Google Doodle Marks the 75th Anniversary of Anne Frank's 'Diary of a Young Girl'

Google Doodle Honours Anne Frank

(Photo Credit: India International Centre/Exhibits from the Anne Frank exhibition.)

Google Doodle on Saturday, 25 June 2022, is observing the 75th anniversary of one of world's most renowned personal accounts of horrors of Holocaust, written by Jewish German-Dutch diarist Anne Frank.

The search engine giant has shared a slide show of Anne Frank on its search page featuring real excerpts from her diary, which describes what she and her friends and family experienced in hiding for over two years.

Google Doodle states that Anne Frank wrote her diary between ages of 13-15, which remains one of the most poignant and widely-read accounts to date of the events and horrors of war.

Who was Anne Frank?

Anne Frank was born on 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, from where her family fled to Amsterdam, Netherlands to escape the increasing atrocities and violence faced by millions of minorities at the hands of the growing Nazi party.

However, Germany invaded Netherlands soon after the beginning of World War 2. Jewish people were targeted and had to go through imprisonment, execution, or forced relocation to inhumane concentration camps.

Just like millions of other Jews, Anne's family was forced to hide in a secret annex in her father’s office building to avoid persecution.

One of the few possessions Anne managed to carry with her was a checkered hardback notebook, a gift she had received on her thirteenth birthday just weeks earlier.

"Over the following 25 months in hiding, she filled its pages with a heartfelt account of teenage life in the “secret annex,” from small details to her most profound dreams and fears. Hopeful that her diary entries could be published after the war, Anne consolidated her writing into one cohesive story titled “Het Achterhuis” (“The Secret Annex”)," reads the official Google Doodle blog.

Soon after, in August of 1944, the Nazi Secret Service, found the Frank family and arrested them. They were then taken to a detention center where they were forced to perform hard labor. It was followed by their forceful deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland where they lived in cramped, unhygienic conditions.

Anne and her sister Margot Frank were later sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. "In addition to the brutal, intentional killings of prisoners by Nazi forces, deadly diseases spread rapidly. Eventually, Anne and Margot succumbed to the inhumane conditions they were forced to live in," the blog added.

Anne Frank was just 15 years old at the time of her death.

Her diary, popularly known as 'The Diary of Anne Frank' and 'The Diary of a Young Girl' is considered an important book of modern history and has been translated in more than 80 languages.