On Anne Frank's birthday, new glimpses of a girl at play

It is where the teenager wrote the diary that became the human voice of the Holocaust before the family was betrayed and captured in August 1944.

Her birthday coincided with the widely celebrated 60th anniversary of D-day, providing a sad reminder of those for whom liberation came too late. The 15-year-old Anne died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen camp in March 1945, just weeks before British troops arrived at the gate.

Theaters, Holocaust museums, churches, and Jewish clubs around the world are commemorating the day with readings from "The Diary of Anne Frank" or performances of the play based on the journal. The Cleveland Opera is performing music inspired by the story.

More than 100,000 Dutch Jews -- 70 percent of the community -- were deported to concentration camps after Germany occupied the Netherlands in May 1940. Most died in gas chambers and were among the 6 million Jewish victims of Nazi genocide.

"It's amazing when you think how much interest the diary created. That little girl -- and she was only a little girl when she went into hiding -- would be so shocked if she would have known," said Carol Ann Lee, a biographer of Anne and her father Otto Frank.

Most of the photographs, first displayed in New York in May, were made by Otto Frank, a talented amateur photographer who snapped hundreds of candid shots of his daughters Anne and Margot.

"What they show is that the Franks were a family like everyone else," said Eva Schloss, Anne's childhood friend. "They had a happy life. They did all the things children do."

Schloss recalls often playing with Anne after school. "I was more wild, a tomboy. She was more sophisticated. She was interested in clothes, in her appearance," she said.

Schloss and her mother also spent two years in hiding, moving from house to house, careful to keep their presence secret from the neighbors of people who helped them. They were betrayed by a Nazi sympathizer, a nurse who had infiltrated the Dutch resistance movement. They were sent to Auschwitz, where they survived nine months.