Anne Frank
Anne Frank, a Jewish girl, was born on June 12, 1929 in the German city of Frankfurt. In the summer of 1933, Otto Frank, Anne’s father, moved the family away from Germany and settled in Amsterdam in the spring of 1934. They moved to escape Nazi persecution of the Jews, which was just beginning in Germany. For centuries Holland had been known as a refuge for the persecuted. During the next few years Anne lived happily, as any Dutch girl, attending a Montessori school, enjoying friends, and discovering boys.
Everything changed when the Germans invaded Holland in 1940. The Germans terrorized and exploited Holland. They closed universities, muzzled the press, imprisoned political leaders, and sent thousands of people to Germany as slave labour. The persecution of the Jews went as follows: At first they were denied promotions or appointments to government jobs. Businesses owned, operated, or with a substantial Jewish investment had to be registered with the Nazi authorities. Then the Jewish civil servants were dismissed. In January, 1941, Jews living in Holland were required to register with the Nazi authorities or face a 5-year prison sentence. In March, 1941, the Nazis began to confiscate Jewish property, and Jews had to have special permits to travel. Their I.D. cards were stamped with a large “J.” In August, 1941, Jewish children were barred from attending school. In May, 1942, they had to wear a yellow star with the word “Jew” printed on it and to observe curfews. Public transportation and telephones were off-limits to Jews. This was just the beginning. Any resistance to these orders was met with brutal reprisals. In Amsterdam there were strikes and protests to the treatment of the Jews, but the Germans’ response was immediate and savage. Ringleaders were arrested and deported. Eventually the Nazis proceeded with the roundup and deportation of Jews. They shipped millions of people to concentration camps in Germany, and many were murdered in gas chambers.
Otto Frank knew the dangers his family might face if deported, and he made plans to keep them safe. He was compelled to leave his business, but his associates and employees secretly prepared a group of rooms at the top and the back of the warehouse building on the Prinsengracht Canal. On July 5th, 1942, the Nazis ordered Anne’s sister, sixteen-year-old Margot, to report for deportation. The next morning the Franks went into hiding in the “secret annexe.” http://www.annefrank.org/content.asp?pid=1&lid=2
For two years Anne and her family remained hidden in the secret annexe, along with a business associate of her father’s—Mr. Van Daan—his wife and fifteen-year-old son Peter, and an elderly dentist, Albert Dussel. During this time they followed the events of the war on their illegal radio—from the height of Hitler’s power to the Allied invasion of France at Normandy. But on August 4th, 1944, an informer betrayed the Frank family and the Gestapo discovered their tiny refuge. The Franks, the Van Daans, and Mr. Dussel were sent to Westerbork, in Holland. From there, they were herded onto a train and shipped into Germany. For three days they were crowded together—seventy-five to a car—until they reached a concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland.
In the camp, the women were separated from their father. Anne and her family endured horrors, and she cried as she watched prisoners herded into the gas chambers. The healthiest people were kept alive to do slave labour, so she and her family survived for a time. In October 1944, Anne, Margot and Mrs. Van Daan, among the youngest and strongest women, were chosen to go to Belsen in Germany in order to evacuate Auschwitz before the advancing Allies reached it. Others would be exterminated, including Anne’s mother. In Belsen, however, there was nothing—no food, no water, no direction, only the bitter cold, overcrowded and unsanitary barracks, and typhus, a killer disease. Margot died at the end of February and Anne, not yet sixteen, died soon afterward.
Anne kept a diary of her time in the secret annexe. She jotted down her experiences, her hopes, her dreams, the squabbles within their small community, her conflicting feelings toward her mother, and her emerging interest in Peter. She told of the events taking place in Amsterdam, what she knew of the war through radio broadcasts from London, and in particular the fear that suffused their world—a perspective from behind a curtain, but nevertheless, extremely insightful. Miep and Elli, Otto’s employees and helpers, kept Anne’s notebooks and returned them to her father at the end of the war. He was the sole survivor of those who’d hidden in the secret annexe. Eventually, a university professor convinced him to have them published, although Otto edited them quite extensively, omitting some of her more personal feelings. Children around the world have sympathized with Anne’s experiences. Today Anne’s diary serves not only as a memorial to her and others who died under the Nazi regime, but as a reminder of the Holocaust and not only the evil which we must all guard against, but of its opposite—the kindness and courage of ordinary heroes.