9. Anne Frank deserved better than death in a concentration camp at the age of fifteen
Born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, at the age of five Annelies Marie Frank, along with her parents and sister, became one of more than three hundred thousand Jews to flee Germany between 1933 and 1939. Settling in Amsterdam, following the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in 1940 her father, Otto, sought unsuccessfully to emigrate to the United States. Receiving for her thirteenth birthday an autograph book, Anne decided to use it for a diary and begun her now famous journal illustrating the lives of Jews under Nazism. Following her sister Margot’s call-up by the Central Office for Jewish Emigration to report to a work camp for mandatory labor, on July 6, 1942, the Franks went into hiding.
Concealing a hidden annex in an office building with a bookcase, leaving behind a trail of evidence suggesting they had fled to Switzerland, only four employees at the site knew of the Franks’ proximity. Offering supplies at the risk of their own lives, on August 4, 1944, following an unknown informant’s tip, the complex was raided and the sheltering Jews were found. Deported to a series of concentration camps, Anne, along with her sister, died at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945. Providing one of the deepest and most human insights into the Holocaust, Frank deserved the chance to live the life she could only dream about in the pages of her now-legendary diary.