Anne Frank Anne Frank was one of over 1 million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust. She was born Annelies Marie Frank on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank.For the first five years of her life, Anne lived with her parents and older sister, Margot, in an apartment on the outskirts of Frankfurt. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Otto Frank fled to Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, where he had business connections. The rest of the family followed, with Anne being the last to arrive in February 1934. The Germans occupied Amsterdam in May 1940. In July 1942, German authorities and their Dutch collaborators began to concentrate Jews from throughout the Netherlands at Westerbork, a transit camp near the Dutch town of Assen, not far from the German border. From Westerbork, German officials deported the Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor killing centers in German-occupied Poland. During the first week in July, Anne and her family went into hiding in an apartment which would eventually hide four Dutch Jews as well -- Hermann, Auguste and Peter van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer. For two years, they lived in a secret attic apartment behind the office of the family-owned business at 263 Prinsengracht Street, which Anne referred to in her diary as the Secret Annex. Otto Frank's friends and colleagues, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, Jan Gies and Miep Gies, had previously helped to prepare the hiding place, and smuggled food and clothing to the Franks at great risk to their own lives. On August 4, 1944, the Gestapo (German Secret State Police) discovered the hiding place after being tipped off by an anonymous Dutch caller. That same day, Gestapo Sergeant Karl Silberbauer and two Dutch police collaborators arrested the Franks; they were sent to Westerbork on August 8. In September 1944, SS and police authorities placed the Franks, and the four others hiding with them, on a train transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz. Because of their youth, Anne and her sister, Margot, were selected for labor and transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle, in northern Germany, in late October 1944. In March 1945, both sisters died of typhus; just a few weeks before British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. Anne's mother, Edith, died in Auschwitz in early January 1945. Only Anne's father, Otto, survived the war. Soviet forces liberated Otto at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. While in hiding, Anne kept a diary in which she recorded her fears, hopes and experiences. Found in the secret apartment after the family was arrested, the diary was kept by Miep Gies, one of the people who had helped hide the Franks. It was published in 1947 after the war; has been translated into 67 languages; and is one of the most widely read books in the world. It is used in thousands of middle-school and high-school curricula in Europe and the Americas. Anne Frank has become a symbol for the lost promise of the children who died in the Holocaust. |
