The Power of the Written Word by Susan Van Kirk

 

I’m taking time out today to celebrate the power of the written word by writing about an event that took place four years before my birth at the end of WWII.

On this day, July 6, a young girl named Anne Frank and her family took refuge in a warehouse annex on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, Holland, in 1942. Anne had received a diary earlier that year. She and seven other people, including her family members, were escaping a Nazi attempt to send them to concentration camps. Her sister, Margot, had received a summons the day before to “present herself” so that she could be transported to a “labor camp.” Their Jewish family was one of 28,000 Jews who hid in the Netherlands during the war.

How interesting it is that my grandson, age 14, should recently have finished reading Anne Frank’s diary in school. He’s mostly been reading nonfiction because of the curse of “core curriculum,” but now he’s discovered this story, which has moved him immensely. He wants to go to Amsterdam to see the Anne Frank house, and I think he may do that next summer.

Anne Frank was born on June 12, 1929. Four years later, Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, and the following year the Frank family moved to Amsterdam. Because they were Jews, they were in danger in Germany. Unfortunately, the evil of the Nazi philosophy would follow them over time and miles to the Netherlands. It’s been estimated that somewhere between 300,000 and 330,000 people hid from the Nazis in the Netherlands during the war. Most were in the countryside where food was more plentiful, but the Frank family moved to a warehouse annex in the city. Five “helpers,” who were part of a network of people who helped Jews hide during the war, aided the family. The annex held the eight of them on two floors that were sealed off for safety. The network supporting them grew larger and more efficient as time went by.

In 1944, Anne’s family was discovered, and she and her sister were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died of typhus the following year. Ironically, my own father was one of the American soldiers in Patton’s army who liberated the camps at the end of the war.

But the words she wrote in her diary didn’t die with her, and her diary was found after the war and given to her father, the only family member who survived. In 1947, he published The Secret Annex. It’s sales were slow at first, but by the time it crossed the ocean and was reviewed in The New York Times on June 15, 1952, sales began to pick up. Five years later, it was turned into a play that ran for 717 performances on Broadway. In 1959, it became a major motion picture. The following year, the hiding place became a museum.

Today, thirty million copies of the diary have sold worldwide, and it’s been translated into seventy languages. The words of this teenager, who wanted to create a kinder world with a moral compass, have resonated with teenagers in cultures all over the world.

And this year, my grandson, living 94 years after Anne Frank’s birth, read her diary. He was emotionally moved.

The power of the written word.