Anne Frank
Holocaust victim and famous diarist Anne
Frank was born Annelies Marie Frank on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany.
Her mother was Edith Frank, and her father, Otto Frank, was a lieutenant in the
German army during World War I, later becoming a businessman in Germany and the
Netherlands. Frank also had a sister named Margot who was three years her
senior.
The Franks were a typical upper middle-class
German-Jewish family living in a quiet, religiously diverse neighborhood near
the outskirts of Frankfurt. However, 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 1919 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 Adolph Hitler became Germany's leading political force,
winning control of the government in 1933.
"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 overmatched 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.
On June 12, 1942, 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."
Weeks later, on July 5, 1942, Margot received
an official summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany. The very next
day, the 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. To
pass the time, Frank wrote extensive daily entries in her diary. 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.
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.
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 transferred to the Auschwitz death 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. Their mother was not
allowed to go with them, and Edith Frank fell ill and died at Auschwitz shortly
thereafter, on January 6, 1945.
At Bergen-Belsen, food was scarce, sanitation
was awful and disease ran rampant. Frank and her sister both came down with
typhus in the early spring and died within a day of each other sometime in
March 1945, only a few weeks before British soldiers liberated the camp. 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.
Otto Frank was the only member of his
immediate family to survive. 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.
