Anne Frank
Anne Frank (1929-1945) was a
Jewish teenager who went into hiding during the Holocaust, journaling her
experiences in the renowned work 'The Diary of Anne Frank.'
Who Was Anne Frank?
Annelies Marie “Anne” Frank (June
12, 1929 to March 1945) was a world-famous German-born diarist and World War II
Holocaust victim. Her work, The Diary of Anne Frank, has been read by millions.
Fleeing Nazi persecution of Jews, the
family moved to Amsterdam and later went into hiding for two years. During this
time, Frank wrote about her experiences and wishes. She was 15 when the family
was found and sent to concentration camps, where she died.
The Diary of Anne Frank
The Secret Annex: Diary Letters
from June 14, 1942 to August 1, 1944 was a selection of passages from Anne
Frank’s diary published on June 25, 1947 by Anne’s father, Otto Frank. "If she had been here, Anne would have
been so proud," he said. For all its passages of despair, Frank's diary is
essentially a story of faith, hope and love in the face of hate. On June 12,
1942, Anne Frank's parents gave her a red checkered diary for her 13th
birthday. She wrote her first entry, addressed to an imaginary friend named Kitty,
that same day: "I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I
have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great
source of comfort and support." During the two years Anne Frank spent
hiding from the Nazis with her family in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam, she
wrote extensive daily entries in her diary to pass the time. Some betrayed the
depth of despair into which she occasionally sunk during day after day of
confinement. "I've reached the
point where I hardly care whether I live or die," she wrote on February 3,
1944. "The world will keep on turning without me, and I can't do anything
to change events anyway." However, the act of writing allowed Frank to
maintain her sanity and her spirits. "When I write, I can shake off all my
cares," she wrote on April 5, 1944.
The Diary of a Young Girl, as
it's typically called in English, has since been published in 67 languages.
Countless editions, as well as screen and stage adaptations, of the work have
been created around the world. The Diary of a Young Girl remains one of the
most moving and widely read firsthand accounts of the Jewish experience during
the Holocaust. Anne Frank's diary endures, not only because of the remarkable
events she described, but due to her extraordinary gifts as a storyteller and
her indefatigable spirit through even the most horrific of circumstances.
"It's utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos,
suffering and death," she wrote on July 15, 1944. "I see the world
being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder
that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet,
when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the
better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return
once more." In addition to her diary, Frank filled a notebook with quotes
from her favorite authors, original stories and the beginnings of a novel about
her time in the Secret Annex. Her writings reveal a teenage girl with
creativity, wisdom, depth of emotion and rhetorical power far beyond her years.
Hidden Diary Pages
In May 2018, researchers
uncovered two hidden pages in her diary that contained dirty jokes and
"sexual matters," which the teen covered with pasted brown paper. “I
sometimes imagine that someone might come to me and ask me to inform him about
sexual matters,” Frank wrote in Dutch. “How would I go about it?” Frank tried to answer these questions as if
she's speaking to an imaginary person, using the phrases like “rhythmical
movements” to describe sex and “internal medicament,” alluding to
contraception. Frank also wrote about her menstrual cycle, saying it's "a
sign that she is ripe," devoted space to "dirty jokes" and
reference prostitution: "In Paris they have big houses for that.”
How Did Anne Frank Die?
Anne Frank and her sister Margot
both came down with typhus in the early spring of 1945 and died within a day of
each other between February/March/April 1945. The girls were being held at the Bergen-Belsen
Concentration Camp in Germany, where food was scarce, sanitation was awful and
disease ran rampant.
How Old Was Anne Frank When She Died?
Anne Frank was just 15 years old
at the time of her death, one of more than 1 million Jewish children who died
in the Holocaust.
Family
Anne Frank’s mother was Edith
Frank. Anne also had a sister named Margot, who was three years her senior. Anne’s
father, Otto Frank, was a lieutenant in the German army during World War I,
later becoming a businessman in Germany and the Netherlands. He was the only
member of his immediate family to survive the concentration camps. At the end of the war, he returned home to
Amsterdam, searching desperately for news of his family. On July 18, 1945, he
met two sisters who had been with Anne and Margot at Bergen-Belsen and
delivered the tragic news of their deaths. When Otto returned to Amsterdam, he
found Anne's diary, which had been saved by Miep Gies. He eventually gathered
the strength to read it. He was awestruck by what he discovered and later had
it published as a book. "There was revealed a completely different Anne to
the child that I had lost," Otto wrote in a letter to his mother. "I
had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings."
Early Life and Education
The Franks were a typical upper
middle-class German-Jewish family living in a quiet, religiously diverse
neighborhood near the outskirts of Frankfurt. However, Anne Frank was born on
the eve of dramatic changes in German society that would soon disrupt her
family's happy, tranquil life as well as the lives of all other German Jews.
Due in large part to the harsh
sanctions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War
I, the German economy struggled terribly in the 1920s. During the late 1920s
and early 1930s, the virulently anti-Semitic National German Socialist Workers
Party (Nazi Party) led by Adolf Hitler became Germany's leading political
force, winning control of the government in 1933.
Otto Frank
"I can remember that as
early as 1932, groups of Storm Troopers came marching by, singing, 'When Jewish
blood splatters from the knife,'" Otto Frank later recalled. When Hitler
became chancellor of Germany on January 20, 1933, the Frank family immediately
realized that it was time to flee. Otto
later said, "Though this did hurt me deeply, I realized that Germany was
not the world, and I left my country forever." The Franks moved to
Amsterdam, Netherlands, in the fall of 1933. Anne Frank described the
circumstances of her family's emigration years later in her diary:
"Because we're Jewish, my father immigrated to Holland in 1933, where he
became the managing director of the Dutch Opekta Company, which manufactures
products used in making jam." After years of enduring anti-Semitism in
Germany, the Franks were relieved to once again enjoy freedom in their new
hometown of Amsterdam. "In those days, it was possible for us to start
over and to feel free," Otto recalled. Anne Frank began attending
Amsterdam's Sixth Montessori School in 1934, and throughout the rest of the
1930s, she lived a relatively happy and normal childhood. Frank had many
friends, Dutch and German, Jewish and Christian, and she was a bright and
inquisitive student.
Nazi Occupation
But that would all change on
September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, igniting a global conflict
that would grow to become World War II. On May 10, 1940, the German army
invaded the Netherlands, defeating Dutch forces after just a few days of
fighting. The Dutch surrendered on May 15, 1940, marking the beginning of the
Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. As Frank later wrote in her diary,
"After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first there was
the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is
when the trouble started for the Jews." Beginning in October 1940, the
Nazi occupiers imposed anti-Jewish measures on the Netherlands. Jews were
required to wear a yellow Star of David at all times and observe a strict
curfew; they were also forbidden from owning businesses. Frank and her sister
were forced to transfer to a segregated Jewish school. Otto Frank managed to
keep control of his company by officially signing ownership over to two of his
Christian associates, Jo Kleiman and Victor Kugler, while continuing to run the
company from behind the scenes.
Secret Annex
On July 5, 1942, Margot received
an official summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany; the very next
day, the Frank family went into hiding in makeshift quarters in an empty space
at the back of Otto Frank's company building, which they referred to as the
Secret Annex. They were accompanied in
hiding by Otto's business partner Hermann van Pels as well as his wife,
Auguste, and son, Peter. Otto's employees Kleiman and Kugler, as well as Jan
and Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, provided food and information about the outside
world. The families spent two years in hiding, never once stepping outside the
dark, damp, sequestered portion of the building.
Concentration Camp
On August 4, 1944, a German
secret police officer accompanied by four Dutch Nazis stormed into the Secret
Annex, arresting everyone that was hiding there. They had been betrayed by an
anonymous tip, and the identity of their betrayer remains unknown to this day. The residents of the Secret Annex were shipped
off to Camp Westerbork, a concentration camp in the northeastern Netherlands,
and arrived by passenger train on August 8, 1944.
They were soon transferred to the
Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland in the middle of the night on September
3, 1944. Upon arriving at Auschwitz, the men and women were separated. This was
the last time that Otto Frank ever saw his wife or daughters. After several
months of hard labor hauling heavy stones and grass mats, Anne and Margot were
again transferred during the winter to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in
Germany, where they both died between February/March/April 1945. Their mother was not allowed to go with them,
and Edith Frank fell ill and died at Auschwitz on January 6, 1945 - a few weeks before the camp was liberated by the Red Army.
Anne Frank House
After the end of World War II,
the Secret Annex was on a list of buildings to be demolished, but a group of
people in Amsterdam campaigned and set up the foundation now known as the Anne
Frank House. The house preserved Frank’s hiding spot; today it is one of the
three most popular museums in Amsterdam.
In June 2013, the Anne Frank
House lost a lawsuit to the Anne Frank Fonds, after the Fonds sued the House
for the return of documents linked to Anne and Otto Frank. Anne’s physical
diary and other writings, however, are property of the Dutch state and have
been on permanent loan to the House since 2009. In 2015, the Fonds, the copyright holders of
Anne’s diary, lost a lawsuit against the Anne Frank House after the House began
new scientific research on the texts in 2011. In 2009, the Anne Frank Center
USA launched a national initiative called the Sapling Project, planting
saplings from a 170-year-old chestnut tree that Anne had long loved (as denoted
in her diary) at 11 different sites nationwide.
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