Google Doodle pays tribute to Holocaust victim Anne Frank

The German-Dutch diarist became one of the most famous victims of the Holocaust after her diary was published as The Diary of a Young Girl posthumously on June 25, 1947

Google is paying tribute to Anne Frank, the teen diarist, who died in 1945 during the Holocaust, through a series of animated pictures as a slideshow.

“Celebrating 75 years of the publication of Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, today’s Doodle features real excerpts from her diary, which describes what she and her friends and family experienced in hiding for over two years. This has been displayed through a series of animations.

“Although only written between the ages of 13-15, her personal account of the Holocaust and events of the war remains one of the most poignant and widely-read accounts to date,” Google wrote.

Anne Frank was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, but her family soon moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands to escape the increasing discrimination and violence faced by millions of minorities at the hands of the growing Nazi party. After millions of Jews were forced to flee their homes or go into hiding, Anne’s family went into hiding in 1942, in a secret annex in her father’s office building to avoid persecution.

Over the following 25 months in hiding, Anne wrote a heartfelt account of teenage life in the secret annex. In one of the excerpts Google has displayed, Anne says, “I feel like a songbird whose wings have been ripped off and who keeps hurting itself against the bars of its dark cage.”

On August 4, 1944, the Frank family was found out by the Nazi Secret Service, arrested, and taken to a detention centre where they were forced to perform hard labour. Although Anne Frank did not survive the horrors of the Holocaust, her account of those years, commonly known as The Diary of Anne Frank, has since become one of the most widely read works of non-fiction ever published. 

“Thank you, Anne, for sharing a critical window into your experience and our collective past, but also unwavering hope for our future,” the search engine wrote in the end.