ANNE FRANK
- MASTER STORYTELLER -
G'day folks,
Anne Frank received a present on her 13th birthday. It was a diary and the entries she would go on to make in it would make her tragically short life an inspiration to millions.
Her first words, written on that day, were: “I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me.”
The daughter of a Jewish industrialist, Anne was born in 1929 as
Annelies Marie Frank at Frankfurt, Germany. Her father, Otto, was a
German businessman who served as a lieutenant in the German army during
the First World War.
But amid rising anti-Semitism and Nazi persecution of Jews, Otto moved
his family to Amsterdam in the autumn of 1933. The Franks were among
300,000 Jews who fled Germany between 1933 and 1939.
In Amsterdam Otto ran a company called Opekta that sold spices and pectin used in the manufacture of jam.
Anne and her sister Margot went to a local school and were relatively
happy. That began to change on 10 May 1940 when the German army invaded
the Netherlands.
Two years later, on 5 July 1942, Margot received an official summons to
report to a Nazi work camp. Her father was having none of it so the next
day the Frank family went into hiding, moving into a secret annex in
the offices of Otto's company.
Hiding alongside them were another Jewish family and, later, a Jewish
dentist. They all spent two years in this hiding place, never once
stepping outside. The entrance to the annex was concealed by a large
bookcase.
Four of Otto’s loyal employees brought food and other necessities as
well as news about the outside world. They knew that if they were caught
they would be executed for helping Jews, but they did it anyway.
Anne passed much of the time reading and writing in her diary. She
started each entry with the words “Dear Kitty”, an imaginary friend.
Written over the course of two years, the diary details the time that
her family spent in hiding as well as the feelings of a frustrated and
“ordinary” teenager, struggling to live in a confined space.
For all its passages of despair, the diary is essentially a story of
faith, hope and love in the face of hate. On 15 July 1944 Anne wrote:
“It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes
rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I
haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical.
Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything,
that people are truly good at heart.
“It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of
chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed
into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will
destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions.
“And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will
change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and
tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I must hold on to my
ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I’ll be able to realise them!”
Anne’s suffering was to take a decisive plunge on the morning of 4
August 1944 when the Gestapo stormed into the secret annex and arrested
everyone inside. For years it was believed that someone called the
Germans and told them that Jews were living in the Opekta premises.
However, the identity of this alleged caller was never confirmed and a
later theory suggests that the Nazis may have discovered the annex by
accident while investigating reports of ration-coupon fraud and illegal
employment at Opekta.
The occupants of the annex were taken to a transit camp in the
Netherlands. Because they were in hiding when arrested they were
considered to be criminals and were punished with hard labour.
Then it was on to the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, all men were separated from their families
and all prisoners considered unfit for work were sent to the gas
chambers, along with everyone under the age of fifteen. Anne had turned
fifteen three months before being captured so she was spared.
Women and girls not selected for immediate death – Anne being one of
them – had to strip naked and were then disinfected. Their heads were
shaved and an identity number tattooed on their arms. Anne and Margot
spent several months enduring hard labour at Auschwitz, lifting heavy
stones and cutting rolls of turf.
During the winter of 1944, the two sisters were transferred to
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, without their mother,
Edith, who fell ill and died of hunger at Auschwitz.
At Bergen-Belsen diseases such as typhoid fever raged through the camp
and in early 1945 a typhus epidemic killed about 17,000 prisoners
including, it is believed, Anne and Margot – just a few weeks before the
camp was liberated by British forces. The exact date of Anne’s death is
not known but it is thought she died in either February or March of
that year.
Otto was held at Auschwitz until its liberation in January 1945 and
afterwards returned to Amsterdam, learning of his wife’s death en route.
He learned of his daughters’ deaths in July 1945 after meeting a woman
who had been at Bergen-Belsen with them.
Following the arrest of those in the annex, Anne’s diary was retrieved
by Miep Gies, one of the trusted friends who had helped the Franks
during their time in hiding. Gies gave the diary to Otto in July 1945
following confirmation of Anne’s death by the Red Cross.
Otto eventually gathered the strength to read it. He was awestruck by
what he read and later had it published. "There was revealed a
completely different Anne to the child that I had lost," he wrote in a
letter. "I had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings."
Published as The Diary of a Young Girl, the work has been translated
into as many as 70 languages and more than 30 million copies.
Anne Frank's
diary endures, not only because of the remarkable events she described,
but due to her extraordinary gifts as a storyteller and her
indefatigable spirit through even the most horrific of circumstances.
Clancy's comment: Having read her book as a teen, I visited the place where she hid in Amsterdam. From there, I went on to visit four concentration camps in Europe, and I'm still reading books about this horrible period. Sadly, decades later, we have learnt nothing.
I'm ...
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