Anne Frank
A young Jewish girl named Anne
Frank (1929-1945), her parents and older sister moved to the Netherlands from
Germany after Adolf Hilter and the Nazis came to power there in 1933 and made
life increasingly difficult for Jews. In 1942, Frank and her family went into
hiding in a secret apartment behind her father’s business in German-occupied
Amsterdam. The Franks were discovered in 1944 and sent to concentration camps;
only Anne’s father survived. Anne Frank’s diary of her family’s time in hiding,
first published in 1947, has been translated into almost 70 languages and is
one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust.
Anne Frank’s Childhood: Anne Frank was born Anneliese Marie Frank in
Frankfurt, Germany, on June 12, 1929, to Edith Hollander Frank (1900-45) and
Otto Frank (1889-1980), a prosperous businessman. Less than four years later,
in January 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany and he and his Nazi
government instituted a series of measures aimed at persecuting Germany’s
Jewish citizens. By the fall of 1933, Otto Frank moved to Amsterdam, where he established
a small but successful company that produced a gelling substance used to make
jam. After staying behind in Germany with her grandmother in the city of
Aachen, Anne joined her parents and sister Margot (1926-45) in the Dutch
capital in February 1934. In 1935, Anne started school in Amsterdam and earned
a reputation as an energetic, popular girl. In May 1940, the Germans, who had
entered World War II in September of the previous year, invaded the Netherlands
and quickly made life increasingly restrictive and dangerous for Jewish people
there. Between the summer of 1942 and September 1944, the Nazis and their Dutch
collaborators deported more than 100,000 Jews in Holland to extermination
camps.
Anne Frank’s Family Goes into
Hiding: In early July 1942, after
Margot Frank received a letter ordering her to report to a work camp in
Germany, Anne Frank’s family went into hiding in an attic apartment behind Otto
Frank’s business, located at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. In an effort to
avoid detection, the family left a false trail suggesting they’d fled to
Switzerland. A week after they had gone into hiding, the Franks were joined by
Otto’s business associate Hermann van Pels (1898-1944), along with his wife
Auguste (1900-45) and their son Peter (1926-45), who were also Jewish. A small
group of Otto Frank’s employees, including his Austrian-born secretary, Miep
Gies (1909-2010), risked their own lives to smuggle food, supplies and news of
the outside world into the secret apartment, whose entrance was situated behind
a movable bookcase. In November 1942, the Franks and Van Pels were joined by
Fritz Pfeffer (1889-1944), Miep Gies’ Jewish dentist. Life for the eight people
in the small apartment, which Anne Frank referred to as the Secret Annex, was
tense. The group lived in constant fear of being discovered and could never go
outside. They had to remain quiet during daytime in order to avoid detection by
the people working in the warehouse below. Anne passed the time, in part, by
chronicling her observations and feelings in a diary she had received for her
13th birthday, a month before her family went into hiding. Addressing her diary
entries to an imaginary friend she called Kitty, Anne Frank wrote about life in
hiding, including her impressions of the other inhabitants of the Secret Annex,
her feelings of loneliness and her frustration over the lack of privacy. While
she detailed typical teenage issues such as crushes on boys, arguments with her
mother and resentments toward her sister, Frank also displayed keen insight and
maturity when she wrote about the war, humanity and her own identity. She also
penned short stories and essays during her time in hiding.
The Franks are Captured by the
Nazis : On August 4, 1944, after 25
months in hiding, Anne Frank and the seven others in the Secret Annex were
discovered by the Gestapo, the German secret state police, who had learned
about the hiding place from an anonymous tipster (who has never been
definitively identified). After their arrest, the Franks,
Van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer were sent by the Gestapo to Westerbork, a holding
camp in the northern Netherlands. From there, in September 1944, the group was
transported by freight train to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination and
concentration camp complex in German-occupied Poland. Anne and Margot Frank
were spared immediate death in the Auschwitz gas chambers and instead were sent
to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northern Germany. In February 1945,
the Frank sisters died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen; their bodies were thrown
into a mass grave. Several weeks later, on April 15, 1945, British forces
liberated the camp. Edith Frank died of starvation at
Auschwitz in January 1945. Hermann van Pels died in the gas chambers at
Auschwitz soon after his arrival there in 1944; his wife is believed to have
likely died at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech
Republic in the spring of 1945. Peter van Pels died at the Mauthausen
concentration camp in Austria in May 1945. Fritz Pfeffer died from illness in
late December 1944 at the Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany. Anne
Frank’s father, Otto, was the only member of the group to survive; he was
liberated from Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945.
Anne Frank’s Diary: When Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam
following his release from Auschwitz, Miep Gies gave him five notebooks and
some 300 loose papers containing Anne’s writings. Gies had recovered the
materials from the Secret Annex shortly after the Franks’ arrest by the Nazis
and had hidden them in her desk. (Margot Frank also kept a diary, but it was
never found.) Otto Frank knew that Anne wanted to become an author or
journalist, and had hoped her wartime writings would one day be published. Anne
had even been inspired to edit her diary for posterity after hearing a March
1944 radio broadcast from an exiled Dutch government official who urged the
Dutch people to keep journals and letters that would help provide a record of
what life was like under the Nazis. After his daughter’s writings were returned
to him, Otto Frank helped compile them into a manuscript that was published in
the Netherlands in 1947 under the title “Het Acheterhuis” (“Rear Annex”).
Although U.S. publishers initially rejected the work as too depressing and
dull, it was eventually published in America in 1952 as “The Diary of a Young
Girl.” The book, which went on to sell tens of millions of copies worldwide,
has been labeled a testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit.
It is required reading at schools around the globe and has been adapted for the
stage and screen.
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/anne-frank-1
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