The Google Doodle on June 25 marked the 75th anniversary of the publication of Anne Frank’s diary-- one of the most enduring and powerful accounts of the Second World War.
Google put out a slideshow comprised of sketches depicting Anne Frank’s life as a Jewish teenager in Holland during the Second World War. It featured excerpts from her diary, which she wrote while in hiding from the Nazis with her family.
Anne Frank, the daughter of Otto Frank, a businessman, and his wife Edith Frank, was 10 when Germany invaded Netherlands. Jews living there began to fear for their lives. Many fled or went into hiding.
The Frank family went into hiding in 1942, in a secret annex situated in Otto Frank’s office building. They shared space with another family -- the Van Pels -- and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer.
In the next 25 months of isolation, Anne Frank’s diary, a birthday gift from her father, became her companion. She jotted down in it every little detail of her life, her adolescent dreams and fears.
In 1944, the occupants of the secret annex were discovered by the Nazis and sent to detention. From there, they were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland – the largest facility created by the Nazis for the mass murder of Jewish people.
The family was separated. Anne and her sister Margot Frank were transported to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany. Both of them are believed to have died of typhus fever. Their mother Edith perished in Auschwitz due to starvation.
Only Otto Frank survived the war. Miep Gies, an employee of his, had managed to retrieve manuscripts of Anne’s diary while the Nazis stormed the office building. She handed them over to Otto Frank, who got it published in 1947 in Dutch. The English version was published in 1952.
Named the Diary of a Young Girl, it became one of the most-read non-fiction books ever written.
“Thank you, Anne, for sharing a critical window into your experience and our collective past, but also unwavering hope for our future,” Google said in a note accompanying its doodle.
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