ANNE FRANK
A BREIF HISTORY OF THE HOLOCAUST MOST FAMOUS VICTIM
PART 1:
I decided to do my essay on Anne frank because in 4th class
my teacher did a brief history on her and I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed
reading the diary in school that I even read on ahead at home without the
teacher asking me to. I also bought the book myself. As I got older and moved
up in school I began to learn more about World War II and Anne Frank and it all
got more and more interesting. Another reason I decided to do Anne Frank is to
try and find out how they got found. Also to find out what life was like in for
her and her family in hiding.
The aims of my essay were:
1- To
find out about the early life of Anne Frank.
2- To
carry out a brief history of the rise of the Nazi and the development of their
anti Jewish policy.
3- To
look at how the family ended up in hiding.
4- To
carry out a brief history of the family’s life in hiding.
5- To
briefly look at the history of the family after hiding.
I’m doing the senior cycle in school. Our history
teacher told us about the history essay for the Leaving Certificate. He sent u
off to pick a topic. I came back with Anne Fran. My teacher said it was a great
topic to do and to do research on the topic (Anne Frank). He also said it as a
good topic because she was the Holocaust most famous victim. He also said to do
some research on her and her family after the war. He told me to go to the
local library and get a few books out on her. I also went on the internet to
find website. I got one book out of the library called searching for Anne
Frank.
Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main in
Anne Frank lived with her family which consisted of her older sister Margot who was three years older then Anne, her mother and father were Edith Hollander and Otto Heinrich Frank. They lived in a small community of Jewish and non Jewish people where children grew up together as friends no matter what religion they were. Her mother was a devoted parent while her father was a decorated German officer from World War I. Both parents encouraged the children to read.
Following the Nazi takeover of
He moved there to organise the business and find
a place for him and his family to stay. He began working at Opekta
Works. He stayed in an apartment on the Merwedeplein
in
In 1938, Anne’s father set up a second company with Hermann van Pels, a
Jewish butcher, who left Osnabrück in
It was Anne’s birthday, and her father got her a little diary Anne had said she liked. She liked it so much she started writing in it straight away[4] She says in the diary “writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.”. At first she was writing about herself what she liked and didn’t like. Then it got more serious and she started talking about her feeling’s towards the Nazis. Then when her grandmother died she talked about how she felt. The diary became like a beast friend to her.
On July 1942, Margot got a phone call notice from the Central Office
for Jewish Emigration telling her to move to a work camp. Anne’s father told
her that the family would go into hiding in rooms above and behind the
company's premises on the Prinsengracht, a street along one of
On Monday morning, 6th July 1942, the family moved into hiding. Their apartment was left like normal so that it looked as if they had left in a hurry, and her father left a letter hinting they were going to Switzerland. The need for secrecy forced them to leave behind Anne's cat, Moortje. Since Jews were not allowed to use public transport, they walked many kilometers from their home. Each of them wore several layers of clothes so they weren’t seen with bags.[5] “As she says in her diary, the four off us were wrapped in so many lsyers of clothes it looked as if we were going off to spend the night in a refrigerator, and all that just so we could take more clothes with us.” The secret Annex was a three-story space entered from a landing above the Opekta offices. It had two small rooms, with a bathroom and toilet, on the first level and above that a larger open room, with a small room beside it. From this smaller room, a ladder led to the attic. The door to the Annex was later covered by a bookcase to hide it.
Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl were the only people who knew that the Frank family was in hiding. Gies' husband Jan Gies and Voskuijl's father Johannes Hendrik. Voskuijl, were their "helpers" for the time they were in hiding[6] “as in her diary she says, mr kleeiman and miep and bep voskuijl too, have helped us so much”. They provided the only contact between the outside world and the people of the house, and they kept them informed of the news in the course of war and politics. They catered for all of their needs, ensured their safety and supplied them with food, a task that grew harder and harder to do as time went on. Anne wrote about their dedication and efforts to boost morale within the household during the most dangerous of times. They all knew that if caught they could be killed[7] “on this website it says, all were aware that if caught they could face the death penalty for sheltering Jews.
Later in the summer, the Franks were joined by the van Pels family, and then in Nov Fritz Pfeffer, a friend of the family who was a dentist. Ann was happy to see more people but tensions began with everybody living so close together[8] “on this website it says Anne wrote of her pleasure at having new people to talk to but tensions quickly developed within the group forced to live in such confined conditions”. After sharing a room with Pfeffer, she though he was irritating, and she also didn’t get along with Auguste van Pels, who she believed, was stupid. She said Hermann van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer were selfish, especially over food they ate. A while later, after first ignoring the shy and awkward Peter van Pels, she found a friendship with him and the two got together. She had her first kiss with him, but her crush on him began to fade as she questioned whether her feelings for him were real, or because they were stuck there. She formed a close bond with each of the helpers and her father later recalled that she couldn’t wait for the daily visits. He observed that Anne's closest friendship was with Bep Voskuijl, "the young typist... the two of them often stood whispering in the corner".
In her writing, she talked about her relationships with her family, and the strong differences in their personalities. She thought of herself as closest to her father, who later commented, "I got on better with Anne than with Margot, who was closer to her mother. The reason for that was because Margot rarely showed her feelings and didn't need as much comfort because she didn't suffer from mood swings as much as Anne. Anne and Margot got closer while in hiding. In Anne’s writing she showed jealousy of Margot’s soft and easy going personality. As Anne began to mature, they were able to talk to each other a lot easier.
12th January 1944, Anne wrote, "Margot's much nicer.... She's not nearly so unpleasant these days and is becoming a real friend. She no longer thinks of me as a little baby who doesn't count".
Anne wrote about her difficult relationship with her mother, and of her ambivalence towards her. On 7 November 1942 she described her "contempt" for her mother and her inability to "confront her with her carelessness, her sarcasm and her hard-heartedness", before concluding, "She's not a mother to me". Later, as she revised her diary, Anne felt ashamed of her harsh attitude, writing "Anne is it really you who mentioned hate, oh Anne, how could you?" She came to understand that their differences resulted from misunderstandings that were as much her fault as her mother's, and saw that she had added unnecessarily to her mother's suffering. With this realization, Anne began to treat her mother with a degree of tolerance and respect.
Margot and Anne each hoped to return to school as soon as they were able and continued with their studies. Margot took a short hand course by correspondence in Bep Voskuijl's name and received high marks. She also kept a diary, however it is believed to be lost. Most of Anne's time was spent reading and studying, and she regularly wrote and edited her diary writings. In addition to providing a narrative of events as they occurred, she wrote about her feelings, beliefs and ambitions, subjects she felt she could not discuss with anyone. As her confidence in her writing grew, and as she began to mature, she wrote of more abstract subjects such as her belief in God, and how she defined human nature. She continued writing regularly until her final entry of 1st August 1944.
On 4th August, 1944, the Achterhuis was broke into by the German Security Police though an informer who was never identified. Led by Schutzstaffel Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer of the Sicherheitsdienst, the group included at least three members of the Security Police. The Franks, van Pelses and Pfeffer were taken to the Gestapo headquarters where they were interrogated and held overnight. On 5th August they were moved to the Huis van Bewaring (House of Detention), an overcrowded prison on the Weteringschans. Two days later they were moved to Westerbork. It was a transit camp, by this time more than 100,000 Jews had passed through it. Having been arrested in hiding, they were considered criminals and were sent to the Punishment Barracks for hard labor.
Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman were arrested and jailed at the penal camp for enemies of the regime at Amersfoort. Kleiman was released after seven weeks, but Kugler was held in different work camps until the war ended. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl were questioned and threatened by the Security Police but were not detained. They returned to the Achterhuis the following day, and found Anne's papers thrown on the floor. They picked them up, as well as several family photo albums, and Gies decided to return them to Anne after the war. On 7th August, 1944, Gies attempted to help release the prisoners by confronting Silberbauer and offering him money to intervene, but he refused.
On 3rd September, the group was deported on what would be the last move from Westerbork to the Auschwitz concentration camp, they arrived after three day’s traveling. In the chaos that marked the unloading of the trains, the men were forced away from the women and children, and Anne’s father was taken from his family. Of the 1019 passengers, 549—including all children younger than fifteen—were sent directly to the gas chambers. Anne had turned fifteen three months earlier and was one of the youngest people to be spared from her move. She was soon made aware that most people were gassed at arrival, and never learnt that the entire group from the Achterhuis had survived this selection. She reasoned that her father, in his mid fifties and not particularly robust, had been killed immediately after they were separated.
With the other females not selected for immediate death, Anne was forced to strip naked to be disinfected, had her head shaved and was tattooed with an identifying number on her arm. Everyday, the women were used as slaves and Anne was forced to haul rocks and dig rolls of sod; at night, they were crammed into overcrowded barracks. Witnesses later testified that Anne became withdrawn and tearful when she saw children being led to the gas chambers, though other witnesses reported that more often she displayed strength and courage, and that her confident nature allowed her to obtain extra bread rations for Edith, Margot and herself. Disease was rampant and before long, Anne's skin became badly infected by scabies. She and Margot were moved into an infirmary, which was always dark, and infested with rats and mice. Her mother stopped eating, saving every morsel of food for her daughters and passing her rations to them, through a hole she made at the bottom of the infirmary wall.
On 28th October, selections began for women to be relocated to Bergen-Belsen.
More than 8,000 women, including Anne and Margot Frank and Auguste van Pels,
were transported, but her mother was left behind and later died from
starvation. Tents were erected at
In March 1945, a typhus epidemic spread through the camp and killed at least 17,000 prisoners. Witnesses later testified that Margot fell from her bunk in her weakened state and was killed by the shock and that a few days later Anne died. They said that this occurred a few weeks before the camp was liberated by British troops on 15th April, 1945, although the exact dates were not recorded. After liberation, the camp was burned in an effort to prevent further spread of disease, and Anne and Margot were buried in a mass grave, exactly where is not know.
After the war, it was said that of the 107,000 Jews moved from the
Anne’s father survived his internment in Auschwitz and after the war ended
he returned to
[1] Web
address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_frank
[2] www.bookrags.com/biography/anne-frank/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank
[4] Anne Frank The Diary Of a Young Girl page 12
[5] Anne Frank The Diary Of a Young Girl page 32
[6] Anne Frank The Diary Of a Young Girl page 39
[7]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank