Anne Frank would have turned 92 today. If the United States had approved her father's visa application, she could be an old lady in Brooklyn, celebrating with her family and showing her great-grandkids the diary that told the story of how she got here.
Anne Frank was born recently enough that we have home movie footage of her, looking out her family's apartment window on an ordinary summer day, a year before she went into hiding.
(I should note for precision's sake that Anne and her family would likely have settled in Boston had the US taken them in, since they had people there. But as a New Yorker, I think of her every time I see a little old lady on the F train.)
The GIF I posted earlier in the thread is an excerpt from a 20-second home movie that was shot on July 22, 1941, as part of the celebration of a neighbor's wedding. After her diary was published in the 1950s, the couple reached out to Anne's father. theguardian.com/world/2009/oct…
Which in turn reminds me of a quote from Anne's father, Otto Frank, which I haven't really stopped thinking about since I first encountered it seven years ago. studentactivism.net/2015/01/02/ott…
Something's been nagging at me about this home movie of Anne Frank, and I just realized what it is—this movie was made nine days before Goering's letter to Heydrich directing the commencement of "preparations … for a final solution of the Jewish question."
The Second World War had been underway for nearly two years that summer, and the Nazis had been in power in Germany for eight, but the machinery of genocide had not yet become fully operational, and would not for most of another year.
(On a personal note, it just hit me that my own mother was alive when the movie was made—she had been born five days before, and just three hundred miles away.)
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