Google Doodle pays tribute to Holocaust victim Anne Frank with an Animated Diary

Tech giant Google on Saturday honored Jewish German Anne Frank, the victim of the Holocaust. She wrote a diary and which became one of the most read books in the world. Frank’s diary spans her personal account of the Holocaust hiding from the Nazis. To mark the 75th anniversary of the publication of her diary, Google slideshow mentions excerpts from her diary, which recounts her life in hiding for over two years. ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ remains one of the most widely-read works of non-fiction ever published.

Born on June 12, 1929, in Germany’s Frankfurt, Anne Frank’s family soon moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands in order to flee the growing discrimination and violence most of the minorities were subjected to by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party. When Frank was 10, World War 2 broke out, and soon the Netherlands was invaded by Germany. The Nazi party particularly targeted Jews who in millions had to flee from their homes or go into hiding to avoid imprisonment, execution, or concentration camps.

In 1942, Frank’s family went into hiding in a secret annex in her father’s office, where she then began writing about her daily life, including dreams and fears. Hoping that her diary could be published post the war, Anne Frank consolidated her writing into a story titled ‘Het Achterhuis’ (‘The Secret Annex’).

On August 4, 1944, her family was discovered by the Nazi Secret Service, arrested, and taken to a detention center later. Eventually, Anne and Margot Frank were shifted to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where they succumbed due to the inhumane living conditions.

After Frank died in 1944 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, her father Otto – the only surviving family member from the Holocaust – returned to Amsterdam and found her diary. Otto’s friends convinced him to publish the diary and in June 1947, the first batch of copies was printed. The diary later went to become an important document in understanding the miseries of Jews who bore the brunt of Nazi rule.

It was translated from its original Dutch and first published in English in 1952 as ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’. Since then, it has been translated into more than 70 languages.

Over time, the diary has become one of the world’s best-selling books, and continues to serve as the inspiration for several plays and films.