50 Years ago... (grandparent's time)

A War Against Children...

February 3, 1944 (sixth month in hiding)

"I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, and I can't do anything to change events anyway. I'll just let matters take their course and concetrate on studying and hope that everything will be all right in the end."

April 5, 1944 (eighth month in hiding)

"When I write, I can shake off all my cares."

(two excerpts from the Diary of Anne Frank)

In the Holocaust, more than one million children under the age of 16 died.

One of the most neglected areas of historical writing is the history of children. The diary of Anne Frank is therefore especially important because we see war from a child's viewpoint.

Born on June 12, 1929, Anne Frank was a German-Jewish teenager who was forced to go into hiding during the Second World War. She and her family, along with four others, spent 25 months from 1942 to 1944, living in a few rooms in an annex above her father's office in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

After being betrayed to the Nazi occupiers of the Netherlands, Anne, her family and the others hiding with them were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Only Anne's father, Otto Frank, survived the war. Anne survived for nine months, but died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen a few weeks before the British army liberated the camp in March 1945. She was only 15 years old.

Holocaust deniers have frequently targeted Anne Frank's diary, calling it a fraud or forgery, because it is such a powerful historical document. The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation tested the papers, inks and glue used in the diary, and all were found to date to before 1945. Tests were performed on her handwriting, comparing the diary with other surviving samples, including letters with dated stamp cancellations. This exhaustive scientific study conclusively proved that the diary had been written by Anne Frank during the war.

The diary had been saved by Miep Gies, a young woman who supplied the annex dwellers, who could not leave their hiding place, with food and other supplies. She rescued the diary, and turned it over to Otto Frank. It had been Anne's hope to have the diary published, but her father had difficulty finding anyone interested in printing the diary. Everyone just wanted to forget the war and get on with living. But in 1947, a publisher was finally found. The book became an immediate hit. Today the diary has been translated into 55 languages and is one of the most widely read books in the world.

If the First World War set the tone for much of the rest of century, with the rise of the United States as a world power, the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the birth of fascism; the Second World War confirmed these trends. By the end of the war, the shape of the world as we know it today had been largely determined. Within a decade of the end of the war, the colonial empires of Europe were quickly being taken apart. The borders of most of the countries of the world were established at this point. This era saw the birth of television and the nuclear bomb. The promise of technology was often poisoned by unwelcome side effects. New industries led to serious air and water pollution. Promises of wealth for all in the new post-war era were not realized -- especially in the former colonies, still economically dependent on the major industrial powers. Even the peace itself was not secure. The Cold War, the military and economic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, raised the cloud of nuclear war -- a war in which there would truly be no winners, where devastation could be so severe that the annihilation of all life on Earth was a possibility.