Benjamin Dreyer: Today is Anne Frank's birthday, and this is her diary.

Today is Anne Frank's birthday, and this is her diary.

I used to contemplate the years missing from AF's life by noting that she was born a mere six weeks before my mother. My mother's been gone only three years, and AF might still be alive.

I'm not sure that she, too, would have been in the habit of taking two buses from the UES to go to a Wednesday matinee, but it's scarcely out of the question.

For me, it’s always been that she had a poster of her favorite movie star on her bedroom wall: Robert Stack. Who I watched in “Airplane,” in the theater.

I'd forgotten that!

Also Deanna Durbin, I'm reading. Which is pleasing.

Ah, it seems that Stack and Durbin appeared together in a movie called First Love. My research skills are a little slow this morning.

That she had American movie stars' pictures cut from a magazine was the thing that most struck me too. It took her from being a character from the past and reminded just how contemporary she was.

This is indelible in my memory, too, Peter. Coattails and white tie. With…Ralph Bellamy?

When I visited the Frank house for the first time, it hit me like a brick that she died just 12 years before I was born. It’s altogether easy to forget just how proximate the Holocaust remains.

There’s a short story by Harry Turtledove: reactormag.com/the-eighth-g...

The Eighth-Grade History Class Visits the Hebrew Home for the Aging - Reactorreactormag.com Some people will tell you that world-class fame is better than living to a contented old age. Other people disagree. One of those other people might possibly be the protagonist of this tale by Harry T...

With both Anne Frank and Irene Nemirovsky, both such observant, thoughtful, and talented writers, I think about what works the world missed. And so many others we don’t know….

My wife’s great aunt, who just moved from independent living to a nursing home, was born 2 years before Anne Frank. I talk to her all the time.

I recall being shocked that Anne Frank was born the same year as MLK Jr and Barbara Walters. They seem like people from 3 different ages, but we're all contemporaries.

Just devastating

Coincidence! I was born on May 12, 1959. My Mother in 1925. She has been dead for 7 Years.

Not to copyedit a copyeditor, but I've always thought of those years as stolen, not merely missing.

After years and years of the paperback cover, the black & white photo, the white on black (or black on white) author and title text, seeing the actual artifact in shades of actual color is breathtaking.

A few years ago we put a new cover on our paperback, and I was awed by its immediacy.

I don't think I'd seen that before. It's ... yeah, it's jarring.

Seeing the image of her diary, like any candid pictures of her, make it almost impossible to move or to breathe…

Images with beautiful light, shot by a photographer she was at ease with, and assembled into a well-edited group.

Seriously. It feels... human instead of historical? I don't quite have the right words.

That book changed my life.

I lived across the canal from her house for a time. The Westertoren bells would ring every 15 minutes and at first they made sleeping impossible, but after a few days it is a sound that you miss. I live on the other side of the planet today, but I'm pretty sure I'd recognise their tone anywhere.

I recall the queue of tourists standing around waiting to go inside. My own family went into hiding during the war, albeit in another city with a different outcome. Living about 100m away with a shared heritage made a big impact that I've not thought about for decades. Thank you!

oh , I have never seen this

Thanks for this.

I didn't know her bday was tday

Really? It's not what I expected. This will haunt me.

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