Amsterdam – Ingliando

On this day, for her thirteenth birthday, Anne Frank received an autograph book, bound with red-and-white checkered cloth and with a small lock on the front which she decided she would use as a diary. She named it Kitty and began writing in it almost immediately. Anne’s family had moved to Amsterdam in 1933 after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party won the federal election, but after Germany occupied the Netherlands they were forced to hide in an attic. Anne used her diary to describe her everyday life in hiding from 1942 to 1944, gaining fame posthumously and becoming one of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust when Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex), commonly referred to as The Diary of Anne Frank, was first published in 1947. It is today one of the world’s best-known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.

Read Bob Lynn’s short story “The Gift of Words”
about Ann Frank’s 13th birthday HERE

Puoi trovare altre brevi notizie storiche QUI

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On this day, the symbolic first stone of the Amstel brewery in Amsterdam was laid. Named after the Amstel river, the first brew was completed on 25th October 1871, and on 9th January 1872, the first beer was delivered to clients. The brewery was officially opened on 15 January 1872. Originally Amstel beers were mostly drunk in Amsterdam, but as early as 1883, Amstel started exporting to Great Britain and to the Dutch East Indies. In 1884, a special export bottling plant was built, where tropical beers for the Dutch East Indies and other overseas markets were pasteurised and packaged in metal kegs. By 1915 the production of Amstel had increased twenty-fold and in 1926, Amstel consisted of a third of the Dutch beer exports. The company was bought out by Heineken International in 1968 who continued, however, to produce beers under the Amstel name.