Young Voices Amidst War: Anne Frank and Bana Alabed

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In the darkest hours of human history, it is often the smallest voices that echo the loudest across time. Two such voices belong to young girls separated by over seven decades, yet bound by the common thread of bearing witness to the horrors of war while holding onto hope.
Anne Frank: The Girl Behind the Diary
In 1942, a 13-year-old Jewish girl named Annelies Marie Frank began documenting her life in a small checkered diary she received for her birthday. Little did she know this diary would become one of history's most powerful testimonies to human resilience.
Anne was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank. A bright, precocious child with expressive brown eyes and a vibrant personality, Anne loved reading, writing stories, and collecting pictures of movie stars. Her sister Margot, four years older, was the quiet, studious counterpart to Anne's outgoing nature.
When Hitler rose to power in 1933, the Frank family fled to Amsterdam, where Otto established a business selling pectin for jam-making. For a time, they lived a normal life—Anne attended the Montessori school, made friends, and enjoyed riding her bicycle along Amsterdam's canals.
But normalcy shattered when Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. By 1942, deportations of Jews to concentration camps had begun. On July 6, 1942, the Frank family went into hiding in a secret annex above Otto's office building at Prinsengracht 263—a space concealed behind a movable bookcase.
For 761 days, Anne lived in this cramped space with seven others: her parents, her sister Margot, the van Pels family (Hermann, Auguste, and their son Peter), and Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist. Their survival depended on the courage of four non-Jewish employees who supplied them with food and news from the outside world—Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and Bep Voskuijl.
In the annex, Anne poured her thoughts into her diary, which she named "Kitty." She documented daily frustrations—like being unable to make noise during business hours or the tensions between eight people living in confined quarters. She recorded her blossoming feelings for Peter van Pels, her evolving relationship with her mother, and her dreams of becoming a writer or journalist.
But beyond these adolescent concerns, Anne's writing revealed remarkable depth and self-awareness. On April 11, 1944, she wrote: "Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again."
Despite everything, Anne retained her belief in humanity's goodness. In one of her most famous passages, written on July 15, 1944, she reflected: "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."
Just three weeks later, on August 4, 1944, the secret annex was raided. Someone—whose identity remains debated by historians—had betrayed them. The eight residents were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
Anne and Margot were eventually transported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died of typhus in February or March 1945—just weeks before the camp's liberation. Anne was 15 years old. Of the eight people who hid in the secret annex, only Otto Frank survived.
After the war, Miep Gies, who had retrieved Anne's diary after the arrest, gave it to Otto. Recognizing its significance, Otto worked to fulfill his daughter's dream of publication. "Het Achterhuis" (The Secret Annex) was published in Dutch in 1947, followed by English editions as "The Diary of a Young Girl."
Today, Anne's diary has been translated into over 70 languages and sold more than 30 million copies. Her words have become a timeless testament to the human spirit's resilience and the devastating impact of prejudice and hatred.
Bana Alabed: The Twitter Girl from Aleppo
More than seventy years after Anne's death, another young girl began documenting her life in a war zone—this time, through the modern medium of Twitter.
Bana Alabed was born on June 7, 2009, in Aleppo, Syria. She lived in the eastern part of the city with her parents, Fatemah and Ghassan, and her two younger brothers, Mohamed and Noor. Her father was a lawyer and her mother an English teacher who had studied political science and law.
Before the war, Bana enjoyed a relatively normal childhood. She attended school, played with friends, and loved reading books. Her favorite color was pink, and she dreamed of becoming a teacher like her mother.
But by 2016, when Bana was seven years old, Syria had been engulfed in civil war for five years. Aleppo, once Syria's largest city and commercial hub, had become a battleground between government forces and various opposition groups.