83 years ago, wicked Nazi Germany broke Europe into a war. Throughout the long war, many were forced to go into hiding. Many of which were those of Jewish ethnicity, who were the main target of the war. Adolf Hitler called for the removal of those without true German blood, the Jews. Those caught would be exterminated immediately or sent to concentration camps where they would be either worked to death or sent to gas chambers.
In Jewish efforts to not be found, many were forced into hiding. Such as the Frank family in Nazi-occupied Holland. "13-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family [were] forced to take refuge in a secret sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse [1942]," says History.com.
Below: A photo showing the travels made by Anne Frank. (https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/)
Anne Frank and her family rushed to Amsterdam in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution hoping they would be safer there than in Holland which began to be occupied by the Germans in 1942. Famously known as the Anne Frank Diary, Anne Frank herself began to write her everyday experiences, observations and so forth. "On July 6, fearing deportation to a Nazi concentration camp, Anne' Frank's father, Otto Frank, approached his Austrian-born bookkeeper, Miep Gies, and asked if she would help hide his family. Otto also asked his employees Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler en Bep Voskuijl to help. They agreed and then risked their own lives to smuggle food, supplies and news of the outside world into the so-called Secret Annex, whose entrance was hidden behind a movable bookcase," says History.com
"On August 4, 1944, just two months after the successful Allied landing at Normandy, the Nazi Gestapo discovered the Frank’s “Secret Annex.” The Franks were sent to the Nazi concentration camps, along with two of the Christians who had helped shelter them, and another Jewish family and a single Jewish man with whom they had shared the hiding place. Anne and the other persons in hiding ended up at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland."
"In early 1945, with the Soviet liberation of Poland underway, Anne was moved with her sister, Margot, to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Suffering under the deplorable conditions of the camp, the two sisters caught typhus and died," sadly enough the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen would have been liberated just weeks before the two sisters passed away at ages 15 and 19.
Above is one of the last pictures ever taken of Anne Frank, 1941.
Both Edith and Otto (Anne's parents) were sent to Auschwitz, where Edith passed on January 6th at the camp. It's said she and Otto were very over worked by SS officers who picked them to do harsh labour. Otto was the only remaining survivor of the Frank family when the camp was liberated on the 27th, he did not know yet that he was the only survivor. Only knowing his wife death, he arrived in Amsterdam on June 5th, 1945 where he had reunited with Miep. Having hope his daughters would soon return too.
The house where they hid, above
Otto Frank shortly after received a letter informing that both of his daughters had passed away in Bergen-Belsen.
While searching through the Secret Annex, Miep found Anne's diary hidden in her desk. She handed it to Otto Frank when they were shocked reading it to discover the amount of detail the young girl had written. Otto Frank stated, "How proud Anne would have been if she had lived to see this..." In a rare television interview, Otto Frank talked about Anne's diary. He was surprised by the depth of her inner thoughts and feelings stated Otto.
Anne Frank and her family photoed above.
Usually, the upper floors of the office building at 263 Prinsengracht were silent. But on August 4, 1944, they came to terrible life. Miep Gies never forgot the sounds. “I could hear the sounds of our friends’ feet,” she wrote in her 1988 memoir. “I could tell from their footsteps that they were coming down like beaten dogs.”
Hours later, when she got up the courage, Gies went upstairs. She had helped her friends, the Frank family, live out of sight in the middle of Amsterdam for two years, bringing them the essentials of life as they hid from the persecution of Europe’s Jews. Now, the attic was trashed, ransacked by German police.
"Anne’s diary was published in Dutch in 1947 and was published in English in 1952. An instant best-seller and eventually translated into more than 70 languages, The Diary of Anne Frank has served as a literary testament to the six million Jews, including Anne herself, who were silenced in the Holocaust," History.com.
More than 30 million copies of Anne's Diary have been sold worldwide, along with myself purchasing a copy in 2019 when I visited Dachau Concentration Camp and saw the horrors the Jews faced through my own eyes up in person. After being able to read Anne's Diary it made me develop such a relationship with Anne. To be able to understand what her and her family faced. It feels as though she was related to me and to be such a touching part of my heart. I pledge to never stop bringing awareness to first-hand witnesses of a genocide, in part to try and stop future genocides from occuring.
To this day, Anne Frank remains as on the the most well known Holocaust victims. We continue to learn in school as we rightly should.
The Story Behind Anne Frank and her Diary
Anne Frank received her diary as a birthday gift for her 13th in 1942. As History.com states, "At first, it was her place to record observations about friends and school and her innermost thoughts. But when she and her family went into hiding the month after the diary began, it became a war document.
Inside the “secret annex,” as she called it, Anne documented her daily life, writing about herself, her family and the other people in hiding, Hermann and Auguste van Pels, their son Peter, and dentist Fritz Pfeffer. She wrote about their protectors’ efforts to smuggle in the essentials of life at great risk. And she increasingly thought about her work as a potential book.
In March 1944, Anne heard a radio broadcast from the Dutch minister for education, art and science, who was in exile in London along with other members of the Dutch government. “History cannot be written on the basis of official decisions and documents alone,” he said. “What we really need are ordinary documents—a diary, letters.” Anne wrote about the broadcast in her diary and decided to edit and rewrite it with an aim for publication.
By the time of her capture, Anne had rewritten much of her diary. Since both versions of the diary survive, so do Anne’s shrewd edits. She edited for content, length and clarity and made a list of suggested pseudonyms for the people in her life. “The differences between Anne’s initial efforts and her revisions vary from trivial to profound,” writes critic Francine Prose, “and deepen our respect for her as a writer.” Anne also wrote and rewrote essays and works of fiction. Her future as a writer was snuffed out when she was betrayed, deported and murdered.".
"He began to translate the diary into German, sharing extracts with friends and family members. Otto made his own edits for content and clarity and excluded passages about conflict between Anne and her mother, Edith, and some sexual content. They encouraged him to publish.
But most publishers at the time were not interested in buying books about World War II—a war everyone wanted to leave behind. After a long struggle to find a home for the book, Frank eventually secured a publisher and the diary was released in 1947. The work was a combination of both of Anne’s diaries—the one she kept for private and the one she intended for publication. Its title, Het Achterhuis (The House Behind), had been chosen by Anne herself."
“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Those words, however, come before the end of the diary, and were written as part of a larger passage exploring the nature of good and evil and grappling with the horror she saw unfolding around her.
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