Today would be a good day to remember a girl named Anne.

Today’s day in history is not a birthday, or an anniversaryof death. It is not the day that something that we take for granted wasinvented or discovered. It is simply a day that something nasty happened tosome not-at-all nasty people. And although once you get to the part of thispost you will all say “oooohhhh, yeah we know her”, right now you are probablyjust raising an eyebrow wondering what on earth it could be.

Today is the 68th anniversary of the day that the Nazi’sfound three jewish families hiding in the Achterhuis of some offices inAmsterdam. The informant who gave them away has never been identified.

We all know the story of Anne Frank, or at least, we should.She is a symbol. A symbol of life, hope, and teenage girls. She held onto somuch hope, even through all of the horror, terror and knowing what was coming.She was a 15 year old girl who after almost 70 years, makes us all feel likemonsters. And that is important. She is the symbol of what the world would liketo accept as humanity.

Her diary is a wonderful thing. She started writing in it inJune of 1942. In those early entries she writes of the restrictions that wereplaced on the Jewish people, on the 20^th of June she made a list ofall of those things that Jews were forbidden from doing.

On the 6^th of July, the Frank family went intohiding, and it is from here that Anne’s words become important to the world.Her diary gives us a glimpse of what it was like for the persecuted children,forced from the lives they knew and shut up into a box. After the liberationsof the work camps and the end of the Holocaust, Anne’s Father returned toAmsterdam and found Anne’s diary and papers. Reading them was a revelation tohim. He had no idea about the depth of her thinking during her short life. Herdiary told him more about his daughter then he had ever known.

Ever since the publication of her diary under the title Het Achterhuis in 1947, the world hasbeen fascinated with the girl who was Anne Frank.  Her words were tuned into a play to give Anneand her family life again.

To someone who has never seen the horrors of war, the ideaof the Holocaust is hard to comprehend. The idea that people… humans can commitsuch atrocities against their own kind, with all the morals an ideologies andreligions that we claim make us more than just animals. Over 6 million peoplewere murdered n cold blood because they were not the same as the ones doing thekilling.

Unfortunately, humanity is not Anne Frank. Anne Frank wasthe beautiful exception.