Annelies Marie Frank was born to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1933, following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power as the German chancellor, the family moved to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where her father opened a local branch of the fruit extract company Opekta. 4 years old Anne quickly adjusted to her new home. She attended the 6th Montessori School, learned Dutch, and made friends.
In May 1940, when Anne was 11 years old, Germany invaded the Netherlands and applied its antisemitic laws to the local population. Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes, and they were not allowed to visit parks, go to the cinema, or shop in non-Jewish businesses. Within a year, Anne and her older sister, Margot, were transferred to a segregated Jewish school, and her father was forbidden from owning his business but remained in charge behind the scenes with the help of his Christian associates.
On her 13th birthday, Anne received a red-and-white checkered autograph book, which she used as her diary, referring to it as a friend named Kitty. She started documenting her life, describing her experiences as a teenage Jewish girl under the Nazi regime.
Over time, with the growing deportation of Jews from the Netherlands, the Franks planned to escape from the country, but after their Visa application to the US was declined, they arranged a hiding place in Anne’s father’s office. A call-up notice for Margot to report for relocation to a work camp forced them to vacate their home ten days earlier. On July 6th morning in 1942, the Frank family moved into the secret annex – a three-story narrow space above the Opekta offices at Prinsengracht 263, with a door covered by a bookcase to hide its entrance.
In the following month, Hermann and Auguste Van Pels and their 16 years old son Peter joined the annex, and in November, Fritz Pfeffer, who was a friend of the family, moved in too. Their only connection to the outside world was Otto’s colleagues, especially his secretary Miep Gies, who risked their lives to smuggle them food, supplies, and information about political developments. The life of the eight residents in the small annex was very stressful. They lived in constant fear of being discovered, keeping quiet during the day so they wouldn’t get detected by the people who worked in the offices downstairs.
Believing they would return to school, Anne and her sister continued to study, and Anne spent most of her time reading books and expressing her thoughts and feelings in her diary. In her writing, Anne described her day-to-day life, from ordinary activities and her anger and frustration at her mother and sister to thoughts of the unknown future, hopes, and dreams. The diary is a reflection of a typical adolescent in an abnormal reality. She detailed her fear of capture alongside her evolving relationship with Peter Van Pels and their first kiss. She also wrote short stories and started a novel, sharpening her writing skills in the ambition of becoming a writer or a journalist. As time went on, Anne began to address more abstract and existentialistic subjects, such as human nature and her belief in God.
When she heard on a radio broadcast that the exiled Dutch Minister of Education is planning to collect and publish diaries and documents written during the war, Anne began to rewrite her diaries into a running story, titled The Secret Annex.
On the morning of August 4th, 1944, after two years in hiding, the German secret police stormed into the annex and arrested its inhabitants. They were taken to an overnight interrogation, relocated to an overcrowded detention house, and two days later, they were transported to the Westerbork transit camp. On September 3rd, the Frank family was deported on the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz concentration camp. Arriving after a three-day journey in a packed cattle wagon, the Franks survived the selection, while 549 out of 1,019 passengers were sent directly to the gas chambers. Though Anne stayed with her sister and mother, she was separated from her father, never seeing him again.
Over the next two months, Anne was forced to hard labor during the days and crammed into overcrowded barracks during the nights. According to women who survived Auschwitz, Anne’s friendliness and kind nature enabled her to obtain extra bread rations for her mother and sister. Both Anne and her sister became infected with scabies and moved into an infirmary.
On October 28th, 1944, Anne and her sister were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Northern Germany. Their mother stayed in Auschwitz, where she died of disease and starvation. In February 1945, a typhus epidemic spread through the camp and killed 17,000 prisoners, among them 15 years old Anne and 18 years old Margot.
When the war ended, Anne’s father returned to Amsterdam, the only one of the annex’s residences to survive. His former colleagues, Jan and Miep Gies, gave him Anne’s diary and belongings, which they had saved after their arrest, hoping to return them to her. He was determined to publish Anne’s diary to show the world what she and millions of other children went through during the war.
In 1946, a newspaper article about the diary was published under A Child’s Voice. A year later, an edited edition of the diary was published in the Netherlands under the title Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 14 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 (The Annex: Diary Notes 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944).
Throughout the years, the book has been retitled The Diary of Anne Frank, translated into more than 70 languages, and sold over 30 million copies worldwide, making Anne one of, if not the most known, Holocaust victims.
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