Not Just A Victim, Not Just A Symbol

This weekend marks a particularly harrowing literary anniversary: Anne Frank would have been 75 years old on June 12. Frank, of course, died at the age of 16 in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp shortly after her family was captured in a friend’s attic. To this day, Frank is the most recognizable face of the Holocaust, and the story she told in the pages of her diary continues to resonate around the world. But Frank was more than a symbol of the brutal era that Nazi oppression and violence inflicted upon a continent: she was a writer, and a very good one, which only makes her untimely death all the more tragic.