Anne Frank: Education, Life in Hiding, and Legacy
Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish diarist, has become one of the most discussed victims of the Holocaust. Her diary, documenting her family's life in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands, has resonated with readers worldwide. This article explores Anne Frank's early life, education, the circumstances that led her family into hiding, and her enduring legacy.
Early Life and Family
Annelies Marie Frank was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Edith (née Holländer) and Otto Heinrich Frank. She had an older sister, Margot. The Franks were Reform Jews, living in an assimilated community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. Otto Frank had served as a lieutenant in the German army during World War I and later became a businessman.
In 1933, after Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party gained power, Edith Frank and the children initially stayed with her mother in Aachen. Otto Frank moved to Amsterdam to start a business and arrange accommodation for his family. He began working at the Opekta Works, a company that sold pectin. The Franks were among the 300,000 Jews who fled Germany between 1933 and 1939.
Education in Amsterdam
After moving to Amsterdam, Anne and Margot were enrolled in school. Margot went to public school and excelled, despite initial difficulties with the Dutch language. Anne began attending Amsterdam's Sixth Montessori School in 1934. She had many friends and was a bright and inquisitive student.
However, the peaceful life Anne had known didn’t last. Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, and the occupation government began to implement anti-Jewish measures. Anne and her sister were forced to transfer to a segregated Jewish school.
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Life in Hiding
On July 5, 1942, Margot received a summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany. The very next day, the Frank family went into hiding in makeshift quarters in an empty space at the back of Otto’s company building, which they called the Secret Annex. They were accompanied by Otto’s business partner Hermann van Pels, his wife Auguste, and their son Peter. In November 1942, German-Jewish dentist Fritz Pfeffer joined the families in the Secret Annex.
Otto’s employees Jo Kleiman and Victor Kugler, as well as Jan and Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, provided food and information about the outside world. The entrance to the Secret Annex was hidden by a hinged bookcase. Anne and the others lived in rooms with blacked-out windows.
During more than two years of secrecy and confinement, Anne wrote about events and experiences in the Annex, and also about her feelings and thoughts while growing up. Anne spent considerable time writing in a red-checkered diary her parents had given her on her 13th birthday. She hoped the diary could become a book and gave herself and companions fake names, such as Anne Robin, her own pseudonym, and Petronella van Daan instead of Auguste van Pels.
The Frank sisters each hoped to return to school as soon as they were able and continued with their studies while in hiding. Margot took an 'Elementary Latin' course by correspondence in Bep Voskuijl's name and received high marks. Most of Anne's time was spent reading and studying, and she regularly wrote and edited her diary entries. In addition to providing a narrative of events as they occurred, she wrote about her feelings, beliefs, dreams and ambitions, subjects she felt she could not discuss with anyone.
Discovery, Deportation and Death
On August 4, 1944, a German secret police officer accompanied by four Dutch Nazis stormed into the Secret Annex and arrested everyone who was hiding there, including Anne and her family. Their location was given away by an anonymous tip, and the identity of their betrayer remains unknown to this day. The residents of the Secret Annex were shipped off to Camp Westerbork, a concentration camp in the northeastern Netherlands. In the middle of the night on September 3, 1944, they were transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
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After a month of hard labor, Anne and Margot were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany during the fall. At Bergen-Belsen, food was scarce, sanitation was awful, and disease ran rampant. Anne was just 15 years old when she died, one of more than 1 million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust. Her cause of death was typhus; both Anne and her sister, Margot, contracted the disease in the early spring of 1945. According to official records and Dutch authorities, Anne died in March 1945. However, in a 2015 research article based on archival materials and eyewitness accounts, historians at the Anne Frank House argue the sisters died within a short time of each other in February 1945.
The Diary and its Legacy
After the war, Otto returned to Amsterdam and was reunited with Miep Gies, one of his former employees who had helped shelter him. She handed him Anne’s diary, which she had found undisturbed after the Nazi raid. In 1947, Anne’s diary was published by Otto in its original Dutch. An instant best-seller and eventually translated into more than 70 languages, The Diary of Anne Frank has served as a literary testament to the nearly six million Jews, including Anne herself, who were silenced in the Holocaust.
The Secret Annex: Diary Letters from June 14, 1942 to August 1, 1944 was a selection of passages from Anne’s diary that was published on June 25, 1947, by her father, Otto. The Diary of a Young Girl, as it’s typically called in English, has since been published in more than 70 languages. Commonly referred to as The Diary of Anne Frank, it remains one of the most moving and widely read firsthand accounts of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust.
The Diary, which has been translated into more than 65 languages, is the most widely read diary of the Holocaust, and Anne is probably the best known of Holocaust victims. The Diary was also made into a play that premiered on Broadway in October 1955, and in 1956 it won both the Tony Award for best play and the Pulitzer Prize for best drama. A film version directed by George Stevens was produced in 1959.
The Frank family’s hideaway at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam opened as a museum in 1960. In 2009, the Anne Frank Center USA launched a initiative called the Sapling Project, planting saplings from a 170-year-old chestnut tree that Anne had long loved, as denoted in her diary, at 11 different sites nationwide. The story of Anne and her family was adapted into a Broadway play titled The Diary of Anne Frank in 1955. It lives on through multiple TV and movie adaptations.
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