As I write it is Holocaust Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945. As you may imagine, it is an annual event which receives a great deal more attention here in Germany than in Ireland. And it brings to mind one of the more celebrated victims of that awful era.
As Jews were rounded up in Amsterdam in 1942, 13-year-old Anne Frank and her family retreated to the temporary safety of an inaccessible attic of her father's business premises. There, for two years, eight people lived in claustrophobic semi-voluntary incarceration.
In what was to become The Diary Of A Young Girl, Anne described in moving terms the petty frictions that developed, and analysed the lives and fears and dreams of herself and those about her with a touching honesty.
Unlike some diaries, published and unpublished, the authenticity of Anne Frank's record has never been seriously questioned. Had this been the case, however, its chronological validity, at least, could have been verified by reference to the numerous weather descriptions that, despite the author's isolation, the document contains; the weather described can be compared to the actual weather records now available from contemporary weather maps. Some time ago, meteorologist Anders Persson conducted precisely such an exercise.
On August 18th, 1943, for example, Anne describes the weather as "bad", but says it was "nice" the day before. Sure enough the weather maps for those days show a ridge of high pressure over Amsterdam on the 17th, to be displaced the following day by a front preceded by freshening south-westerly winds.
On March 31st that year she notes that the weather had been "cold for some time"; again the charts show that after a depression had passed 10 days earlier, cool northerly and north-westerly winds prevailed for a week or more.
The diary covers the period from June 1942 to summer 1944. All in all, according to Persson, references to "lovely", "wonderful" or "warm" weather occur about 10 times in the text, and "rain", "mist" or "windy weather" are mentioned with a similar frequency. All references, when investigated, coincide with appropriate developments on the relevant weather maps on the dates in question.
In July 1944 Anne wrote: "I have now reached the stage where I don't care whether I live or die. Whatever is going to happen, will happen." And so it did. Shortly afterwards, the family's hideaway was found by the Gestapo, and they were taken to the concentration camps. Anne Frank, aged 15, died from typhus in Bergen-Belsen in March the following year.