Courageous writer Anne Frank (1929–1945) was born on this day. She was thirteen when she began pouring her heart into the diary she named Kitty. For two years, she and her family hid from Hitler’s Nazis in a cramped office annex in Amsterdam, sustained by the bravery of Dutch friends who smuggled in food.

“I don’t think of all the misery,” she wrote, “but of all the beauty that still remains.”

With raw honesty and luminous optimism, she found light amid the horrors of her life in hiding. Her spirit clung to the Good News—the indelible spiritual magic—that still radiates within each of us.

“In spite of everything,” she wrote a month before her hiding place was discovered, “I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

Since its publication in 1947, Anne’s diary has reached millions, celebrating the enduring power of the written word. It even inspired Nelson Mandela during his long struggle for freedom.

Her legacy honors the strength of the human spirit. A beacon of innocence during the Holocaust, her heart still glows through words of radiant hope.

Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi observed, “One Anne Frank moves us more than countless others who suffered just as she did, but whose faces have remained in the shadows.”

“How wonderful it is,” Anne wrote, “that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”