David Colbert - Anne Frank

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Annes story is how millions of people have come to understand the Holocaust, an event that might otherwise be too vast to comprehend.

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DAY 1:
MAY 15, 1940
SURRENDER

Anne and her family are trapped in the Netherlands after a sudden invasion by Nazi Germany.

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DAY 2:
APRIL 29, 1942
JOOD

Anne struggles under the bizarre and vicious laws imposed by the German government.

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DAY 3:
JULY 6, 1942
THE VANISHING

A chilling letter forces the Frank family into an extreme and dangerous decision.

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DAY 4:
MARCH 28, 1944
DEAR KITTY

Anne takes comfort and places her hopes in her one true confidanteher diary.

Mark Squires

DAY 5:
APRIL 9, 1944
BREAK-IN

An ominous event threatens to expose the secret lives of Anne and her family.

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DAY 6:
AUGUST 4, 1944
CAUGHT

Annes worst fears come true: She and her family and friends are betrayed to the Germans.

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DAY 7:
AUGUST 8, 1944
WESTERBORK

The Frank family arrives at a Nazi slave labor camp, and they are given especially harsh punishments.

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DAY 8:
SEPTEMBER 5, 1944
SEPARATED

Anne loses her fathers protection and enters the dark world of the Nazis most notorious camp.

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DAY 9:
OCTOBER 7, 1944
SECRETS AND LIES

The twisted cruelty of the Germans hatred leads to horrors beyond anything Anne has imagined.

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DAY 10:
MARCH 1945
WE HAVE OUR PEACE

Sent to a new camp, where an epidemic rages, Anne tries to comfort her dying sister.

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AFTERWORD:
JULY 19, 1945
LEGACY

The lone survivor of the Frank family is handed a precious and powerful legacy: Annes diary.

T he short life of an ordinary schoolgirl may seem to be an unlikely subject for a biography. Yet when we read about Anne Frank, we defy what Nazi Germany hoped to achieve. The Holocaust was meant to be namelessthe Nazis tattooed numbers on most of their victims instead. Some of the worlds first large computers, sold to the Nazis by the American company IBM, literally reduced the victims to old-style computer punch cards. So the personal story of every Holocaust victim is an act of defiance simply because its personal.

Its easy to quote statistics: six million Jews murdered90 percent of the Jewish population of Poland, Germany, and other European countries. More than three million Poles, Slavs, Communists, Socialists, pacifist Christians, Gypsies (Roma), homosexuals, disabled, and people of African descent bring the total murdered to perhaps eleven million.

However, those statistics, shocking as they are, say nothing about the experience. You can only memorize numbers like those; you cant feel them. The story of a single life can tell you more about the Holocaust than any statistic, no matter how large. Without stories like Annes, the Holocaust would be too vast to comprehend.

Annes life began just as the Nazis rose to power and ended just as the Nazis were defeated. She knew almost every part of the experience: what it felt like to have Nazi soldiers invade her neighborhood, to be branded as less than human, to live in hiding, to have a family separated into different death camps, and to be a prisoner of people who took a bizarre pleasure in cruelty. Like millions of others, she knew what it felt like to be murdered, slowly, by Nazi Germany.

Yet she also knew what it felt like to laugh during those horrible times. She watched movies with friends. She had crushes. She tried to get out of schoolwork. She had all the usual arguments with her mother that any girl her age might have. Anne understood that even any normal day under Nazi rule, even a dull day, was a victory for her and her family.

Anne lived approximately 5,748 days. (Because of conditions in her concentration camp, her exact date of death remains unknown.) Still, because of the events of the ten days that follow, she left her mark. These days changed her worldand yours.