Frank: The German Diarist
Anne Frank was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Edith Hollander and Otto Frank. Four years later, her life changed when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany and led a government whose aim was to persecute and eradicate Jews.
In 1940, Germans invaded the Netherlands and made life horrible for the Jews who lived there. They deported over 100,000 Jews to extermination camps. And so when Margot Frank received a letter ordering her to report to a work camp in Germany in July 1942, they were suspicious and went into hiding.
They were hiding in an attic apartment behind Otto Frank’s business, located in Amsterdam. Trying to avoid being traced, the family left a false trail suggesting they’d fled to Switzerland. Over time, seven more families came to live with the Franks and life in the apartment was tense.
On Anne’s 13th birthday, a month before they went into hiding, she got a journal for her birthday. As a result of how tense the apartment was and how they couldn’t talk for fear of being discovered, Anne turned to her journal and wrote about her feelings and observations.
She had an imaginary friend, Kitty, to whom she wrote these letters. She wrote about life in hiding, her impressions of the other inhabitants of the Secret Annex (as the apartment was called), and feeling lonely and lacking privacy.
In her diary, Anne described herself as a “little bundle of contradictions,” a willful, lively teenager who didn’t always agree with her mother, worried about her changing body, dreamed of a better future and focused on the good in the midst of so much evil.
In the two years her family and seven other families lived undiscovered in the secret annexe, they did a lot of studying, and Anna composed short stories and kept a book of her favourite quotes.
She wanted to be a journalist or play a significant role in Hollywood when she grew up. Following a special news report on the radio that encouraged people to keep diaries and documents so they could be collected after the war, she decided to revise her diary for future readers.
On August 4, the German police discovered the secret annexe and arrested all of its inhabitants. It is unknown how they discovered the secret annexe. They were all sent to Auschwitz, where the women and men were separated.
Anne died of typhus in February 1945, two weeks before the British rescued the people in the concentration camps. Anne’s father, Otto, was the only resident of the secret annexe that survived the Holocaust.
He eventually published her diary, which sold over 30 million copies, and she went on to have a museum called the Anne Frank House in her honour and become one of the most popular Holocaust Victims.
