We all know who Anne Frank was: the young Jewish-German girl who spent the last two years of her short life hidden with her family in a secret room in her father’s office in Amsterdam — only to be discovered and incarcerated by the Nazi regime at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died just two months before the end of World War II.

And most of us have heard of the diaries she kept during those two years — diaries rescued by employees of her father’s firm, and later published as a book by her father, Otto Frank, who miraculously survived the war.

Her words belie her youth and inexperience; her undaunted spirit inspires us still. And this one sentence particularly speaks to me in today’s atmosphere of political uncertainty:

“People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but that doesn’t stop you from having your own opinion.”

– Anne Frank, “The Diary of a Young Girl”

That teen-aged girl, who was forced to keep silent for fear of discovery yet found release in her writing, is a compelling reminder that the most dangerous thing we can do in difficult times is to surrender our opinions and our freedom of expression.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
1/25/26