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"Am I really only fourteen? Am I only just a silly school girl? Am I really so inexperienced in everything? I have more experience than most; I've experienced something almost no one my age ever has." Anne Frank.
Anneliese Marie Frank didn't live long, but her writings have become classic literature. She was born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank. She had a sister named Margot. They were Jews.
In 1933, Hitler took power in Germany and set into motion the dastardly acts of the Nazi Party. The impetus of the Nazi regime was that Aryans were the superior race and therefore Slavic peoples, Gypsies and especially Jews, must be eliminated. As long as they existed, Hitler believed, Germany could never rise to greatness. So, in preparation for the rise of the Third Reich, as Hitler called his idealized world, the Nazi party set about meeting this end.
Anne's father, Otto Frank was a businessman. Watching carefully as the Nazi regime increased pressure on the Jews in Germany, Frank moved his family to Holland, a neutral country. He became director of the Dutch Opekta Company, a business that produced products for the making of jam. Holland was one of the few countries that was willing to take in Jewish refugees from Germany. Anne Frank was four years old at the time. About 30,000 German Jews settled in Holland.
Because they were among the first to flee Germany, many people thought the Frank family, and others like them, were overreacting. But over the next five years Holland gradually increased immigration restrictions in an attempt to remain neutral in the war. Finally only the closest relatives of Jews already in Holland could enter the country. Edith Frank's mother, Sarah Holländer, came to live with the Frank family during this time.
Anne studied at a Montessori school until she turned six, then she attended the public school. She was an excellent and eager student with lots of friends. On her thirteenth birthday she received a red and white checkered diary as a gift from her parents. She wrote in it all her girlhood thoughts and dreams. Over the course of two years she filled several notebooks with her writings.
Things went relatively well in Holland for about seven years, despite increasing poverty worsened by the world wide depression. Then, against their assurances to the contrary, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940. Within five days the Nazis had overwhelmed Holland's government, and after bombing Rotterdam and promising to bomb more cities, the country fell under Hitler's control.
Anne was forced to leave her "Aryan" school in 1941 and attend the Jewish Secondary School. Then on July 5, 1942, 16 year old Margot received a notice to report to work at a labor camp. Otto Frank had already converted an attic annex of his business into a hiding space for himself and his family. The entire family was moved into the secret annex next to Mr. Frank's office the next day. His company was turned over to a Dutchman named Henk Gies who was the husband of Frank's employee, Miep Gies. The Van Pels family and a dentist named Pfeffer joined them in hiding in the annex.
They lived there for two years, in seclusion, hiding from the Nazis. There were others in hiding with them. Throughout this time, Anne continued to write in her diary, recording the conditions of their seclusion, as well as her thoughts. She inserts news clippings and other items for her memories. Because of her isolation in the annex, she invents imaginary friends. The one named "Kitty" becomes the recipient of her journal entry letters. A year or so after starting the diaries, Anne began to recopy them into short stories, which she includes with fantasy stories. She realized while in hiding in the annex that her notebooks might be of interest to others after the war. In fact, in her diaries, she recorded her greatest dream, to become a journalist.
On August 4, 1944, a Dutch collaborator revealed the family's hiding place and it was raided by the German Security Police. As it would turn out, seventy percent of the Jews in Holland were killed by the Nazis. The eight people who lived in the annex were arrested and taken to Auchwitz Concentration Camp. Margot and Anne were moved to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where people were dying rapidly of disease and starvation. Conditions were filthy, and there wasn't enough food. Abuse by the guards was routine. Margot succumbed to typhus and died in the camp. Anne died within a short time of the same disease, just a few weeks before the camp was liberated. Edith Frank died in Auschwitz in 1945. Of the Frank family, only Otto Frank survived the concentration camps.
Miep Geis was left behind after the raid on the annex and saved Anne's diaries for her. Upon Otto Frank's return from the ghetto, she gave him the notebooks and some loose sheets written by Anne. Otto Frank devoted the remainder of his life to sharing his daughter Anne's poignant writings, complete with innocence and hope in times of despair. In 1947 the diary was published into a book which has become a classic of historical literature. Other editions of the book were produced in later years. It was discovered in 1998 that Otto Frank had shared an edited version of the diary, and had left out some of her teenaged musings that he deemed inappropriate for public consumption.
Otto Frank died in 1980. The secret annex is open to visitors in Amsterdam.
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