Today Should Have Been Anne Frank's 94th Birthday

Reflections on a Life Cut Short

Anne Frank laughing at the school photographer. This photograph was made at the Jewish High School Amsterdam, December 1941. (wikimedia commons)

Today, June 12, it is 81 years ago that Anne Frank celebrated her 13th birthday in Amsterdam. Her best friend Hannah Pick-Goslar remembered a lifetime later how, at school that day, "Anne passed around cookies for the happy occasion, and the whole class formed a circle around her and wished her a very happy birthday."

Two days later, she invited dozens of friends at home, it was her first birthday after new laws had been issued under the Nazi occupation barring non-Jews from Jewish homes, so her many non-Jewish friends from school and the neighborhood could not attend.