Anne Frank, Colorized

Anne Frank, colorized by Sanna Dullaway

These colorized photos are eerie.  They give us the impression of being modern day, but all other visual and background information tells us they are from another era altogether.  There is art in this process for jarring us, if only moderately, into an alternative perception of reality.

Anne Frank (1929 - 1945) never made it to her 16th birthday.  I remember walking by the Anne Frank House, while walking about in Amsterdam on one of several long layovers in that city, en route from the US to the Middle East on client business.  It was about 10 years ago, and back then I wasn't so curious about her story.  

She and her family fled to the Netherlands in 1933 to escape Nazi Germany, but by 1940 they were trapped in Amsterdam as the Germans occupied their chosen country.  On her 13th birthday, June 12th 1942, she was given a blank diary, and wrote in it until August 1st 1944, well into age 15.  Betrayed, the family was caught, and sent to concentration camps in Northern Germany, where she and her sister Margot died of Typhus in March 1945.  Her father Otto survived the Holocaust, and arranged to have the diary published in 1947 as The Diary of a Young Girl.

The Anne Frank House tells her story in words, photos and timelines.