Anne Frank
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (June 12, 1929–February/March 1945) was a Jewish girl who wrote a diary while in hiding with her family and four friends in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. After two years in hiding, the group was betrayed and they were transported to concentration camps, where all but Anne's father Otto died. He returned to Amsterdam to find that Anne's diary had been saved, and became convinced that the diary was a unique record. Otto took action to have it published.
The diary was given to Anne Frank for her thirteenth birthday and chronicles the events of Frank's life from June 12, 1942 until its final entry of August 4, 1944. It provided for many people an intimate examination of daily life under Nazi occupation. Described as the work of a mature and insightful mind, the diary eventually was translated from its orginal Dutch into many langauges and became one of the world's most widely read works . Through her writing, Frank has become one of the most renowned and discussed victims of the Holocaust.
Life before World War II
Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, the second daughter of Otto Heinrich Frank (May 12, 1889–August 19 1980) and his wife Edith Holländer (January 16, 1900–January 6, 1945), of a family of Germans who had served in World War I. Margot Betti Frank (February 16, 1926–March 1945) was her sister.
The family lived in an assimilated community of Jewish and Aryan citizens. As young children, the Frank girls grew up with Catholic and Protestant children, as well as other Jewish children. The Franks were Reform Jews, observing the traditions of the Jewish faith without observing all its customs. Edith Frank was the most devout member of the family. Otto Frank was more interested in scholarly pursuits, and had an extensive library. Both parents encouraged the children to read.
On March 13, 1933, elections were held in Frankfurt for the municipal council, with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party winning. Anti-semitic demonstrations occurred almost immediately and the Franks began to fear what would happen to them if they remained in Germany. Later in the year, Edith and the children went to Aachen where they stayed with Edith's mother, Rosa Holländer. Otto Frank remained in Frankfurt, but after receiving an offer to start a company in Amsterdam, he moved there to organize the business and to arrange accomodation for his family. His mother, Alice Betty Frank, who was also in fear of the Nazis, moved to Basel in Switzerland, where she joined other relatives in exile.
Otto Frank began working at the "Opekta-Works," a company which sold pectin, a fruit extract used in the making of jams. He also found an apartment in a new housing estate on the "Merwedeplein," an Amsterdam suburb. By February 1934, Edith and the children had arrived in Amsterdam. The girls were enrolled in the Montessori school, where they both proved to be capable students. Margot demonstrated her abilities with arithmetic, however Anne showed aptitude in reading and writing. They were also recognized as highly distinct personalities, with Margot being well mannered, reserved and studious, while Anne was outspoken, energetic and extroverted.
In 1938, Otto Frank started a second company in partnership with Hermann van Pels, a butcher by trade, who had fled Osnabrück in Germany with his wife Auguste and son Peter. By 1939, the situation for Jews in Germany had worsened, and Edith's mother came to live with the Franks in Amsterdam, where they attempted to lead a normal life. Otto Frank's business was doing well, and both daughters were excelling in their studies, and had accumulated a large number of friends. Rosa Holländer, who had been in poor health since her arrival in Amsterdam, died in January 1942, and the stability of the daughters was further disturbed with the introduction of a decree that Jewish children could only attend Jewish schools, which result in them being forced to enroll at the Jewish Lyceum.
Diary
For her thirteenth birthday, Anne received a small notebook which she had pointed it out to her father in a shop window a few days earlier. It was actually an autograph book, bound with red-and-green checkered cloth, and with a small lock on the front, but Anne had already decided she would use it as a diary. She began writing in it almost immediately, describing herself and her family, and her daily life at home and at school. Within days, she wrote about the yellow star all Jews were forced to wear in public, and she listed some of the restrictions and persecutions with which Jews in Amsterdam were forced to live, and of the effect that it had on her life. In July 1942, Margot Frank received a call-up notice ordering her to report at a certain place and time for relocation to a work camp. It was only then that Anne was told of a plan that Otto had formulated with the most trusted staff members of his company, and which Edith and Margot had been aware of for a short time. He had decided not to tell Anne until closer to the event, but it was now forced upon them sooner than expected. The family was to go into hiding in rooms above and behind the company's premises on the Prinsengracht canal.
The Achterhuis
On July 8, the family moved into the hiding place. As Jews were not allowed to use public transport they walked several miles from their home. They dared not carry luggage, so each wore several layers of clothing. They left their apartment in a state of disarray to create the impression that they had left suddenly, and Otto Frank left a note that hinted they were going to Switzerland. The achterhuis ("hiding place") was a small, two-story space of two rooms, with a bathroom and toilet on the lower level and a large and small room on the upper level. The door to the achterhuis was later covered by a bookcase to ensure it remained undiscovered. Anne would later refer to it in her diary as the "Secret Annex." The main building was nondescript, old and typical of buildings in the area, on the western side of Amsterdam, a block from the Westerkerk.
Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies and Elisabeth "Bep" Voskuijl were the only employees who knew of the people in hiding, and with Miep Gies' husband Jan Gies and Bep Voskuijl's father, Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl were their "helpers" for the duration of their confinement. They provided the only contact between the outside world and the occupants of the house, and they kept them informed of war news and political developments. They catered for all of their needs, most importantly ensuring their safety and supplying them with food, a task that grew more difficult with the passage of time. Anne wrote of their dedication and of the great lengths they would go to in their efforts to boost morale within the household during the most dangerous of times. All were aware that if caught they could face the death penalty for aiding those in hiding.
In late July, the family was joined by the three members of the van Pels family, Hermann, Auguste, and 16-year-old Peter, and then in November by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and friend of the family, who in 1938, had also fled Germany. Initially, Anne wrote of her pleasure at having new people to talk to, but tensions quickly developed within the group of people forced to live under such confined conditions. Anne was required to share her room with Pfeffer and found him insufferable. She frequently clashed with Auguste van Pels, and with her own mother, whom she referred to as "remote." Although she sometimes argued with Margot, she wrote of an unexpected bond that had developed between them, but she remained closest emotionally to her father. Some time later, after first dismissing the shy and awkward Peter van Pels, she recognised a kinship with him and the two entered a romance.
Anne spent most of her time reading and studying, while continuing to write and edit her diary. In addition to providing a narrative of events as they occurred, she also wrote about her feelings, beliefs and ambitions, subjects that she could not discuss with anyone. As her confidence in her writing grew, and as she began to mature, she wrote of more abstract subjects such as her belief in God, and how she defined human nature. She continued working on it regularly until her final entry of August 1, 1944.
Arrest and concentration camps
On the morning of August 4, 1944, the Secret Annex was stormed by the Grüne Polizei following a tip-off from an informer who was never identified. The group was led by Schutzstaffel Sergeant Karl Joseph Silberbauer of the, and included at least three armed Dutch members of the Security Police. The occupants were given a short time to collect their possessions and were loaded into trucks and taken for interrogation. Their helpers were also subjected to abuse by the Germans. Miep Gies described being shouted at by a policeman who threatened to shoot her. Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman were taken away, and were subsequently jailed, but Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl were allowed to go. Later in the afternoon, Gies and her husband, along with Voskuijl and another worker went upstairs to find the Secret Annex in chaos. Expecting the police to return, they hastily collected Anne Frank's papers which were strewn on the floor, as well as several family photograph albums. Miep resolved not to look at any of it, but to hold it for safekeeping, and to return it to Anne after the war.
After being interrogated in a local police station, the members of the household were taken by train to the camp at Westerbork. Ostensibly a transit camp, by this time more than 100,000 Jews had passed through it, most on their way to the Auschwitz concentration camp. On September 2, the group was deported, along with more than 1,000 other people, on what would be the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, after a three day journey, the passengers were seperated by gender. This was the last time the men and women were to see each other. Of the 1019 passengers, 549 people, including all children under the age of 15 years, were then selected and sent directly to the gas chambers where they were killed. Anne had turned 15 three months earlier and was spared. Everyone from the Secret Annex survived this selection; however, Anne believed that her father had been killed.
With the other females not selected for immediate death, Anne was forced to strip naked to be disinfected, had her head shaved and was tattooed with an identifying number on her arm. By day the women were used as slave labor, and by night were crammed into freezing barracks. Disease was rampant and before long Anne's skin became badly infected by scabies.
On October 28, selections began for women to be relocated to Bergen-Belsen. Over the course of several days, more than 8,000 women, including Anne and Margot Frank, and Auguste van Pels, were transported. Edith Frank was left behind. Bergen-Belsen had not been designed as an extermination camp, but as its population grew, so too did disease, and the death rate was very high. Tents had been erected to try to accomodate the influx of prisoners, and Anne and Margot Frank were among those to be housed in them. During her time there, Anne was briefly reunited with two friends from school. Both of these friends survived the war and were able to provide information about Anne's final days. They each described Anne as bald, emaciated and infested with lice and each recalled that Anne had told them that both of her parents were dead. Anne told them that Margot was extremely ill, and that she was caring for her, however it was not possible for them to see Margot.
In March 1945, a typhus epidemic spread through the camp killing an estimated 17,000 prisoners. Witnesses later testified that Margot fell from her bunk in her weakened state and was killed by the shock, and that a few days later Anne also died. They estimated that this occurred a few weeks before the camp was liberated by British troops on April 15, 1945, and although the exact dates were not recorded, it is generally accepted to have been between the end of February and the middle of March.
Publication of the diary
Otto Frank survived, and he returned to Amsterdam after the liberation of Auschwitz, arriving June 3. During his travels he was informed that his wife had died, but he also learnt that his daughters had been transferred to Bergen-Belsen, and so he remained hopeful that they had survived. In July 1945, the Red Cross confirmed the deaths of Anne and Margot. Only then did Miep Gies give him the diary. He read it, and later commented that he had not realised Anne had kept such an accurate and well written record of their time together. He was moved by her repeated wish to be an author and he began to consider having it published.
When Anne Frank started writing her diary, she wrote only for herself, and said that she would never allow anyone else to read it. She described candidly, her life, her family and companions, and their situation. In the spring of 1944, she heard a radio broadcast by Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile in which he said that after the war ended, he would like to collect information for publication, to create a public record of the oppression of the Dutch people under German occupation. He specifically mentioned letters and diaries, and Anne decided to submit her work when the time came. She began editing what she had already written, removing sections, and rewriting others, with the view to publication. Her original notebook, long since filled, was supplemented by additional notebooks and loose leaf sheets of paper. She created pseudonyms for the members of the household and the helpers. The van Pels family became Hermann, Petronella and Peter van Daan, and Fritz Pfeffer became Albert Düssell. Her original diary, known as "version a", and her edited version, known as "version b", were the basis for the diary edited by Otto Frank. From these two sources he created the first version for publication. He removed certain passages, most notably those which referred to his wife in unflattering terms, and sections that discussed Anne's growing sexuality, not considered a proper topic for a book which would be aimed at young people. Otto Frank decided to restore the true identities of his own family, but retained all of the other pseudonyms his daughter had created.
After a couple of newspaper articles, and praise from the historian Jan Romein, the diary was first published in 1947, followed by a second run in 1950. The first American edition was published in 1952 under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. A play based upon the diary, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, premiered in New York on October 5, 1955, and won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was followed by a 1959 movie, The Diary of Anne Frank, which was a critical and commercial success. Over the years the popularity of the diary grew, and in many schools, particularly in the United States, it was included as part of the curriculum. Many people throughout the world who have never read the diary, know something of the story, or can connect the name "Anne Frank" to events of World War II or the Holocaust.
In 2003 a critical edition of Anne Frank's diary was published. It compared her original entries with her father's edited versions, and included discussion relating its authentication, and historical information relating to the family.
The legacy of Anne Frank
On May 3, 1957 a group of citizens including Otto Frank, established the "Anne Frank Foundation" in an effort to save the Prinsengracht building from demolition and to make it accessible to the public. Otto Frank also insisted that the chief aim of the foundation would be to foster contact and communication between young people of different cultures, and of different racial or religious backgrounds, and to work towards preventing intolerance and racial discrimination.
"Anne Frank House" opened on May 3, 1960. It consists of the Opekta warehouse and offices, and the "Secret Annexe", all unfurnished, so that people can walk freely through the rooms. Some personal relics of the former occupants remain, such as the movie star photographs that Anne glued to the wall, a section of wallpaper where Otto Frank marked the height of his growing daughters, and a map on the wall where he recorded the advance of the Allied Forces, all now protected behind perspex sheets. From the small room which was once home to Peter van Pels, a walkway now connects the building to its neighbours, also purchased by the foundation. These other buildings are used to house Anne's diary, as well as changing exhibits that chronicle different aspects of the Holocaust and more contemporary examinations of racial intolerance in various parts of the world, through audio visual and multimedia displays. It has become one of Amsterdam's main tourist attractions, and is visited by more than half a million people each year.
In 1963, Otto and his second wife Fritzi set up the "Anne Frank Fonds" as a charitable foundation, based in Basel, Switzerland. The Fonds raises money to donate to causes "as it sees fit". Upon his death, Otto willed the diary's copyright to the Fonds, on the proviso that the first 80,000 francs in income each year, was to be distributed to his heirs, and any income above this figure was to be retained by the Fonds to use for whatever projects its administrators considered worthy. Under Swiss law, the Fonds is not required to make public, any information concerning which organisations benefit from its bequests, or how much money it either earns or bequeaths. After considerable criticism in 1997 over its announcement that it had distributed 270,000 francs to "good causes", it doubled its bequests in 1998.
The original diary, including letters and loose sheets, were willed to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation.
Criticism and authentication of the diary
Much of the criticism levelled at the diary has been related to the quality of the writing. Holocaust deniers have pointed at the clarity and immediacy of the text and of the maturity, sensitivity and self awareness of the writer. They argue that such a work could not be created by a girl barely fifteen years of age. Much of Anne Frank's writing is a study of characters, and she examines every person in her circle with a shrewd, uncompromising eye. She is occasionally cruel and often biased, aspects of her writing that her supporters acknowledge as indicators of a real person speaking her true thoughts. She saved her harshest criticisms for herself, and in her diary she relates the battle that she fought within herself between the "good Anne" she wanted to be, and the "bad Anne" she believed herself to be. That such a search for one's inner self could also be placed within the context of a story that follows a logical narrative and contains elements of suspense and humour, is also perceived by the deniers to be outside the grasp of so young a writer.
In 1986 the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation commissioned a forensic study of the diary through the Netherlands Ministry of Justice. They examined the handwriting against known exemplars and found that they matched. They determined that the paper, glue and ink were readily available during the time the diary was said to have been written. Their final determination was that the diary is authentic. On March 23, 1990, the Hamburg Regional Court confirmed its authenticity.
The fates of Anne Frank's family and friends
After the war, it was estimated that of approximately 111,000 Jews deported from The Netherlands, only 5,000 had survived.
- Other occupants of The Achterhuis:
- Edith Frank: died January 6, 1945, in Auschwitz-Birkenau from starvation.
- Fritz Pfeffer: died December 20, 1944, in Neuengamme.
- Hermann van Pels: died September 6, 1944, in Auschwitz. He was the only member of the group to be gassed. This occurred about three weeks after arriving at Auschwitz and his selection was witnessed by Otto Frank and Peter van Pels.
- Auguste van Pels: Both her date and place of death are unknown but witnesses testified she was with the Frank sisters during part of their time in Bergen-Belsen, but that she was not present when they died in February/March. She is therefore believed to have been transferred before March 1945, to Buchenwald, then to Theresienstadt, where she is believed to have died.
- Peter van Pels: died May 5, 1945, in Mauthausen during a death march. Otto Frank had protected him during their period of imprisonment together, as the two men had been assigned to the same work group. Frank later stated that he had urged Peter to hide in Auschwitz and remain behind with him, rather than set out on the forced march. Peter decided that he would have a better chance of survival if he joined the march. His death at the age of eighteen occurred three days before the liberation of Mathausen.
- Otto Frank remained in Auschwitz with other sick prisoners and survived. In 1953 he married Elfrida 'Fritzi' Markovits Geiringer, an Auschwitz survivor who had lost her husband and son in Auschwitz, and whose daughter, also a survivor, had been acquainted with the Frank sisters. Otto Frank died in Birsfelden, Switzerland from natural causes, August 19, 1980.
- The helpers:
- Miep Gies saved Anne Frank's diary without reading it. She later said that if she had read it, she would have needed to destroy it, as it contained a great deal of incriminating information. She and her husband Jan took Otto Frank into their home where he lived from 1945 until 1952. In 1994 she received the "Order of Merit" of the Federal Republic of Germany, and in 1995 received the highest honor from the Yad Vashem, the Righteous Among the Nations. She was appointed a "Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau" by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. In 1996 she shared an Academy Award with Jon Blair for their documentary Anne Frank Remembered. Born in 1909, Miep Gies as of 2005 resides alone in her apartment in Amsterdam.
- Jan Gies, husband of Miep, died January 26, 1993 in Amsterdam.
- Johannes Kleiman spent seven weeks in a work camp after his arrest, and was released after intervention from the Red Cross. He returned to Opekta, and took over the firm when Otto Frank moved to Basel in 1952. He died in 1959 at his office desk, at the age of sixty-three.
- Victor Gustav Kuglar spent seven months in various work camps, and escaped in March, 1945 when the camp was attacked by British troops. He remained in hiding in his hometown of Hilversum until liberated by Canadian troops. He migrated to Canada in 1955 and lived in Toronto. He received the "Medal of the Righteous" from Yad Vashem Memorial, with a tree planted in his honour on the Boulevard of the Righteous Among the Nations in 1973. He died December 16, 1981 in Toronto, after a long illness, at the age of eighty-one.
- Elisabeth 'Bep' Voskuijl left Opetka shortly after the war and married in 1946. She died in Amsterdam on May 6, 1983.
- Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl (father of Bep) whose ill health was often mentioned in Anne's diary, died of cancer, in late November, 1945.
- Friends and extended family:
- Susanne "Sanne" Ledermann was Anne's constant companion since her arrival in Amsterdam, and is mentioned several times at the beginning of the diary. After his return to Amsterdam Otto Frank determined to investigate the fates of his daughters' friends. He learnt that Sanne, her sister Barbara, and their parents Franz and Ilse were arrested on June 20, 1943. Barbara Ledermann, who was a friend of Margot, pretended to be Aryan and a young soldier allowed her to leave. She survived the war. Sanne and her parents were sent first to Westerbork, then on November 16 to Auschwitz, where all three were gassed upon arrival. Another friend mentioned in the diary, Ilse Wagner was the first of Anne's circle of friends to be deported. She was deported, along with her mother, and grandmother, to Sobibór extermination camp, where they were all gassed upon arrival on April 2, 1943.
- Charlotte Kaletta, the Aryan common law wife of Fritz Pfeffer, lost her husband and son in Auschwitz, but held hope that Pfeffer had survived. When she learnt of his death, she married him posthumously. Otto Frank was sympathetic to her, and offered her assistance, however in the 1950s she severed all contact with him, and with Miep and Jan Gies, because she was offended by the unflattering depiction of Pfeffer in Anne's diary. She died in Amsterdam, June 13, 1985.
- Several members of the Frank and Holländer families, including Otto's mother and brothers and Edith's sister and two brothers fled from Germany to Switzerland in the 1930s, and all who did so, survived the war. In his later years, Otto Frank lamented his decision to take his family to the Netherlands.
Trivia
Margot Frank was also known to have written a diary during her period in hiding. No trace of it was ever found, and it is assumed to have been destroyed after the arrest.
Anne and Margot Frank each sent a penpal letter to sisters Juanita and Betty Ann Wagner in Iowa, before going into hiding, but were not able to receive the Wagner sisters' reply, as it arrived after they had entered "The Achterhuis". After the war, Otto Frank wrote to the Wagner sisters to inform them of the deaths of his family, and they corresponded for a time.
In 2004, the Dutch broadcaster "KRO" tried to obtain posthumous citizenship for Anne Frank as part of the company's "De Grootste Nederlander" programme. Becoming a Dutch citizen was one of Anne Frank's many unfulfilled wishes. Some controversy followed, partly because such a citizenship would be in stark contrast to the Dutch refugee policy of minister Rita Verdonk. Eventually, the Dutch authorities said that this was practically impossible. See the BBC article
In 2004 a new book was published in The Netherlands, called Mooie zinnen-boek (Book of Beautiful Sentences). Following her father's advice, Anne copied fragments of books and short poems that especially struck her from the many books she read during her stay in "the Achterhuis".
Related subjects
- Holocaust
- Auschwitz concentration camp
- Bergen-Belsen
- Netherlands in World War II
- Corrie ten Boom
- Tanya Savicheva
- Etty Hillesum
References
- The Diary of a Young Girl - The Definitive Edition - Anne Frank, translated by Susan Massotty, edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler. Doubleday. 1995. mass market paperback, 339 pages, ISBN 0553296981
- The Biography of Anne Frank - Roses from the Earth - Carol Ann Lee. Viking. 2000. mass market paperback, 297 pages, ISBN 0708991742
- Anne Frank - The Biography - Melissa Müller. Translated by Rita and Robert Kimber. With a note by Miep Gies. Metropolitan books. 2000. mass market paperback, 330 pages. ISBN 0747545235
- Anne Frank - Beyond the Diary - A Photographic Remembrance - Ruud van der Rol and Rian Verhoeven for the Anne Frank House. Introduction by Anna Quindlen. Translated by Tony Langham and Plym Peters. Puffin. 1995. soft cover, 113 pages. ISBN 0140369260
Further reading
- Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank, introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt, translated by B. M. Mooyaart, Bantam, mass market paperback, 304 pages, ISBN 0553296981
- The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, Anne Frank, edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold Van der Stroom, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, compiled by H. J. J. Hardy, revised and updated edition, Doubleday 2003, hardcover, 736 pages, ISBN 0385508476. Prepared by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. Compares several editions of the diary to the original, includes an extensive study of its authenticity, relates history of the involved people before and after the war.
- Anne Frank's Tales From the Secret Annex, Anne Frank, translated by Michel Mok and Ralph Manheim, Washington Square Press, copyright 1949 and 1960 by Otto Frank and in 1982 by Anne-Frank Fonds, English translation copyright 1952 and 1959 by Otto Frank and 1983 by Doubleday and Company, edition of September 1983, paperback, 156 pages, ISBN 0671458574. Relates short works of fiction by Anne Frank, as well as short essays by the same author.
External links
