Today the church remembers a young writer who continues to call to us from the not-so-distant past: Anne Frank, Diarist and Idealist.

Anne was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1929 to liberal Jewish parents (Edith and Otto), and had an older sister, Margot. A young Anne would move with her family to Amsterdam in the Netherlands when the Nazi Party took control of the German government in 1934. They quickly saw that Germany was not a safe place to live or raise their family.

By 1940 the Netherlands also became a dangerous place. Adolf Hitler had so thoroughly dismantled the checks and balances in the fragile German democracy and, convinced of his own Divine right to dominate the world, invaded nearby neighbors. The fascist regime was able to bring the German public along largely through creating common scapegoat enemies out of the Jewish, LGBTQIA, and other diverse populations.

Every fascist take-over begins by demonizing a minority.

With the Jewish people taking the brunt of the hatred, the Frank family were stripped of their German citizenship and were forced to go into hiding in 1942 as the terror campaign of rounding folks up and shipping them off to detention centers stretched far and wide.

Otto Frank, Anne’s father, worked in a factory where a secret area had been secured behind a bookshelf. The family would hole themself up there to wait for the horror of the German occupation to end…if the brave would take a stand.

To pass the time Anne wrote in a small diary she had received for her 13th birthday that year, calling their small area the “secret annex.” She longed to be an author, and despite having to live in hiding, was determined to do what all good authors do: write about what they know. Her musings about their silent and secretive life would go on to live forever, though Anne would not see any of it happen.

For over two years, being silent day and night, the family waited. Wondered. Hoped. Eventually some other Jewish refugees would house with them in their small area, Anne writing the most about young Peter, the son of the Van Pel family, who had to hide alongside them.

In 1944 the Gestapo were tipped off about the secret room where the Frank family had been sheltered, and on August 4th in 1944 Anne’s family joined millions of others sent to concentration camps. In September of that year the family ended up at Auschwitz and were separated from their father, Otto, eventually ending up at Bergen-Belsen.

It was there that she and her sister both died of typhus in either February or March of 1945.

Anne’s diary had been saved by the secretaries of her father, Otto Frank, who ended up being the only survivor of the family.

As a father, I cannot tell you how unbelievably destitute that would have made me. We are not meant to bury our babies, Beloved.

Otto was reunited with his daughter’s diary and, knowing how she longed to be a published author, published it for her in 1947. It has since been turned into numerous books, plays, and movies, telling Anne’s story far and wide.

My favorite line from her diary:

“Our lives are fashioned by our choices. First we make our choices. Then our choices make us.”

Anne Frank died because some made choices…and others remained silent for too long.

February 21st is generally decided as her day of remembrance largely because few other saints of note are commemorated on this day.

Anne Frank, the young author and idealist, is a reminder for me and should be for the whole church that now is the right time to do what is right. Afterall, you may not get another chance.

-historical bits from public information

-icon written by Mister Jones Attic