AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- As police reports go, the file for April 13, 1942, is strictly routine. But history is the stuff of detail, adding wonder to a yellowing footnote from that day: a complaint about a bicycle stolen from a 12-year-old girl named Anne Frank.
"Taken between noon and 2 p.m. in front of her house. Worth 45 guilders," reads the entry scribbled into the Amsterdam police blotter.The complaint, discovered last month by a researcher looking for something else, captures the imagination. Not because it's important. On the contrary, because it's heartbreakingly ordinary -- another glimpse of the voice of the Holocaust, for a world that can't help but wonder who she might have become.
She would have turned 70 this month, quite possibly retired as an acclaimed journalist, if the young Jewish diarist's youthful pluck and ambition were any measure of future greatness. Perhaps she'd have been a grandmother by now, delighting in the dreams of her own spirited teenage granddaughter.
"You find yourself wanting to learn more about her, to look for any signs of life you can find," said Peter Romijn, a historian with the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, which publishes a scholarly edition of "The Diary of Anne Frank."
"You realize this is someone you really wish you could have met."
Since she died of typhoid at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the spring of 1945, just weeks before its liberation and her 16th birthday, Anne Frank has come to symbolize the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews in a way that has astonished even those in charge of her legacy.
Born in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 12, 1929, Anne's account of hiding with her family from the Nazis for nearly two years in the secret annex of an Amsterdam canal house is an international best seller in 58 languages. More than that, it is a modern literary classic that has become required reading in schools worldwide.
Her hiding place, carefully preserved as a museum complete with its moveable bookcase and the faded magazine photos of movie stars Anne used to decorate the bleak walls, is one of Amsterdam's top tourist attractions -- drawing a record 822,000 visitors last year.
But the diary -- which begins with Anne's girlish assessment of her looks and an exultant "Oh, I am so glad I brought you along!" -- is what continues to hold the world spellbound more than 50 years after it was first published in 1947.
Last summer, longtime Frank family confidant Cor Suijk stunned scholars by revealing the existence of five previously unknown handwritten diary pages. Suijk, who works for the New York-based Anne Frank Center USA, says he won't return the pages until the rival Anne Frank Fund in Basel, Switzerland, which holds the diary copyright, earmarks royalties from diary sales to help promote Holocaust awareness in the United States.
What really caught people's attention, though, was the contents of those five pages, in which Anne acidly describes her icy relationship with her mother and what she portrays as her parents' practically loveless marriage. Her moodiness resonates with anyone who's been a teen or has one.
"It's amazing that it's not outdated, that there are still some fresh qualities to it," Romijn said. "You can understand why this diary has such appeal."
As the 70th anniversary of her birth approaches, people seem mesmerized by each revelation, no matter how small.
The Dutch marvel at Anne's brazenness in striding into a police station in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands to report her bike stolen just six weeks before she and her family were forced into hiding.
"Every little human detail is one more little human detail we share," said James E. Young, chairman of the Judaic studies department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
"She was a child, and still unfulfilled," he said in an interview. "Part of the appeal of wondering what she might have been is that we don't know. We fill in the blanks with our imaginations, and in that way we bond to her even more."