A Reflection as a Tribute

In memory of Anne Frank on the 65^th anniversary of her death and in honor of all women, I composed this reflection during Women’s History Month last year.

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I know that I can write, a couple of my stories are good, my descriptions of the ‘Secret Annex’ are humorous, there’s a lot in my diary that speaks—but whether I have real talent remains to be seen.

~words of Anne Frank in her famous diary

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Anneliese Marie Frank and her sister Margot Betti Frank died 65 years ago, within days of one another. It was March of 1945, the month before Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British. Anne was 15, and Margot was 19, two of 17,000 deaths that resulted from deprivation and disease that month in that place. They were two of the 1.5 million murdered children and two of the almost 6 million murdered Jews of the Holocaust.

They lay dying next to each other near the open door of the barracks. They were too weak to get up and close the door to shut out the bitter North Sea wind.

Two promising lives had lain ahead of them: Anne’s as a writer and journalist in Paris or London and Margot’s as a nurse and midwife in Palestine.

For her 15^th birthday just nine months earlier, while still in hiding at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, Anne received

…all five parts of Springer’s History of Art,…a handkerchief, a pot of jam,…a book on botany from Mummy and Daddy, a double bracelet from Margot, a book from the Van Daans,…and, the high spot of all, the book Maria Theresa, and three slices of full-cream cream cheese from Kraler.

While in hiding, they studied French and English, worked together on crossword puzzles, read Goethe and Schiller, played "Monopoly," listened to opera on the radio, and enjoyed the antics and comfort that the cats brought to their claustrophobic hiding place. Anne had a lot of time to develop her perspectives on the world:

In no way do I mean…that women should turn against childbearing, on the contrary, nature has made them like that and that is all to the good. I merely condemn all the men, and the whole system, that refuse ever to acknowledge what an important, arduous, and in the long run beautiful part, women play in society.