Where there is hope…

May 9, 2026
— Where There Is Hope —
Where there is hope, there is life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.
— Anne Frank
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Annelies Marie “Anne” Frank (1929–1945) was born in Frankfurt, Germany, the second daughter of Otto and Edith Frank. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled to Amsterdam, where Otto built a small spice and pectin business and Anne grew up speaking Dutch among Dutch friends. For nine years she had what looked like an ordinary childhood — school, books, the ordinary social dramas of a bright girl with a quick pen.
On her thirteenth birthday — June 12, 1942 — her father gave her a small red-and-white checkered diary. Three weeks later, when her sister Margot received a deportation notice for a German labor camp, the family disappeared into the secret annex behind Otto’s office at Prinsengracht 263. They were joined by the Van Pels family and, later, the dentist Fritz Pfeffer. For just over two years, eight people lived in roughly 500 square feet, dependent on a handful of trusted helpers for food, news, and survival.
Anne wrote nearly every day. She wrote about boredom and irritation and the strangeness of growing up where you cannot grow out, about the families squeezed too close together, about her own evolving thoughts on God, on people, on what she still hoped to become. She wanted to be a writer. She was already one.
On August 4, 1944, the annex was betrayed. The eight occupants were arrested and dispersed through the Nazi camp system. Anne and Margot were sent to Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus in February or early March of 1945, only weeks before British forces liberated the camp on April 15. Of the eight, only Otto survived. He returned to Amsterdam, was given his daughter’s recovered diary by the helper Miep Gies, and — at first reluctantly, then with the force of a father who realized what he held — saw it published in 1947.
The diary has since been translated into more than seventy languages. Anne is fifteen years old forever. The words she wrote in hiding are now read by more people than she could have imagined existed.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
There is a striking accident of the calendar in placing Anne Frank on this particular day. May 9 sits one day after V-E Day in the West and is observed as Victory Day in much of Eastern Europe — the date the Second World War in Europe formally ended. Anne died about two months before that ending. She never saw it. The regime that killed her collapsed within weeks of her death, and she never knew how close liberation had been.
That fact is part of why her words land the way they do. She wrote about hope from inside a place where every visible reason said hope was foolish. She wrote it not knowing how the war would end, not knowing whether she would survive — and, in the actual outcome of her own life, she did not survive. The hope was not vindicated by her circumstances. It was vindicated by what her words have done since.
This is important. Anne is not telling us that hope is correct because hope produces good outcomes for the hopeful. She is telling us something deeper: that hope is itself the source of life, and that it produces fresh courage and renewed strength even when the external situation provides nothing. Hope precedes life. It is not a product of favorable conditions. It is what allows a fifteen-year-old in an attic to keep writing as if the writing mattered. And, as it turns out, it did.
SCRIPTURE CROSS-LINKS
Jeremiah 29:11 — “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” — Written to exiles. To people who could not see the end from where they stood. The promise was not that the exile would be short, but that there was an end being prepared.
Romans 5:3–5 — “Tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed.” — Paul’s sequence: tribulation does not destroy hope. It builds it, by way of patience and experience. Anne’s hope was the late stage of that sequence, not its beginning.
Hebrews 11:1 — “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” — Anne saw nothing of what her words would do. The substance was already there. The evidence came later.
Moroni 7:41 — “And what is it that ye shall hope for? Behold I say unto you that ye shall have hope through the atonement of Christ and the power of his resurrection, to be raised unto life eternal.” — The deepest hope is not for circumstance. It is for the eternal outcome that no circumstance can finally destroy.
Psalm 42:11 — “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him.” — The Psalmist commands his own soul. Hope is sometimes a choice, sometimes an order issued to oneself in the dark.
THEMATIC REFLECTION
There is a quiet inversion in Anne’s sentence that is easy to miss. The ordinary assumption is that life produces hope — that when our circumstances are good, hope arises naturally, and when our circumstances collapse, hope dies with them. Anne reverses this. Where there is hope, there is life. Hope is the source. Life is what hope makes possible.
This is not poetry. It is observation. The physician knows it. The patient who decides there is still something worth living for finds reserves of strength the body should not, by any reasonable measure, still possess. The patient who has decided there is nothing left often slips away from causes that should not have been fatal. The body follows the soul more closely than we like to admit. Hope is not decorative. It is structural.
The second half of Anne’s sentence makes the bridge to courage explicit. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again. The two — hope and courage — are not separate virtues. Courage is what hope produces when action is required. A person without hope cannot summon courage for any sustained period; the well runs dry too quickly. A person with hope can keep finding courage long past the point where the circumstances should have exhausted it.
This is why so many of the great courageous lives of the last century — Frankl, Bonhoeffer, ten Boom, King — speak of hope before they speak of courage. The hope was the foundation. The courage was what they did with it.
Anne did not live to see the end of the war. She did not live to grow up, to write the books she had planned, to become the person she had imagined becoming. By any earthly measure, the hope she wrote about did not save her. And yet — read her words again — where there is hope, there is life. There was life in that attic. There was life in those pages. There is life in those pages now, eighty years later, on every continent, in every language. The hope produced the life. The life outlived the death. This is what hope does.
PERSONAL REFLECTION
I have watched hope work in hospital rooms more times than I can count, and I have watched its absence work too. The patient with a difficult diagnosis who has something — someone, something, some belief — to live for finds reserves the textbook does not predict. The patient who has quietly given up often slips away from a condition the body could have survived. I do not pretend to fully understand the mechanism. I have seen it too consistently to doubt the pattern.
What strikes me about Anne’s sentence, reading it now as a man in his seventies, is how young she was when she wrote it. Fifteen. In an attic. Hungry. Tired of the people she was crowded with. Frightened, certainly, though she rarely lets that be the dominant note. And yet she had already understood something it takes most of us much longer to learn — that hope is not a feeling that arrives when life is going well. Hope is the thing that makes life livable when it is not. She did not have her hope confirmed by her own survival. She had it confirmed by what survived through her.
I think about that when I sit with patients near the end. The hope that matters in those rooms is rarely hope for cure. It is hope of a different kind — that the life lived has mattered, that the people they have loved are held in something larger than the failing body, that the story is not ending but changing. I cannot manufacture that hope for them. I can only stand in the room as someone who believes it is true.
— Richard K. Olsen
GRANDFATHER’S COUNSEL
I want you to remember three things about Anne Frank.
First, she was young. The wisest sentence about hope in this entire book may have been written by a fifteen-year-old. Do not wait until you are older to understand what hope is. You are old enough now. The young Anne saw it more clearly than most adults ever will.
Second, her hope was not rewarded by her own survival. She died. The hope produced her words; her words produced the life that has since reached millions; but she herself did not live to see any of it. This is the harder truth. Hope sometimes saves the one who hopes. Sometimes hope produces something that outlives the one who hopes. Both are real. Both are worth it. Do not make the mistake of measuring hope only by what it does for you personally.
Third — and this is the part I most want you to hold — hope and courage are joined. When you cannot find courage to face something, look for hope first. Find some reason, however small, to believe that what you do today is part of something larger and that the story is not over. That hope will become the courage. Anne knew this. She wrote it down. We are still reading it. So can you.
Where there is hope, there is life. Find your hope. The courage will come.
— Richard K. Olsen