Anne Frank, just 15 years old on this day in 1944, was found hiding in a secret room in Amsterdam by the Nazi Gestapo and arrested, along with nine others including her family. They were hauled off to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. Anne and her sister Margot were later moved to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany where they both eventually died from typhus, due to unsanitary conditions which were common in those death factories.
Anne’s father, Otto Frank, was the only one in the group to survive until the war was over. When Otto returned to Holland after the war, Miep Gies, a former employee of Mr. Frank’s, gave him Anne’s diary which she had found and kept safe after the family’s capture. The diary held a detailed account of the two years in which Anne and her family spent hiding from a government who was hellbent on being in control of everything, including who had a right to live and who did not.
The Diary of Anne Frank is a testimony to, and contains a lesson in the consequences of, giving people in government too much power and control. America was once the antithesis of big government, founded on the principles of people’s rights as opposed to the government’s rights. She used to be a shining example of freedom. But the people of America seek to elect a government that tells them what to do and makes their choices for them rather than the citizens striving to be responsible for themselves and their life choices. We are sliding backwards toward a system that not only has been proven unsustainable time and time again throughout history, but toward a system that inevitably has a murderous ending.
