A Note From Bob

Monday. In July of 1942, a 13-year-old girl in Amsterdam packed her belongings, including a red-and-white checkered diary she had received for her birthday just weeks earlier, and walked with her family to a hiding place above her father's business. Anne Frank wrote in that diary for two years, never imagining an audience beyond herself. It has since been published in more than 70 languages and read by tens of millions. Today's featured quiz covers her life and the people who protected her, and today's date holds a quiet connection to her story. Pour the coffee.

Trivia Question of the Day

The answer is at the bottom of this email.

Today's Featured Quiz

She was one of thousands of Jews who went into hiding in the occupied Netherlands, and none left a record like hers. Test how well you know her story: the family, the secret annex, the helpers who risked everything to protect them, and the diary that outlived the war. 15 questions.

The Answer

Anne opened nearly every entry with the words "Dear Kitty." Kitty was not a real person. She was an imagined confidante, a name Anne most likely borrowed from a character in the popular Dutch novels of Cissy van Marxveldt, which she read and loved in the annex. Addressing a friend, even an invented one, is what gives the diary its warmth and its directness, and it is a large part of why readers more than 80 years later still feel she is writing to them.

On This Day

On this day in 1942, one week after the Frank family went into hiding, the van Pels family climbed the narrow stairs to the secret annex to join them: Hermann, his wife Auguste, and their 15-year-old son Peter. Anne recorded them all in her diary under the name van Daan. Eight people would eventually share those few hidden rooms, pressed together by a regime that had made their existence a crime. Today's second quiz takes on that regime directly, from its rise in 1933 to its collapse in 1945. 32 questions.