Through a sequence of animated images, Google is paying tribute to Anne Frank, the teen diarist who perished in the Holocaust in 1945.
In honour of The Diary of a Young Girl’s 75th anniversary, Google’s Doodle for today includes actual passages from Frank’s diary that depict what she and her friends and family went through while living in hiding for more than two years. A number of animations have been used to demonstrate this.
Although it was only written when she was between the ages of 13 and 15, Google stated that her account of the Holocaust and other wartime events is still one of the most moving and well-read ones.
On June 12, 1929, Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany. However, her family quickly relocated to Amsterdam, Netherlands, to avoid the rising prejudice and brutality that millions of minorities were subjected to at the hands of the burgeoning Nazi party. In 1942, Anne’s family took refuge of a hidden annex in her father’s office building after being forced to evacuate their houses or go into hiding, hoping to avoid persecution.
In the subsequent 25 months of hiding, Anne penned a moving tale of adolescence in the hidden annex. Anne states, “I feel like a songbird whose wings have been torn off and who keeps hurting itself against the bars of its gloomy cage,” in one of the excerpts Google has posted.
The Frank family was discovered by the Nazi Secret Service on August 4, 1944. They were then apprehended, transferred to a prison facility, and subjected to hard labour. Despite not surviving the atrocities of the Holocaust, Anne Frank’s chronicle of those years, known as The Diary of Anne Frank, has grown to become one of the most widely read nonfiction works ever.
The search engine concluded, “Thank you, Anne, for giving a key window into your experience and our collective past, but also steadfast hope for our future.