August 4 Birthday
On August 4, 1944, the Gestapo raided the Secret Annex at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. Anne Frank, her sister Margot, her parents Otto and Edith, the van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer had been hiding there for two years and one month. They were sent to concentration camps. Anne and Margot died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, weeks before the camp was liberated. Otto Frank survived and returned to Amsterdam, where Miep Gies gave him Anne's diary. She had found it scattered on the floor and kept it without reading it. Anne was fifteen when she died. Barack Obama, born this day in 1961, was the first African American president. He was born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother. He worked as a community organizer in Chicago, taught constitutional law, and served in the Illinois Senate before being elected to the US Senate in 2004. He was elected president in 2008. He authorized the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. He passed the Affordable Care Act. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, less than a year into his presidency. People born on August 4 fall under the zodiac sign of Leo. The birthstone is Peridot and the birth flower is Gladiolus. Historical events on August 4 include 1944: Anne Frank and family discovered and arrested by Gestapo in Amsterdam, 1964: Bodies of three civil rights workers found in Mississippi, 1977: President Carter establishes Department of Energy. Famous people born on August 4 include Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792), Louis Armstrong (1901), Barack Obama (1961).