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Anne Frank’s Quote
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“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before beginning to improve the world.”- Anne Frank
We, the comrades of Unit 1012, will honor and remember Anne Frank every
year on 12 June, as it was her birthday. We, the comrades of Unit 1012: The
VFFDP, will make her one of The
82 murdered children of Unit 1012, where we will not forget her. Let us
remember how she lived and not how she died, do read her diary.
We will post the
information about her from Wikipedia
and other links.
Anne
Frank
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Born
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Annelies
or Anneliese Marie Frank
12 June 1929 Frankfurt, Weimar Republic |
Died
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February
or March 1945 (aged 15)
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Lower Saxony, Nazi Germany |
Language
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Nationality
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Notable works
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The Diary of a Young Girl (1947)
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Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (Dutch
pronunciation: [ɑnəˈlis ˈɑnə maˈri frɑŋk],
German pronunciation: [anəliːs ˈanə maˈʁiː fʁaŋk], pronunciation (help·info); 12 June 1929 –
early March 1945) is one of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Her wartime diary The Diary of a Young Girl has been the basis for
several plays and films. Born in the city of Frankfurt in Weimar Germany, she
lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Born a German
national, Frank lost her citizenship in 1941. She gained international fame
posthumously after her diary was published. It documents her experiences hiding
during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.
The Frank family moved from Germany to
Amsterdam in 1933, the year the Nazis gained control over Germany. By May 1940, they were
trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands. As
persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went
into hiding in some concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where
Anne's father worked. After two years, the group was betrayed and transported
to concentration camps. Anne Frank and her
sister, Margot Frank, were eventually transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they
died (probably of typhus)
in February or March 1945.
Otto Frank,
the only survivor of the family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find
that Anne's diary had been saved by one of the helpers, Miep Gies,
and his efforts led to its publication in 1947. It has since been translated
into many languages. It was translated from its original Dutch version and
first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl. The
diary, which was given to Anne on her thirteenth birthday, chronicles her life
from 12 June 1942 until 1 August 1944.
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13-year-old Anne Frank
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AnneFrank/AnneFrank01.html]
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Stolperstein
for Anne Frank at the Pastorplatz in Aachen, Germany, where Anne lived in 1933
with her grandmother Rosa Holländer.
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Early life
Frank was
born Annelies or Anneliese Marie Frank on 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto Frank (1889–1980) and Edith Frank-Holländer (1900–45). She had an
older sister, Margot
(1926–45). The Franks were liberal Jews, and did not observe all of
the customs and traditions of Judaism, and lived in an assimilated
community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of various religions. Edith Frank
was the more devout parent, while Otto Frank was interested in scholarly
pursuits and had an extensive library; both parents encouraged the children to
read.
On 13 March
1933, elections were held in Frankfurt for the municipal council, and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party won. Antisemitic demonstrations occurred almost
immediately, and the Franks began to fear what would happen to them if they
remained in Germany. Later that year, Edith and the children went to Aachen, where they stayed with Edith's
mother, Rosa Holländer. Otto Frank remained in Frankfurt, but after receiving
an offer to start a company in Amsterdam, he moved there to organize the
business and to arrange accommodations for his family. The Franks were among
300,000 Jews who fled Germany between 1933 and 1939.
Otto Frank
began working at the Opekta Works, a company
that sold fruit extract pectin, and found an
apartment on the Merwedeplein (Merwede Square) in the Rivierenbuurt
neighborhood of Amsterdam. By February 1934, Edith and the children had arrived
in Amsterdam, and the two girls were enrolled in school—Margot in public school
and Anne in a Montessori school.
Margot demonstrated ability in arithmetic, and Anne showed aptitude for reading
and writing. Her friend Hanneli Goslar
later recalled that from early childhood, Frank frequently wrote, although she
shielded her work with her hands and refused to discuss the content of her
writing. The Frank sisters had highly distinct personalities, Margot being
well-mannered, reserved, and studious, while Anne was outspoken, energetic, and
extroverted.
In 1938,
Otto Frank started a second company, Pectacon, which was a wholesaler of herbs,
pickling salts, and mixed spices, used in the production of sausages. Hermann van Pels was employed by Pectacon
as an advisor about spices. A Jewish butcher, he had fled Osnabrück in Germany with his family. In
1939, Edith's mother came to live with the Franks, and remained with them until
her death in January 1942.
In May
1940, Germany invaded the
Netherlands, and the occupation government began to persecute Jews
by the implementation of restrictive and discriminatory laws; mandatory
registration and segregation
soon followed. Otto Frank tried to arrange for the family to emigrate to the
United States – the only destination that seemed to him to be viable – but this
possibility was blocked from June 1941, as the US government was concerned that
people with close relatives still in Germany could be blackmailed into becoming
Nazi spies. The Frank sisters were excelling in their studies and had many
friends, but with the introduction of a decree that Jews could attend only
Jewish schools, they were enrolled at the Jewish Lyceum. Anne became a friend of Jacqueline van
Maarsen in the Lyceum. In April 1941, Otto Frank took action to
prevent Pectacon from being confiscated as a Jewish-owned business. He
transferred his shares in Pectacon to Johannes Kleiman and resigned as director.
The company was liquidated and all assets transferred to Gies and Company,
headed by Jan Gies. In December 1941, Frank followed
a similar process to save Opekta. The businesses continued with little obvious
change and their survival allowed Frank to earn a minimal income, but
sufficient to provide for his family.
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The apartment block on the Merwedeplein where
the Frank family lived from 1934 until 1942
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Time period chronicled in the diary
Before
going into hiding
For her thirteenth birthday on 12 June
1942, Anne Frank received a book she had shown her father in a shop window a
few days earlier. Although it was an autograph
book, bound with red-and-white checkered cloth and with a small lock on the
front, Frank decided she would use it as a diary, and she began writing in it
almost immediately. While many of her early entries relate the mundane aspects
of her life, she also discusses some of the changes that had taken place in the
Netherlands since the German occupation. In her
entry dated 20 June 1942, she lists many of the restrictions that had been
placed upon the lives of the Dutch Jewish population, and also notes her sorrow
at the death of her grandmother earlier in the year. Frank dreamed about
becoming an actress. She loved watching movies, but the Dutch Jews were
forbidden access to movie theaters from 8 January 1941 onwards.
In July 1942, Margot Frank received a
call-up notice from the Zentralstelle für jüdische
Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration) ordering her to report
for relocation to a work camp. Otto Frank told his family that they would
go into hiding in rooms above and behind Opekta's premises on the Prinsengracht,
a street along one of Amsterdam's canals, where some of his most trusted
employees would help them. The call-up notice forced them to relocate several
weeks earlier than had been anticipated.
Shortly before going into hiding, Anne
gave her friend and neighbor, Toosje Kupers, a book, a tea set, a tin of
marbles, and the family cat for safekeeping. As the Associated Press reports:
"'I'm worried about my marbles, because I'm scared they might fall into
the wrong hands,' Kupers said Anne told her. 'Could you keep them for me for a
little while?'"
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Reconstruction of the bookcase at the Anne
Frank house.
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Life
in the Achterhuis
On the morning of Monday, 6 July 1942,
the family moved into their hiding place, a secret annex. Their apartment was
left in a state of disarray to create the impression that they had left
suddenly, and Otto Frank left a note that hinted they were going to Switzerland.
The need for secrecy forced them to leave behind Anne's cat, Moortje. As Jews
were not allowed to use public transport, they walked several kilometers from
their home, with each of them wearing several layers of clothing as they did
not dare be seen carrying luggage. The Achterhuis (a Dutch word denoting
the rear part of a house, translated as the "Secret Annexe" in
English editions of the diary) was a three-story space entered from a landing
above the Opekta offices. Two small rooms, with an adjoining bathroom and
toilet, were 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 Achterhuis was later covered by a bookcase to ensure it
remained undiscovered. The main building, situated a block from the Westerkerk,
was nondescript, old, and typical of buildings in the western quarters of
Amsterdam.
Victor
Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies,
and Bep
Voskuijl were the only employees who knew of the people in hiding. Along
with Gies' husband Jan Gies and Voskuijl's father Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl,
they were the "helpers" for the duration of their confinement. The
only connection between the outside world and the occupants of the house, they
kept the occupants informed of war news and political developments. They
catered to all of their needs, ensured their safety, and supplied them with
food, a task that grew more difficult with the passage of time. Frank wrote of
their dedication and of their efforts to boost morale within the household
during the most dangerous of times. All were aware that, if caught, they could
face the death penalty for sheltering Jews.
On 13 July 1942, the Franks were
joined by the van Pels family: Hermann,
Auguste, and 16-year-old Peter,
and then in November by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and friend of the family.
Frank 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 her room with Pfeffer, she found him to be insufferable and
resented his intrusion, and she clashed with Auguste van Pels, whom she
regarded as foolish. She regarded Hermann van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer as
selfish, particularly in regard to the amount of food they consumed. Some time
later, after first dismissing the shy and awkward Peter van Pels, she
recognised a kinship with him and the two entered a romance.
She received her first kiss from him, but her infatuation with him began to
wane as she questioned whether her feelings for him were genuine, or resulted
from their shared confinement. Anne Frank formed a close bond with each of the
helpers, and Otto Frank later recalled that she had anticipated their daily
visits with impatient enthusiasm. He observed that Anne's closest friendship
was with Bep Voskuijl, "the young typist ... the two of them often
stood whispering in the corner."
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Anne Frank house model
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| The Anne Frank House alongside the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. |
The
young diarist
In her
writing, Frank examined her relationships with the members of her family, and
the strong differences in each of their personalities. She considered herself
to be closest emotionally to her father, who later commented, "I got on
better with Anne than with Margot, who was more attached to her mother. The
reason for that may have been that Margot rarely showed her feelings and didn't
need as much support because she didn't suffer from mood swings as much as Anne
did." The Frank sisters formed a closer relationship than had existed
before they went into hiding, although Anne sometimes expressed jealousy
towards Margot, particularly when members of the household criticised Anne for
lacking Margot's gentle and placid nature. As Anne began to mature, the sisters
were able to confide in each other. In her entry of 12 January 1944, Frank
wrote, "Margot's much nicer ... She's not nearly so catty these
days and is becoming a real friend. She no longer thinks of me as a little baby
who doesn't count."
Frank
frequently wrote of 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, Frank 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, Frank began to treat her mother with
a degree of tolerance and respect.
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 a shorthand 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, 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.
Frank
aspired to become a journalist, writing in her diary on Wednesday, 5 April
1944:
I finally realized that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant, to get on in life, to become a journalist, because that's what I want! I know I can write ..., but it remains to be seen whether I really have talent ...And if I don't have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. But I want to achieve more than that. I can't imagine living like Mother, Mrs. van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! ...I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me!When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that's a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?— Anne Frank
She
continued writing regularly until her last entry of 1 August 1944.
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The Secret Annexe with its light-coloured
walls and orange roof (bottom) and the Anne Frank tree in the garden behind the
house (bottom right), seen from the Westerkerk
in 2004
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Arrest
On the morning of 4 August 1944,
following a tip from an informer who has never been identified, the Achterhuis
was stormed by a group of German uniformed police (Grüne
Polizei) led by SS-Oberscharführer Karl
Silberbauer of the Sicherheitsdienst.
The Franks, van Pelses, and Pfeffer were taken to RSHA headquarters, where they were
interrogated and held overnight. On 5 August they were transferred to the Huis
van Bewaring (House of Detention), an overcrowded prison on the Weteringschans.
Two days later they were transported to the Westerbork transit camp, through which by that
time more than 100,000 Jews, mostly Dutch and German, had passed. Having been
arrested in hiding, they were considered criminals and 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 various work
camps until the war's end. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl were questioned and threatened
by the Security Police but not detained. They returned to the Achterhuis
the following day, and found Anne's papers strewn on the floor. They collected
them, as well as several family photograph albums, and Gies resolved to return
them to Anne after the war. On 7 August 1944, Gies attempted to facilitate the
release of the prisoners by confronting Silberbauer and offering him money to
intervene, but he refused.
Although there has been persistent
speculation, the source of the information that led the authorities to raid the
Achterhuis has never been identified. Signs of the building being
occupied after office hours, such as open curtains and accidental noises, may
have been noticed and discussed by people on the outside. Reports of such
events may have eventually come to the attention of the authorities without
there being a specific or intentional informant. Night watchman Martin Sleegers
and an unidentified police officer investigated a burglary at the premises in
April 1944 and came across the bookcase concealing the secret door. Tonny
Ahlers, a member of the National Socialist
Movement in the Netherlands (NSB), was suspected of being the informant by Carol
Ann Lee, biographer of Otto Frank. Another suspect is stockroom manager
Willem van Maaren. The Annex occupants did not trust him, as he seemed
inquisitive regarding people entering the stockroom after hours. He once
unexpectedly asked the employees whether there had previously been a Mr. Frank
at the office. Lena Hartog was suspected of being the informant by Anne Frank's
biographer Melissa Müller. Several of these suspects knew one
another and might have worked in collaboration. While virtually everyone
connected with the betrayal was interrogated after the war, no one was
definitively identified as being the informant.
In 2015, Flemish journalist Jeroen de
Bruyn and Joop van Wijk, Bep Voskuijl’s youngest son, wrote a biography, Bep
Voskuijl, het zwijgen voorbij: een biografie van de jongste helper van het
Achterhuis (Bep Voskuijl, the Silence is Over: A Biography of the
Youngest Helper of the Secret Annex), in which they alleged that Bep's
younger sister Nelly (1923–2001) could have betrayed the Frank family.
According to the book, Bep's sister Diny and her fiance Bertus Hulsman
recollected Nelly telephoning the Gestapo on the morning of 4 August 1944.
Nelly had been critical of Bep and their father, Johannes Voskuijl, helping the
Jews. (Johannes was the one who constructed the bookcase covering the entrance
to the hiding place.) Nelly was a Nazi collaborator between 1942 and 1946. Karl
Silberbauer, the SS officer who received the phone call and made the arrest,
was documented to say that the informer had "the voice of a young
woman".
Deportation and death
On 3
September 1944, the group was deported on what would be the last transport from
Westerbork to the Auschwitz concentration camp and arrived after a three-day journey.
On the same train was Bloeme Evers-Emden, an Amsterdam native who had
befriended Margot and Anne in the Jewish Lyceum in 1941. Bloeme saw Anne,
Margot, and their mother regularly in Auschwitz, and was interviewed for her
remembrances of the Frank women in Auschwitz in the television documentary The Last Seven Months of Anne
Frank (1988) by Dutch filmmaker Willy
Lindwer and the BBC
documentary Anne Frank Remembered (1995).
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, the SS
forcibly separated the men from the women and children, and Otto Frank was
wrenched from his family. Those deemed able to work were admitted into the
camp, and those deemed unfit for labor were immediately killed. Of the 1,019
passengers, 549—including all children younger than 15—were sent directly to
the gas chambers. Anne Frank, who had turned 15 three
months earlier, was one of the youngest people to be spared from her transport.
She was soon made aware that most people were gassed upon arrival and never
learned 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, Frank was forced to strip naked
to be disinfected,
had her head shaved, and was tattooed with an identifying number on
her arm. By day, the women were used as slave labour and
Frank was forced to haul rocks and dig rolls of sod; by night, they were
crammed into overcrowded barracks. Some witnesses later testified Frank became
withdrawn and tearful when she saw children being led to the gas chambers;
others reported that more often she displayed strength and courage. Her
gregarious and confident nature allowed her to obtain extra bread rations for
her mother, sister, and herself. Disease was rampant; before long, Frank's skin
became badly infected by scabies. The Frank sisters were moved into an infirmary,
which was in a state of constant darkness and infested with rats and mice.
Edith Frank 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.
In October
1944, the Frank women were slated to join a transport to the Liebau labour
camp in Upper Silesia. Bloeme Evers-Emden was slated to be on
this transport, but Anne was prohibited from going because she had developed
scabies, and her mother and sister opted to stay with her. Bloeme went on
without them.
On 28 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.
Edith Frank was left behind and later died from starvation.
Tents were erected at Bergen-Belsen to accommodate the influx of prisoners, and
as the population rose, the death toll due to disease increased rapidly. Frank
was briefly reunited with two friends, Hanneli
Goslar and Nanette Blitz, who were confined in another section
of the camp. Goslar and Blitz survived the war, and later discussed the brief
conversations they had conducted with Frank through a fence. Blitz described
Anne as bald, emaciated, and shivering. Goslar noted Auguste van Pels was with
Anne and Margot Frank, and was caring for Margot, who was severely ill. Neither
of them saw Margot, as she was too weak to leave her bunk. Anne told Blitz and
Goslar she believed her parents were dead, and for that reason she did not wish
to live any longer. Goslar later estimated their meetings had taken place in
late January or early February 1945.
In early 1945, a typhus epidemic
spread through the camp, killing 17,000 prisoners. Other diseases, including typhoid
fever, were rampant. Due to these chaotic conditions, it is not possible to
say what ultimately caused Anne's death. Witnesses later testified Margot fell
from her bunk in her weakened state and was killed by the shock. Anne died a
few days after Margot. The exact dates of Margot and Anne's deaths were not
recorded. It was long thought that their deaths occurred only a few weeks
before British
soldiers liberated the camp on 15 April 1945, but new research in 2015
indicated that they may have died as early as February of that year. Among
other evidence, witnesses recalled that the Franks displayed typhus symptoms by
7 February, and Dutch health authorities reported that most untreated typhus victims
died within 12 days of their first symptoms. After liberation, the camp was
burned in an effort to prevent further spread of disease; the sisters were
buried in a mass grave at an unknown location.
After the war, it was estimated that
only 5,000 of the 107,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands between 1942 and
1944 survived. An estimated 30,000 Jews remained in the Netherlands, with many
people aided by the Dutch underground. Approximately two-thirds of
this group survived the war.
Otto Frank survived his internment in
Auschwitz. After the war ended, he returned to Amsterdam, where he was sheltered
by Jan and Miep Gies as he attempted to locate his family. He learned of the
death of his wife, Edith, in Auschwitz, but remained hopeful that his daughters
had survived. After several weeks, he discovered Margot and Anne had also died.
He attempted to determine the fates of his daughters' friends
and learned many had been murdered. Susanne ''Sanne'' Ledermann, often
mentioned in Anne's diary, had been gassed along with her parents; her sister,
Barbara, a close friend of Margot's, had survived. Several of the Frank sisters'
school friends had survived, as had the extended families of Otto and Edith
Frank, as they had fled Germany during the mid-1930s, with individual family
members settling in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
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Het
Achterhuis,
the first Dutch edition of Anne Frank's diary, published in 1947, later
translated to English and retitled The Diary of a Young Girl
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The Diary of a Young Girl
Main article:
The Diary of a Young Girl
Publication
In July 1945, after the Red Cross
confirmed the deaths of the Frank sisters, Miep Gies gave Otto Frank the diary
and a bundle of loose notes that she had saved in the hope of returning them to
Anne. Otto Frank later commented that he had not realized Anne had kept such an
accurate and well-written record of their time in hiding. In his memoir, he
described the painful process of reading the diary, recognizing the events
described and recalling that he had already heard some of the more amusing
episodes read aloud by his daughter. He saw for the first time the more private
side of his daughter and those sections of the diary she had not discussed with
anyone, noting, "For me it was a revelation ... I had no idea of the
depth of her thoughts and feelings ... She had kept all these feelings to
herself". Moved by her repeated wish to be an author, he began to consider
having it published.
Frank's diary began as a private
expression of her thoughts; she wrote several times that she would never allow
anyone to read it. She candidly described her life, her family and companions,
and their situation, while beginning to recognise her ambition to write fiction
for publication. In March 1944, she heard a radio broadcast by Gerrit
Bolkestein—a member of the Dutch government in exile, based in London—who said
that when the war ended, he would create a public record of the Dutch people's
oppression under German occupation. He mentioned the publication of letters and
diaries, and Frank decided to submit her work when the time came. She began
editing her writing, removing some sections and rewriting others, with a view
to publication. Her original notebook was supplemented by additional notebooks
and loose-leaf sheets of paper. She created pseudonyms for the members of the
household and the helpers. The van Pels family became Hermann, Petronella, and
Peter van Daan, and Fritz Pfeffer became Albert Düssell. In this edited
version, she addressed each entry to "Kitty," a fictional character
in Cissy van Marxveldt's Joop
ter Heul
novels that Anne enjoyed reading. Otto Frank used her original diary, known as
"version A", and her edited version, known as "version B",
to produce the first version for publication. He removed certain passages, most
notably those in which Anne is critical of her parents (especially her mother),
and sections that discussed Frank's growing sexuality. Although he restored the
true identities of his own family, he retained all of the other pseudonyms.
Otto Frank gave the diary to the
historian Annie Romein-Verschoor, who tried
unsuccessfully to have it published. She then gave it to her husband Jan Romein,
who wrote an article about it, titled "Kinderstem" ("A Child's
Voice"), which was published in the newspaper Het Parool on 3 April 1946. He wrote
that the diary "stammered out in a child's voice, embodies all the
hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence at Nuremberg
put together." His article attracted attention from publishers, and the
diary was published in the Netherlands as Het
Achterhuis
(The Annex) in 1947, followed by five more printings by 1950.
It was first published in Germany and
France in 1950, and after being rejected by several publishers, was first
published in the United Kingdom in 1952. The first American edition, published
in 1952 under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,
was positively reviewed. The book was successful in France, Germany, and the
United States, but in the United Kingdom it failed to attract an audience and
by 1953 was out of print. Its most noteworthy success was in Japan, where it
received critical acclaim and sold more than 100,000 copies in its first
edition. In Japan, Anne Frank quickly was identified as an important cultural
figure who represented the destruction of youth during the war.
A play by Frances
Goodrich and Albert Hackett based upon the diary premiered in New York City
on 5 October 1955, and later won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was followed
by the 1959 movie The Diary of Anne Frank,
which was a critical and commercial success. Biographer Melissa
Müller later wrote that the dramatization had "contributed greatly to
the romanticizing, sentimentalizing and universalizing of Anne's story."
Over the years the popularity of the diary grew, and in many schools,
particularly in the United States, it was included as part of the curriculum,
introducing Anne Frank to new generations of readers.
In 1986 the Dutch Institute for War
Documentation published the "Critical Edition" of the diary. It
includes comparisons from all known versions, both edited and unedited. It
includes discussion asserting the diary's authentication, as well as additional
historical information relating to the family and the diary itself.
Cornelis Suijk—a former director of
the Anne Frank Foundation and president of the U.S. Center for Holocaust
Education Foundation—announced in 1999 that he was in the possession of
five pages that had been removed by Otto Frank from the diary prior to
publication; Suijk claimed that Otto Frank gave these pages to him shortly before
his death in 1980. The missing diary entries contain critical remarks by Anne
Frank about her parents' strained marriage and discuss Frank's lack of
affection for her mother. Some controversy ensued when Suijk claimed publishing
rights over the five pages; he intended to sell them to raise money for his
foundation. The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, the formal owner
of the manuscript, demanded the pages be handed over. In 2000 the Dutch Ministry of
Education, Culture and Science agreed to donate US$300,000 to Suijk's
Foundation, and the pages were returned in 2001. Since then, they have been
included in new editions of the diary.
Reception
The diary has been praised for its
literary merits. Commenting on Anne Frank's writing style, the dramatist Meyer
Levin commended Frank for "sustaining the tension of a
well-constructed novel", and was so impressed by the quality of her work
that he collaborated with Otto Frank on a dramatization of the diary shortly
after its publication. Meyer became obsessed with Anne Frank, which he wrote
about in his autobiography The Obsession. The poet John
Berryman called the book a unique depiction, not merely of adolescence but
of the "conversion of a child into a person as it is happening in a
precise, confident, economical style stunning in its honesty".
In her introduction to the diary's
first American edition, Eleanor
Roosevelt described it as "one of the wisest and most moving
commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read."
John
F. Kennedy discussed Anne Frank in a 1961 speech, and said, "Of all
the multitudes who throughout history have spoken for human dignity in times of
great suffering and loss, no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank."
In the same year, the Soviet writer Ilya
Ehrenburg wrote of her: "one voice speaks for six million—the voice
not of a sage or a poet but of an ordinary little girl."
As Anne Frank's stature as both a
writer and humanist
has grown, she has been discussed specifically as a symbol of the
Holocaust and more broadly as a representative of persecution. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in her acceptance
speech for an Elie Wiesel Humanitarian Award in 1994, read from Anne
Frank's diary and spoke of her "awakening us to the folly of indifference
and the terrible toll it takes on our young," which Clinton related to
contemporary events in Sarajevo, Somalia and Rwanda. After receiving a humanitarian
award from the Anne Frank Foundation in 1994, Nelson
Mandela addressed a crowd in Johannesburg,
saying he had read Anne Frank's diary while in prison and "derived much
encouragement from it." He likened her struggle against Nazism to his
struggle against apartheid, drawing a parallel between
the two philosophies: "Because these beliefs are patently false, and
because they were, and will always be, challenged by the likes of Anne Frank,
they are bound to fail." Also in 1994, Václav
Havel said "Anne Frank's legacy is very much alive and it can address
us fully" in relation to the political and social changes occurring at the
time in former Eastern Bloc countries.
Primo Levi
suggested Anne Frank is frequently identified as a single representative of the
millions of people who suffered and died as she did because "One single
Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did
but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if
we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would
not be able to live." In her closing message in Müller's biography of Anne
Frank, Miep Gies expressed a similar thought, though she attempted to dispel
what she felt was a growing misconception that "Anne symbolises the six million
victims of the Holocaust", writing: "Anne's life and death were her
own individual fate, an individual fate that happened six million times over.
Anne cannot, and should not, stand for the many individuals whom the Nazis
robbed of their lives ... But her fate helps us grasp the immense loss the
world suffered because of the Holocaust."
Otto Frank spent the remainder of his
life as custodian of his daughter's legacy, saying, "It's a strange role.
In the normal family relationship, it is the child of the famous parent who has
the honor and the burden of continuing the task. In my case the role is
reversed." He recalled his publisher's explaining why he thought the diary
has been so widely read, with the comment, "he said that the diary
encompasses so many areas of life that each reader can find something that
moves him personally". Simon Wiesenthal expressed a similar sentiment when
he said that the diary had raised more widespread awareness of the Holocaust
than had been achieved during the Nuremberg
Trials, because "people identified with this child. This was the
impact of the Holocaust, this was a family like my family, like your family and
so you could understand this."
In June 1999 Time
magazine published a special edition titled "Time 100: The Most
Important People of the Century". Anne Frank was selected as one of
the "Heroes & Icons", and the writer, Roger Rosenblatt, described
her legacy with the comment, "The passions the book ignites suggest that
everyone owns Anne Frank, that she has risen above the Holocaust, Judaism,
girlhood and even goodness and become a totemic figure of the modern world—the
moral individual mind beset by the machinery of destruction, insisting on the
right to live and question and hope for the future of human beings." He
notes that while her courage and pragmatism are admired, her ability to analyze
herself and the quality of her writing are the key components of her appeal. He
writes, "The reason for her immortality was basically literary. She was an
extraordinarily good writer, for any age, and the quality of her work seemed a
direct result of a ruthlessly honest disposition."
Denials
of authenticity and legal action
After the diary became widely known in
the late 1950s, various allegations against the veracity of the diary and/or
its contents appeared, with the earliest published criticisms occurring in Sweden and Norway.
In 1957, Fria ord ("Free Words"),
the magazine of the Swedish neofascist organisation National League of Sweden published an
article by Danish author and critic Harald Nielsen, who had previously written
antisemitic articles about the Danish-Jewish author Georg
Brandes. Among other things, the article claimed that the diary had been
written by Meyer Levin.
In 1958, at a performance of The
Diary of Anne Frank in Vienna, Simon Wiesenthal was challenged by a group
of protesters who asserted that Anne Frank had never existed, and who
challenged Wiesenthal to prove her existence by finding the man who had
arrested her. Wiesenthal indeed began searching for Karl
Silberbauer and found him in 1963. When interviewed, Silberbauer admitted
his role, and identified Anne Frank from a photograph as one of the people
arrested. Silberbauer provided a full account of events, even recalling
emptying a briefcase full of papers onto the floor. His statement corroborated
the version of events that had previously been presented by witnesses such as
Otto Frank.
Opponents of the diary continued to
express the view that it was not written by a teen, but was a hoax, with Otto
Frank being accused of fraud.
In 1959, Otto Frank took legal action
in Lübeck
against Lothar Stielau, a school teacher and former Hitler Youth member who
published a school paper that described the diary as "a forgery." The
complaint was extended to include Heinrich Buddegerg, who wrote a letter in
support of Stielau, which was published in a Lübeck newspaper. The court
examined the diary in 1960 and authenticated the handwriting as matching that
in letters known to have been written by Anne Frank. They declared the diary to
be genuine. Stielau recanted his earlier statement, and Otto Frank did not
pursue the case any further.
In 1976, Otto Frank took action
against Heinz Roth of Frankfurt, who published pamphlets stating that the diary
was "a forgery." The judge ruled that if Roth was to publish any
further statements he would be subjected to a fine of 500,000 German marks and
a six-month jail sentence. Roth appealed against the court's decision. He died
in 1978, and after a year his appeal was rejected.
Otto Frank mounted a lawsuit in 1976
against Ernst Römer, who distributed a pamphlet titled "The Diary of Anne
Frank, Bestseller, A Lie". When a man named Edgar Geiss distributed the
same pamphlet in the courtroom, he too was prosecuted. Römer was fined 1,500
Deutschmarks, and Geiss was sentenced to six months imprisonment. The sentence
of Geiss was reduced on appeal, and the case was eventually dropped following a
subsequent appeal because the statutory limitation for libel had expired.
With Otto Frank's death in 1980, the
original diary, including letters and loose sheets, were willed to the Dutch
Institute for War Documentation, who commissioned a forensic
study of the diary through the Netherlands Ministry of Justice in 1986.
They examined the handwriting against known examples and found that they
matched. They determined that the paper, glue, and ink were readily available
during the time the diary was said to have been written. They concluded that
the diary is authentic, and their findings were published in what has become known
as the "Critical Edition" of the diary. On 23 March 1990, the Hamburg Regional
Court confirmed the diary's authenticity.
In 1991, Holocaust
deniers Robert Faurisson and Siegfried
Verbeke produced a booklet titled The Diary of Anne Frank: A Critical
Approach, in which they revived the allegation that Otto Frank wrote the
diary. Purported evidence, as before, included several contradictions in the
diary, that the prose style and handwriting were not those of a teenager, and
that hiding in the Achterhuis would have been impossible. In December
1993 the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank
Funds in Basel filed a civil lawsuit to prohibit further distribution of
Faurisson and Verbeke's booklet in the Netherlands. On 9 December 1998 the
Amsterdam District Court ruled in favour of the claimants, forbade any further
denial of the authenticity of the diary and unsolicited distribution of
publications to that effect, and imposed a penalty of 25,000 guilders per
infringement.
Complaints
regarding unabridged version
An unabridged edition of Anne Frank's
work was published in 1995. This version included Anne's description of her exploration
of her own genitalia and her puzzlement regarding sex and childbirth, a passage
that had previously been edited out by Otto Frank. When Gail Horalek of Northville, Michigan, learned in March 2013
that her daughter's seventh-grade class was using this edition of the diary in
class, she filed a complaint with the school district asking that an edited
version be used instead. Horalek, who described the passage as pornographic,
said the school should have obtained prior approval from parents before
assigning the book. In 2010, school officials in Culpeper County, Virginia, stopped
assigning the unabridged version after similar complaints were lodged.
Emer O'Toole of The Guardian
noted that "we live in a society in which young women are taught to be
ashamed of the changes that their bodies undergo at puberty – to be secretive
about them, and even to pretend that they don't exist." Clem Bastow of Daily
Life found the complaint "infuriating".
 |
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Statue of Anne Frank, by Mari
Andriessen, outside the Westerkerk in Amsterdam
|
Legacy
On 3 May 1957, a group of citizens,
including Otto Frank, established the Anne Frank Stichting in an effort to
rescue the Prinsengracht building from demolition and to make it accessible to
the public. The Anne Frank House opened on 3 May 1960. It consists of the Opekta
warehouse and offices and the Achterhuis, all unfurnished so that visitors can walk freely
through the rooms. Some personal relics of the former occupants remain, such as
movie star photographs glued by Anne to a wall, a section of wallpaper on which
Otto Frank marked the height of his growing daughters, and a map on the wall
where he recorded the advance of the Allied Forces, all now protected behind
Perspex sheets. From the small room which was once home to Peter van Pels, a
walkway connects the building to its neighbours, also purchased by the
Foundation. These other buildings are used to house the diary, as well as rotating
exhibits that chronicle aspects of the Holocaust and more contemporary
examinations of racial intolerance around the world. One of Amsterdam's main
tourist attractions, it received a record 965,000 visitors in 2005. The House
provides information via the internet and offers exhibitions that in 2005
travelled to 32 countries in Europe, Asia, North America, and South America.
In 1963, Otto Frank and his second
wife, Elfriede Geiringer-Markovits, set up
the Anne Frank Fonds as a charitable foundation, based in Basel, Switzerland.
The Fonds raises money to donate to causes "as it sees fit". Upon his
death, Otto willed the diary's copyright to the Fonds, on the provision that
the first 80,000 Swiss francs in income each year was to be distributed
to his heirs. Any income above this figure is to be retained by the Fonds for
use on whatever projects its administrators considered worthy. It provides
funding for the medical treatment of the Righteous among the Nations on a yearly
basis. The Fonds aims to educate young people against racism, and loaned some
of Anne Frank's papers to the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington for an exhibition in 2003. Its annual report
that year outlined its efforts to contribute on a global level, with support
for projects in Germany, Israel, India, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and
the United States.
In 1997, the Anne Frank Educational Centre
(Jugendbegegnungsstätte Anne Frank) was opened in the Dornbusch neighborhood of Frankfurt,
where Frank lived with her family until 1934. The Centre is "a place where
both young people and adults can learn about the history of National Socialism
and discuss its relevance to today."
The
Merwedeplein apartment, where the Frank family lived from 1933 until 1942,
remained privately owned until the 2000s. After becoming the focus of a
television documentary, the building—in a serious state of disrepair—was
purchased by a Dutch housing corporation. Aided by photographs taken by the
Frank family and descriptions in letters written by Anne Frank, it was restored
to its 1930s appearance. Teresien da Silva of the Anne Frank House and Frank's
cousin, Bernhard "Buddy" Elias, contributed to the restoration
project. It opened in 2005. Each year, a writer who is unable to write freely
in his or her own country is selected for a year-long tenancy, during which
they reside and write in the apartment. The first writer selected was the
Algerian novelist and poet El-Mahdi Acherchour.
In June
2007, "Buddy" Elias donated some 25,000 family documents to the Anne
Frank House. Among the artifacts are Frank family photographs taken in Germany
and the Netherlands and the letter Otto Frank sent his mother in 1945,
informing her that his wife and daughters had perished in Nazi concentration
camps.
In November
2007, the Anne Frank tree—by then infected with a fungal disease affecting
the tree trunk—was scheduled to be cut down to prevent it from falling on the
surrounding buildings. Dutch economist Arnold
Heertje said about the tree: "This is not just any tree. The Anne
Frank tree is bound up with the persecution of the Jews." The Tree
Foundation, a group of tree conservationists, started a civil case to stop the
felling of the horse
chestnut, which received international media attention. A Dutch court
ordered city officials and conservationists to explore alternatives and come to
a solution. The parties built a steel construction that was expected to prolong
the life of the tree up to 15 years. However, it was only three years later, on
23 August 2010, that gale-force winds blew down the tree. Eleven saplings from
the tree were distributed to museums, schools, parks and Holocaust remembrance
centers through a project led by the Anne Frank Center USA. The first sapling
was planted in April 2013 at The Children's Museum of
Indianapolis. Saplings were also sent to a school in Little Rock, Arkansas that was the scene of a
desegregation battle, Liberty Park (Manhattan), which honors
victims of the September 11 attacks, and other sites in the
United States.
Over the
years, several films about Anne Frank appeared. Her
life and writings have inspired a diverse group of artists and social
commentators to make reference to her in literature,
popular music, television, and other media. These include The Anne Frank
Ballet by Adam Darius, first performed in 1959, and the choral
work Annelies,
first performed in 2005.[112]
The only known footage of the real Anne Frank comes from a 1941 silent
film recorded for her newlywed next-door neighbor. She is seen leaning out
of a second-floor window in an attempt to better view the bride and groom. The
couple, who survived the war, gave the film to the Anne Frank House.
In 1999, Time
named Anne Frank among the heroes and icons of the 20th century on their list The
Most Important People of the Century, stating: "With a diary kept in a
secret attic, she braved the Nazis and lent a searing voice to the fight for
human dignity". Philip Roth called her the "lost little
daughter" of Franz Kafka. Madame
Tussauds wax museum unveiled an exhibit featuring a likeness of Anne Frank
in 2012. Asteroid
5535
Annefrank was named in her honor in 1995, after having been discovered in
1942.
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