World’s Most Famous Diary: History Honors Anne Frank

On June, 12 1942, a 13-year old girl received a diary for her birthday. Seven years later, the world would see it’s contents. Seventy years after she received the book, the world still talks about it.

Yahoo News reports that the diary was given to a Dutch Jewish girl named Anne Frank on her birthday, and had she not died in a German concentration camp in 1945, she would have turned 83 on Tuesday. The red-checkered notebook was given to Frank by her father —22 days before Frank and her German-born Jewish family went into hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

The diary’s profound meaning comes from the mix of everyday thoughts and mundane experiences one expects from a 13-year-old girl, juxtaposed with the overhanging cloud of fear and the important decisions her family made to try and hide from the Nazis.

“I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to with anyone, and I hope you will provide much support and comfort,” Anne Frank wrote in the diary.

The final entry in the diary complained a bit about her family, but showed the optimism of a young girl in a troubled world as she finished it saying she would, “keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if… if only there were no other people in the world.”

Just days later, her family was betrayed, captured and separated. When she died a few years later, just before the British liberated her camp, she was under the impression that her father was already dead.

Instead, Otto Frank had his daughter’s diary published. The International Business Times report that today, Anne Frank’s diary has been translated into more than 70 languages and remains a best-seller.