June 25, 1947 CE – The Diary of Anne Frank is Published
One of the most influential books of the 20th century, written by a teenage girl, first reached bookstores on June 25, 1947. The Diary of a Young Girl is more commonly known by the referred to as The Diary of Anne Frank and read the world over to give schoolchildren a unique view of life as a Jew hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland. The story begins shortly after Anne’s 13th birthday. Yet to be driven into hiding, she is much like other girls her age – a childlike wonder she seems to maintain even as she spends month after month locked in an upstairs room near her father’s office with six other people (a seventh joined later). The group would remain there – squeezing into a hidden room when Nazi soldiers searched the building – until August 1944, when they were given up and shipped away to concentration camps. Just a few months before she would be locked in a train car and shipped to Bergen-Belsen, the Dutch Minister for Education, Art and Science went on the radio, appealing to listeners to preserve “simple everyday material” for the sake of creating a narrative to describe the horrors the Dutch faced under Nazi rule. The Dutch government, exiled in London, wanted any scrap of paper its citizens could muster – letters, journals, etc. – to help paint as complete a picture as possible.