92: Anne Frank

 Anne Frank

Today (June 12th) would have been Anne Frank’s 92nd Birthday!

Annelies ”Anne” Marie Frank (Born: June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany; Died: between February and April 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp near Hannover, Germany) was a world-famous diarist and World War II Holocaust victim.

Her work, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” was first published in Dutch in 1947 and in English in 1952, has been read by millions and translated into 67 languages.

Fleeing Nazi persecution of Jews, the family moved to Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 1934 and later went into hiding for two years (1942-1944) during the German Occupation (1940-1945.) During this time, Anne wrote about her experiences and wishes. She was 15 when the Germans arrested her, her family and the 4 other people hiding with her on August 4, 1944. They were sent to the Westerbork Transit Camp in Holland a few days later.

They arrived at the Auschwitz Death Camp in occupied Poland on September 6, 1944 (on the last train from Westerbork to Auschwitz) where the men were separated from the women. Anne, her sister, Margot, and their Mother were selected to work – Anne having just reached the minimum age the Germans allowed children to work instead of being gassed immediately.

She was put to hard labor hauling heavy stones until October 30, 1944 when Anne and her sister were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in Germany where they both contracted typhus and died within days of each other between February and April 1945 and buried in a mass grave. She was 15 years old.

The Anne Frank House (where Anne and her family hid during the war) was turned into a museum in 1960 and had 1.2 million visitors in 2018. This picture is of Anne at the Jewish Lyceum (since all Jews were kicked out of non-Jewish schools by the Germans) in Amsterdam in December 1941.