Anne and Samantha day

Anne and Samantha Day takes place annually on 20 June to honour Anne Frank and Samantha Smith. Anne Frank was a German-born Jewish girl who was born 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929. In 1934, when she was four-and-a-half, Frank and her family moved to Amsterdam in the Netherlands after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control over Germany. By May 1940, the family was trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands. Frank lost her German citizenship in 1941 and became stateless. Despite spending most of her life in the Netherlands and being a de facto Dutch national, she never officially became a Dutch citizen. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Frank’s father, Otto Frank, worked.

The hiding place is notably referred to as the “secret annex”. Anne Frank kept and regularly wrote in a diary she had received as a birthday present in 1942 documenting her life in hiding amid Nazi persecution during the German occupation of the Netherlands. Frank described everyday life from her family’s hiding place in an Amsterdam attic Until the family’s arrest by the Gestapo on 4 August 1944. Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps. On 1 November 1944, Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (presumably of typhus) a few months later. They were estimated by the Red Cross to have died in March, with Dutch authorities setting 31 March as the official date. Later research has alternatively suggested that they may have died in February or early March.

Otto, the only Holocaust survivor in the Frank family, returned to Amsterdam after World War II to find that Anne’s diary had been saved by his female secretaries, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Moved by his daughter’s repeated wishes to be an author, Otto Frank published her diary The Diary of a Young Girl (originally Het Achterhuis, in 1947 which documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944. Following publication She gained world wide fame and became one of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Diary became one of the world’s best-known books which has been the basis for several plays and films and has been translated from its original Dutch version into over 70 languages.

American peace activist and child actress Samantha Smith was born June 29, 1972 in Manchester, Maine. She became famous for her anti-war outreaches during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1982, Smith wrote a letter to the newly appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov, and received a personal reply with an invitation to visit the Soviet Union, which she accepted. Smith attracted extensive media attention in both countries as a “Goodwill Ambassador”, becoming known as America’s Youngest Ambassador and subsequently participating in peacemakingactivities in Japan. With the assistance of her father, Arthur (an academic), she wrote a book titled Journey to the Soviet Union, which chronicled her visit to the country. She later became a child actress, hosting a child-oriented special on the 1984 United States presidential election for The Disney Channel and playing a co-starring role in the television series Lime Street. Smith died August 25,1985 at the age of 13, onboard Bar Harbor Airlines Flight 1808, which tragically crashed short of the runway on final approach to the Auburn/Lewiston Municipal Airport in Maine.