Anne Frank — the young Jewish German girl who spent two years in hiding from the Nazis until she and her family were arrested and sent to Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp — is universally known for the diaries she kept during the period of their isolation.

Between the ages of 13 and 15, her writing naturally focused largely on the war, as well as her continuing hope for the future and her faith in what she believed was the innate goodness of mankind. But a recent reading of some segments of her diaries revealed a surprisingly mature understanding of women’s accustomed lot in life in the 1940s, and a view of what would later become known as women’s rights that places her decades ahead of her time.

This is what I found:

“Women should be respected as well! Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn’t women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers? . . . Women who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together!”

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

Had Anne not perished in the camps just two or three months before the end of the war in 1945, she may well have become the German compatriot of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the others of her generation who fought so valiantly for fair and equal treatment in a “man’s world.”

What a loss! But — thanks to her father, who was the only member of their family to survive the war — her words live on, as she would have hoped.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
2/11/26