Anne Frank has been a lifelong obsession for many Jewish women my age. At Nautilus Junior High in Miami Beach, my English teacher, Mrs. Gelber, handed me a paperback book titled Diary of a Young Girl. It was only 10 years after Anne Frank's death in 1945. I was then 13, the age that Anne had been when she was given her diary, on her birthday.
Anne went into hiding two months after that birthday, in the secret annex where she and others hid for over two years above her father's office in Amsterdam. She died from typhus at 15, seven months after her arrest in Bergen-Belson concentration camp, just before it was liberated.
I took Diary of a Young Girl home and read it through, crying along the read. I identified with the sensitive, Jewish teenager who could write openly and freely, who didn't get along with her mother, who was feisty and flirty and curious.
I had lived through the war as a baby in Florida, and my Jewish grandmother had left Germany (where the Frank family had lived before resettling in Holland), to come to the States. I realized with a chill, perhaps for the first time, "there but for the grace of God...." This was when the world was still discovering the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Many survivors of these camps lived in South Beach, and I had by then met a lady with a tattooed number on her arm.
Anne Frank's story was turned into a play on Broadway, and when I was 16 years old, on my first date with the man who would become my husband, we saw The Diary of Anne Frank, the film adaptation of the book.
Five years after that date, on my honeymoon, my husband and I visited the attic in Amsterdam above her father's office, where Anne Frank and her family went into hiding. The day we visited, 20 years after Anne's death, there were no other visitors around. We walked right up the same stairs she had climbed to hide behind the false bookcase, the same stairs she was forced down by the Gestapo after being betrayed. We walked alone through the cramped attic hideaway, with movie star pictures from 1940s fan magazines still on the walls above her bed. I remember a little bathroom, and stairs to a skylight.
The two-tone sirens I heard in the Amsterdam streets that day reminded me of a scene when Anne Frank heard them in the movie. In that dramatized version, when the siren sound stopped, Anne knew that the police had found their hiding place.
I've been back to the Anne Frank house a couple of times since that first visit in the mid-1960s, and now there is a major building with interactive displays and world viewpoints, and the line snakes around the block near the Westerkerk, where Anne heard the steeple bells through the attic skylight.
There were more connections with Anne Frank. My niece, who had an uncanny resemblance to Anne, played Margo Frank, the older sister who also perished, in a regional theatre production in Atlanta. And a few years ago I ghostwrote a holocaust story of a survivor Anne's age, who had also hidden through much of the war, and I went to Auschwitz to see where that brave lady had survived hell on earth. (I wrote a version on HuffPost a couple of years ago, and it was selected to be in a book anthology.)
Anne Frank was a brilliant, budding writer. We can only imagine what this perceptive, creative girl would have accomplished had she lived to celebrate her 80th birthday, on June 12.
Instead she has became a symbol of the horrors of war, and is considered the most famous child of the 20th century.