Anne Frank was born (1929-1945)
Eighty-Two years ago, a girl was born to a middle-class German-Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany. Her name was Anne Frank. In another time and place, Anne would have likely grown up to be a good student, possibly a journalist or writer, maybe a wife and mother. Instead, her life was cut tragically short, but not before she left behind a famous eyewitness account of history.
Anne was a small child when Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party came to power in Germany. The Nazis launched genocide against Jewish people known as the Holocaust. Jews were rounded up, stripped of their possessions and their professions, and sent to prisons known as concentration camps. In 1933, the Frank family fled to the Netherlands. Her father, Otto, set up a business in Amsterdam.
In 1939, Adolph Hitler invaded Poland, effectively beginning WorldWar II. In 1940, the Nazis invaded and occupied the Netherlands, imposing the same Anti-Jewish policies they had in Germany and Poland. When Annes sister Margot was summoned to report to a Nazi work camp, Otto took his family into hiding in a secret compartment attached to his companys building.
For two years, the Frank family, along with Ottos business partner, Hermann van Pels, and his family, lived in the small, dark, cramped space they called the secret annex. They never once ventured outside during their two years of confinement. They survived due to the bravery of Ottos employees and friends.
Anne passed her time in the annex by writing in a leather-bound diary her parents had given her for her 13th birthday. She recorded the depths of her despair, her wish for the future and moments of abject hopelessness, as well as the drudgery of her daily life.
In 1944, Nazi soldiers stormed the annex and arrested everyone inside. The Franks were sent first to a concentration camp in the Netherlands, then onto the infamous Auschwitz death camp in Poland. There, the women were separated from the men. Otto Frank never saw his family again.
Margot and Anne were next moved to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Conditions at the camp were deplorable, the prisoners sick and starving. Anne and Margot contracted typhus and died within days of each other. Their mother, Edith, died in Auschwitz.
The Nazis killed approximately 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. Anne, almost 16 at the time of her death, was among more than one million children who were killed.
Otto Frank survived the camps and, upon his release, searched frantically for his family. Upon his return to Amsterdam, he was given Annes diary, which had been safeguarded by a family friend.
Otto had the diary published, and Anne Franks story of her life in the secret annex became one of the most enduring voices of the Holocaust. Millions of copies of the book have been published in many different languages.
