She goes on living

I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better.

The above mentioned words are an entry in Anne Frank8217;s Diary a fortnight before her capture. On Sunday, Anne Frank would have turned 70. She would have liked to have done that. It was one among her many wishes, most of which did not come true. One did though. She wanted 8220;to go on living8221; as a writer after her death, and on her birth anniversary the newly-appointed British poet laureate Andrew Motion not only came to her 70th birthday party but even read apoem about her.

Motion8217;s poem was about about Anne8217;s 8220;three years of whispering and loneliness8221; in the Amsterdam annexe, which now draws 800,000 visitors a year:

What hope she had for ordinary love and interest survives her here, displayed above her bed as pictures of her family.
And those who stoop to find them find not only patience missing its reward but one enduring wish.

No one I know has read Anne Frank without tears and they come again when one thinks of the ceremony, a pitiable sight for the absence of the birthday girl, who died in Belsen 55 years ago at the age of 15. The reading, held on the eve of her birthday, however, was only one of a chain of commemorations across Britain. Children planted trees in 50 schools, and held ceremonies at another 100 schools that have previously planted commemorative saplings. Prayers were said in 12 cathedrals for a child who has been raised close to the status of a secular saint by the immortal vehemence of the diaries she wrote in hiding withher German-Jewish family.

But London is where Anne would have wanted to be. Pumped up by the sight of a poet laureate lauding her spirit. Here her birthday was marked in the grandeur of a chandeliered banqueting room at Marlborough House. The room, at the Commonwealth Secretariat, they say, is five times bigger than the cramped Amsterdam annexe in which the Frank family hid with fellow-refugees for three years. Among those paying tribute to her along with Motion were the parents of another victim of racialism, the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence. Stephen8217;s mother Doreen Lawrence summed up the courage of Anne8217;s life and words for a generation fractured by war and violence. 8220;That her courage, stamina and spirit endured all that time seems quite extraordinary. I have felt a little of the need for that in the last six years since Lawrence was killed in racial violence.8221;

They watched the Commonwealth secretary general, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, sign a declaration in Anne Frank8217;s name for the new millennium.The declaration, signed by Tony Blair, William Hague, Paddy Ashdown and the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan says: 8220;Anne Frank has served as an inspiration to millions of people around the world. She stands as a symbol of the innocence of the millions of children who have died due to persecution this century. War now, more than ever before, claims the lives of the young.8221;

Missing in person from the ceremony, but surely present in spirit were the many Kosovar refugee children, who each in the past months has looked at the sky and clung to the hope that things will change for the better.