I know it has been a while, I've been busy and have been trying to find some things to blog about. And today it was there in front of me as I checked my mail this morning...It is Anne Frank's 80th Birthday, actually she would have been 80 years old today...but she died at the young age of 15. For those who don't know who Anne Frank is, here's a brief summary (with the help of http://www.annefrank.com/) :
"Anne Frank was a German-Jewish teenager who was forced to go into hiding during the Holocaust. She and her family, along with four others, spent 25 months during World War II in an annex of rooms above her father’s office in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.After being betrayed to the Nazis, Anne, her family, and the others living with them were arrested and deported to Nazi concentration camps.
In March of 1945, nine months after she was arrested, Anne Frank died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. She was fifteen years old.
Her diary, saved during the war by one of the family’s helpers, Miep Gies, was first published in 1947. Today, her diary has been translated into 67 languages and is one of the most widely read books in the world."
I grew up reading her diary and reading about her life all through junior high and high school. She helped me understand why the Holocaust was such a tradegy in history and what made it become a part of history. And at the same time I could relate, because she was just 15, so young, so innocent, so pure.
Tragedies happen in the world everyday...murders, rapings, torture, kidnappings, robberies, bomb explosions, these are all human-willed...and then we have the "natural disasters" hurricanes, volcanoe explosions, avalanches, tropical storms, thunderstorms, tsunamis and so many more...but yet we all go on drinking our coffee, reading the paper, getting upset that the train is late, or someone cut you off on the highway, yet we take the precious seconds in our life to be upset, to make life more unbearable while on the other side of the world, there are people clinging to life because there arent cures for the illnesses they have, or they havent eaten in 4 days, and their feet are bleeding because they can't get a pair of shoes to wear...
We have life so good here...and we dont know anything less than that, because we have been so fortunate...but those people on the other side of the world, they dont know what its like to live our life...but somehow its something that they would give anything to live and experience.
Anne Frank knew exactly what was going on outside her window...she knew why she was in hiding, she knew what she had to sacrafice to live, and she knew what would happen if they were discovered. Yet she kep such high spirits, such strength and maturity that are rare in 15-year-olds that I found amazing. What happened to her was so tragic, it brings tears to my eyes by just imagining how it all felt, what she could have possibly experienced.
The Holocaust was a terrible, tragic event that happened, and many people died because if it. But Anne Frank's famous diary helps her to live on.
Happy Birthday Anne.
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