Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

She wanted to be a journalist when she grew up.  And the truth is that while she was denied a long life, her journalistic skills have been heard around the world.

The Diary of Anne Frank details her life in hiding in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944 in a Secret Annex her father had prepared when the Germans made life too miserable for the Jewish population in Holland.

There were four in Anne’s family plus four others who lived in secrecy above a warehouse. Today Earl and I toured the garret where they hid for over two years in hope of waiting out the German occupation.  Over secret radio transmissions, they learned that the Allies were making great strides in reclaiming Western Europe from the Germans.  It’s not known if they knew specifically of D-Day, but one can assume they’d heard encouraging news in the weeks following the invasion.

Then on August 4, 1944 the eight were discovered and sent first to Auschwitz and then to Bergen-Belsen.  Only the father, Otto, survived. Eventually he returned to Amsterdam where a loyal associate gave him a variety of documents she’d taken and hidden after the arrests.  Among them was his daughter’s red and white checked diary.

Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, died approximately one month before Bergen-Belsen was liberated in early 1945. How painful it must have been for Otto to re-read his daughter’s words, particularly her belief that people were inherently good, and realize how close the family came to surviving.

There is a video of Otto Frank in the Anne Frank House where he says he never realized how mature his daughter was at the time, as he’d never read her diary while she was writing it. Ultimately he chose to make the work public.

Perhaps this was his way of helping Anne realize her dream.