On what is the 75th anniversary of the publication of Anne Frank's diary, Google honored the Holocaust victim with doodles depicting moments from her life she had written down in her diary.
The doodles, also commemorating Frank's would-have-been 93rd birthday earlier this month, were launched in over 25 countries, including the United States, Germany and the UK.
The design of the doodles draws inspiration from the layered collage style featured in the diary. The scenes depicted were illustrated based on Frank's own description of events, taken from her diary.
The doodles were created by Google Doodle art director Thoka Maer. The German illustrator noted her sense of responsibility to preserve the memory of the Holocaust as a major factor in the illustration process.
Anne Frank's life & diary
Anne Frank was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt Germany. In 1933, soon after Adolf Hiter's rise to power with the Nazi Party's federal election victory, the Frank family emigrated west to Amsterdam.
Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940 and the persecution and segregation of Dutch Jews soon followed. On her 13th birthday, one month before her family went into hiding, Frank received the book which would go on to become her famous diary.
Frank wrote her first entry on June 20, 1942, and upon moving into the Achterhuis, or the Secret Annex, she began writing regularly and in detail on the restrictions placed upon Dutch Jews, her experience of going into hiding, her aspirations and her relationships with family members.
The last entry in Frank's diary is dated August 1, 1944. Her arrest came three days later after a raid of the annex by the Nazi Grüne Polizei, after which she was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Frank was relocated to Bergen Belsen with some 8,000 other women. Her mother, Edith Frank, was left behind and died soon after. A year later, in early 1945, Frank died in Bergen Belsen. While the cause of death could not be determined, there is evidence suggesting Frank died as a result of the typhus epidemic which spread throughout the concentration camp at the time of her death. 17,000 Jews died from the epidemic.
Remembering Anne Frank on Google
Google also honored Frank by releasing Google Trends statistics, showcasing search trends for Anne Frank around the world.
Google revealed that the search engine saw a peak in interest in Anne Frank in February 2022, when Netflix released My Best Friend Anne Frank on its streaming platform. Google also revealed that the country with the most searches for Anne Frank since 2004 is the Netherlands, where Frank lived for most of her life.
Anne Frank is one of the 60 leading search topics relating to Jewish culture, Google said, adding that the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is searched more often than the Van Gogh Museum, also located in the Dutch capital.