into hiding. On Anne's 13th birthday, one of her presents was a diary. Although she began writing on that day, of keen interest to most who read Anne's story are the entries after July 5, 1942 when her sister, Margot, received a notice that commanded her to report to a labor camp. The very next day, the Frank family began hiding in hidden rooms in Otto Frank's spice shop.

Aside from being a chronicle of the atrocities of Hitler's fascist dictatorship, Anne's diary serves as a window into the life of a little girl who worried about all the things many girls her age worried about, but with the nearly surreal twist of being a captive-by-choice in a cramped living space with her beloved family. Stories of wondering about girlish concerns are interlaced with close calls and nail-biting escapades that are made more intense when the reader realizes these events actually took place. We can tell from Anne's diary that she was a fan of Cissy van Marxveldt's Joop ter Heul novels, due to her writing to various imaginary friends by names of the characters.

Anne's final entry in her diary was on August 1, 1944. Three

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