Anne Frank - 1929-1945
German-Dutch Diarist
Added to the album by a wonderful woman called Tara
It is worth noting, that we will never really know how wonderful a woman Anne would have grown to be... she was just a girl really but a truly wonderful one at that.
It is important that we read the diary of this woman in school, that children are taught to understand the suffering one human can cause another. Reading her diary, when I was just a girl myself, had a profound effect on me and continues to influence people the world over, more than six decades after it was written.
Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her family moved to Amsterdam when Anne was four years old due to the Nazis gaining power of Germany. In 1941, she lost her German citizenship because of her Jewish faith and the anti-Semitic Nazi rule. Sadly, this move did not secure the Frank family's future, as the Nazis later gained occupation of The Netherlands.
Stories of the persecution of Jews by the regime filtered into Amsterdam. In July 1942, in fear of their lives, the entire Frank family went into hiding in the attic building of Anne's father's office building. They were later joined in their secret hiding place by another Jewish family, the Van Pels and later again by a Jewish dentist. This left seven people spending every moment of every day in the cramped rooms for a little over two years.
Anne kept a constant log of the daily occurrences within the secret refuge. She wrote about the Nazi occupation and the war of course but also about her feelings, her thoughts her dreams and aspirations. She wrote about her relationship with her mother and the others in her family. She wrote about her desire to return to school and to have a career in journalism once the war was over. And touchingly, she wrote about the feelings she experienced towards Peter van Pels, the son of the family whom they shared their space. About their first kiss and about her fears that the romance was not genuine but rather due to the situation they found themselves flung together by.
All those jokes about marrying Peter if we stayed here long enough weren’t so silly after all. Not that I’m thinking of marrying him, mind you. I don’t even know what he’ll be like when he grows up. Or if we’ll even love each other enough to get married.
Anne Frank
In August 1944, the Nazis where tipped off about the attic hiding place. The building was stormed and the occupants arrested. Anne's diary was left behind, collected with
some family photographs by local people. The following month, Anne was deported to Auschwitz. The women were separated from the men, forced to strip naked to be disinfected, their heads were shaved and tattooed with identification numbers. Still only fifteen years old, Anne found herself a slave to hard labour and spent her nights in cramped and squalid huts. For the seven months Anne spent in Auschwitz, she believed her father had been sent to the gas chamber, with the many others she knew to have died in this horrific way. In late October 1944, Anne and her sister Margot were transported to Bergen-Belsen, her mother left behind to die of starvation. It was here, in Bergen-Belsen, that Anne and Margot died during an epidemic of typhus, which killed in the region of 17,000 prisoners.
Anne's father had not been gassed in Auschwitz, as Anne had believed. He survived and after the war, returned to Amsterdam where he was given the salvage from their attic hide-out, including Anne's diary. So moved by her diary and by her repeated statements of desire to become a writer, he passed the diary to those who he believed would publish her memoirs. The diary was first published in 1950 with the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. It was and is internationally successful and Anne's writing critically acclaimed.
Through her candid accounts of her life, Anne has become the most famous and discussed victim of the Holocaust and reminds us that whatever our differences, we are all just people with thoughts and feelings and ambition and hope.
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
Anne Frank
Thank you Tara for making this most wonderful addition.
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