Anne Frank
Annelies Marie Frank was a German-born Jewish diarist and Holocaust victim. She gained worldwide fame posthumously for keeping a diary documenting her life in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands. In the diary, she regularly described her family's everyday life in their hiding place in an Amsterdam attic from 1942 until their arrest in 1944.
Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929. In 1934, when she was four and a half, Frank and her family moved to Amsterdam after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control of Germany. By May 1940, the family was trapped in Amsterdam due to Germany's occupation. Frank lost her German citizenship in 1941 and became stateless. Despite spending most of her life in the Netherlands and being a de facto Dutch national, she never officially became a Dutch citizen. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in rooms concealed behind a bookcase in the building where Frank's father, Otto Frank, worked. The family was arrested two years later by the Gestapo, on 4 August 1944.
Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps. On 1 November 1944, Anne Frank and her sister Margot were transferred from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died a few months later. The Red Cross estimated that they died in March 1945, with Dutch authorities setting 31 March as the official date. Later research has alternatively suggested that they may have died in February or early March.
Otto Frank, the only Holocaust survivor in the family, returned to Amsterdam after World War II to find that Anne's diary had been saved by his secretaries, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Moved by his daughter's repeated wishes to be an author, Otto Frank published her diary in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch version and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl '' and has since been translated into over 70 languages. With the publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne became one of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. One of the world's best-known books, Anne's diary is the basis for several plays and films.
Early life
In Germany
Frank was born Annelies or Anneliese Marie Frank on 12 June 1929 at the Maingau Red Cross Clinic in Frankfurt, Germany, to Edith and Otto Heinrich Frank. She had an older sister, Margot. As the Franks were Reform Jews, they did not practise all the customs and traditions of Judaism. They lived in an assimilated community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of various religions. Edith and Otto were devoted parents with an interest in scholarly pursuits. They had an extensive library and both parents encouraged the children to read.At the time of her birth, the family lived in a house at Marbachweg 307 in Frankfurt-Eckenheim, where they rented two floors. In 1931, they moved to a house at Ganghoferstraße 24 in a fashionable liberal area of Frankfurt-Ginnheim called the Dichterviertel that is now also part of Dornbusch. Both houses still exist.
In 1933, after Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party won the federal election and Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Reich, Edith Frank and the children went to stay with her mother Rosa Hollander in Aachen. Otto Frank remained in Frankfurt, but after receiving an offer to start a company in Amsterdam, he moved there to organize the business and arrange accommodation for his family. He began working at the Opekta Works, a company that sold pectin, a fruit extract. Edith travelled back and forth between Aachen and Amsterdam and found an apartment on the Merwedeplein in the Rivierenbuurt neighbourhood of Amsterdam, where many Jewish-German refugees settled. In November 1933, Edith followed her husband and a month later Margot also moved to Amsterdam. Anne stayed with her grandmother until February, when the entire family reunited in Amsterdam.
In the Netherlands
The Franks were among 300,000 Jews who fled Germany between 1933 and 1939. After moving to Amsterdam, Anne and Margot were enrolled in school. Margot went to public school where, despite initial problems with the Dutch language, she became a star pupil. Anne joined the 6th Montessori School in 1934 and soon felt at home there, meeting children of her own age, like Hanneli Goslar, who would later become one of her best friends. Twenty-three years later, the school was posthumously renamed after her as the Anne Frank School in 1957.In 1938, Otto Frank started a second company, Pectacon, a wholesaler of herbs, pickling salts and mixed spices, used in the production of sausages. Hermann van Pels was employed by Pectacon as an advisor about spices. A Jewish butcher, he had fled Osnabrück with his family. In 1939, Edith Frank's mother Rosa came to live with the Franks and remained with them until her death in January 1942. In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, and the occupation government began to persecute Jews by the implementation of restrictive and discriminatory laws. Mandatory registration and segregation soon followed. Otto Frank tried to arrange for the family to emigrate to the United States, the only destination that seemed to him to be viable, but his visa application was never processed because the US consulate in Rotterdam was destroyed by German bombing on 14 May 1940, resulting in the loss of all the paperwork there.
On 22 July 1941, Frank was filmed watching her neighbours' marriage ceremony from her balcony apartment above the road. Aged 12 at the time, it is the only known footage of Frank taken during her lifetime. After the summer holidays in 1941, Anne learned that she would no longer be allowed to go to the Montessori School, as Jewish children had to attend Jewish schools. From then on, Anne, like her sister Margot, went to the , an exclusive Jewish secondary school in Amsterdam that opened in September that same year.
Period chronicled in Anne's diary
Before going into hiding
For her thirteenth birthday on 12 June 1942, Anne received an autograph book, bound with red-and-white checkered cloth and with a small lock on the front. She decided she would use it as a diary, and named it "Kitty". She began writing in it almost immediately. In her entry dated 20 June 1942, she lists many of the restrictions placed upon the lives of the Dutch Jewish population.In mid-1942, the systematic deportation of Jews from the Netherlands began. Otto and Edith Frank planned to go into hiding with the children on 16 July 1942, but when Margot received a call-up notice from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration on 5 July, ordering her to report for relocation to a work camp, they were forced to initiate their plan ten days earlier than they had originally intended. Shortly before going into hiding, Anne gave her friend and next-door neighbour Toosje Kupers a book, a tea set and a tin of marbles. On 6 July, the Frank family left a note for the Kupers, asking them to take care of their cat Moortje. As the Associated Press reports, Kupers said Anne told her: "'I'm worried about my marbles, because I'm scared they might fall into the wrong hands. Could you keep them for me for a little while?'"
Life in the Secret Annex
On Monday morning 6 July, the Frank family moved into their hiding place, a three-story space entered from a landing above the Opekta offices on the Prinsengracht, where some of Otto Frank's most trusted employees would be their helpers. The hiding place became known as the Achterhuis in Dutch. The Franks' apartment was left in a state of disarray to create the impression that they had left suddenly, and Otto left a note that hinted they were going to Switzerland. As Jews were not allowed to use public transport, Otto, Edith and Anne walked several kilometres from their home. Margot cycled to the Prinsengracht with Miep Gies. The door to the Secret Annex was later covered by a bookcase to ensure that it remained undiscovered.Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl were the only employees who knew of the people in hiding. Along with Gies' husband Jan Gies and Voskuijl's father Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl, they were the "helpers" for the duration of confinement. As the only connection between the outside world and the occupants of the house, the helpers kept the occupants informed of war news and political developments. They catered to all the Franks' needs, ensured their safety and supplied them with food, a task that grew more difficult over time. Anne wrote of their dedication and efforts to boost morale within the household during the most dangerous times. All were aware that, if caught, they could face the death penalty for sheltering Jews.
On 13 July 1942, the Franks were joined by the Van Pels family, made up of Hermann, Auguste and 16-year-old Peter; then in November by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and friend of the family. Anne wrote of her pleasure at having new people to talk to, but tensions quickly developed within the group forced to live in such confined conditions. After sharing her room with Pfeffer, she found him insufferable and resented his intrusion, and she clashed with Auguste van Pels, whom she regarded as foolish. She regarded Hermann van Pels and Pfeffer as selfish, particularly regarding the amount of food they consumed.
Sometime later, after first dismissing the shy and awkward Peter van Pels, she recognized a kinship with him and the two entered a romance. She received her first kiss from him, but her infatuation with him began to wane as she questioned whether her feelings for him were genuine or resulted from their shared confinement. Anne also formed a close bond with each of the helpers, and Otto Frank later recalled that she had anticipated their daily visits with impatient enthusiasm. He observed that Anne's closest friendship was with Bep Voskuijl, "the young typist ... the two of them often stood whispering in the corner".