The age of thirteen was a traumatic year for me in many ways, involving change in every area of my life. Old friends, favorite places, familiar teachers and a beloved grandparent soon became little more than distant memories. Into that vacuum came new experiences, not all of them pleasant. The one old, familiar friend I was able to keep was my love of reading. And into that world came a young girl by the name of Anne Frank.

"The Diary of a Young Girl" could have been written about me, so closely did I relate to this other thirteen-year-old. Certainly the details of her life were alien to me. I lived in a free country with no threat of Nazi occupation. I had been a school boarder for several years, which in some ways was not so different from the crowded conditions under which Anne and her family existed in the secret annexe! No, what I related to most in this book was Anne's desire for a close friend in the midst of the upheaval she was facing; for some stability amid so much uncertainty. And this, I believe, is what has made this book such a favorite with so many young girls over the past sixty years.

Anne began to keep her diary (a birthday present from her father) on June 12, 1942, three weeks before she went into hiding with her father, mother, sister and four other Jews, in the sealed-off upper rooms of the annexe of her father's office building in Amsterdam. They remained there in cramped conditions without seeing the outside world for just over two years, until their betrayal in August 1944 resulting in their deportation to Nazi concentration camps. Of the group of eight, only Otto Frank, Anne's father and closest ally, remained. It was he who found the diary when he returned to their former hiding place after the war had ended.

It seems strange that anyone would want to question the veracity of a diary written by a young teenager looking for a shred of normalcy in an otherwise crazy world. That is, until one considers that this little book became representative of the huge scale of Nazi atrocities committed during the war. It sheds light on the long-term consequences of racism and persecution, and in particular their impact on the European communities targeted for extermination by the Nazis. Anne Frank was to become symbolic of all the civilians murdered under the Nazi regime as well as revealing the extent of Jewish suffering under Hitler.

Hence it is not entirely surprising that Holocaust deniers began a two-edged smear campaign. First

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