Voices Carry

The woman in history who has meant the most to me was a thirteen year-old girl when she began the diary about which John Kennedy wrote, "Of all the multitudes who throughout history have spoken for human dignity in times of great suffering and loss, no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank." With German Jews trapped in Amsterdam by the Nazi occupation, the Frank family went into hiding in an attic annex, and it was there that Anne secretly recorded her dreams and sorrows. In doing so, she gave voice to the victims of the Holocaust. She has become a hero and an icon, an example of a time when fascism and brutality set out to destroy a people, but she was also a very human Jewish girl who longed to be a writer.

The Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote that in Anne Frank "one voice speaks for six million -- the voice not of a sage or a poet but of an ordinary little girl." But for me, Anne Frank was both sage and poet, as she was most especially for young Jewish girls who read The Diary of a Young Girl, published in the US in 1951. This harrowing account of the Frank family and their neighbors has sold more than 30 million copies and been published in more than sixty languages, yet it is perhaps the most intimate book ever written, filled with a young girl's sorrows and dreams, and above all else, filled with faith and hope. In what is perhaps the most famous quote from the diary, Anne writes, "Despite everything I believe that people are really good at heart" and in May 26th, 1944 Anne made this note in her diary: "We still love life, we haven't forgotten the voice of nature. And we keep hoping, hoping for... everything." Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, and yet for a reader she is achingly alive

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