Anne Frank
Annelies Marie Frank (German: [ˈanə(liːs maˈʁiː) ˈfʁaŋk] ⓘ, Dutch: [ˌɑnəˈlis maːˈri ˈfrɑŋk, ˈɑnə ˈfrɑŋk] ⓘ; 12 June 1929 – c. February or March 1945)[1] was a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary in which she documented life in hiding under Nazi persecution during the German occupation of the Netherlands. She is a celebrated diarist who described everyday life from her family hiding place in an Amsterdam attic. One of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl (originally Het Achterhuis in Dutch, lit. 'the back house'; English: The Secret Annex), in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944 — it is one of the world's best-known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.
For other uses, see Anne Frank (disambiguation).
Anne Frank
Annelies Marie Frank
12 June 1929
Frankfurt, Prussia, Weimar Republic
c. February or March 1945 (aged 15)
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Nazi Germany
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
Diarist
- Dutch
- German
- German (1929–1941)
- Stateless (1941–1945)
- 6th Montessori School Amsterdam (1934–1941)
- Jewish Lyceum
- (1941–1942)
- Biography
- autobiography
- Otto Frank (father)
- Edith Frank (mother)
- Margot Frank (sister)
- Buddy Elias (cousin)
Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929. In 1934, when she was four-and-a-half, she and her family moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands, after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control over Germany. She spent most of her life in or around Amsterdam. By May 1940, the Franks were trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands. Anne lost her German citizenship in 1941 and became stateless. Despite spending most of her life in the Netherlands and being a de facto Dutch national,[2] she never officially became a Dutch citizen. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, they went into hiding in concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Anne's father, Otto Frank, worked. The hiding place is notably referred to as the "secret annex". Until the family's arrest by the Gestapo on 4 August 1944, Frank kept and regularly wrote in a diary she had received as a birthday present in 1942.
Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps. On 1 November 1944,[3] Frank and her sister, Margot, were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (presumably of typhus) a few months later. They were estimated by the Red Cross to have died in March, with Dutch authorities setting 31 March as the official date. Later research has alternatively suggested that they may have died in February or early March.
Otto, the only survivor of the Frank family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that Anne's diary had been saved by his female secretaries, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. He decided to fulfil his daughter's greatest wish to become a writer. He published her diary in 1947.[4] It was translated from its original Dutch version and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl, and has since been translated into over 70 languages.[5]
1929: Anne Frank's birthplace, the Hospital Maingau of the Red Cross, in 1929 still known as Vaterländisches Krankenhaus (the hospital of the "Patriotic Women's Association") in Frankfurt-Nordend
1931-1933: Ganghoferstraße 24 in the Poets' Quarter of Frankfurt-Dornbusch, the Franks' residence from 1931 to 1933
1933-1934: Pastorplatz 1 in Aachen, where Anne's maternal grandmother Rosa Holländer (née Stern) lived until 1939. Anne stayed with her from July 1933 to February 1934.
Frank was born Annelies[6] or Anneliese[7] Marie Frank on 12 June 1929 at the Maingau Red Cross Clinic[8] in Frankfurt, Germany, to Edith (née Holländer) and Otto Heinrich Frank. She had an older sister, Margot.[9] The Franks were liberal Jews, and did not practice all of the customs and traditions of Judaism.[10] They lived in an assimilated community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of various religions. Edith and Otto were devoted parents, who were interested in scholarly pursuits and had an extensive library; both parents encouraged the children to read.[11][12] At the time of Anne's birth, the family lived in a house at Marbachweg 307 in Frankfurt-Eckenheim (today Frankfurt-Dornbusch),[a] where they rented two floors. In 1931, the family moved to Ganghoferstraße 24 in a fashionable liberal area of Frankfurt-Ginnheim, called the Dichterviertel ("Poets' Quarter") (now also part of Dornbusch). Both houses still exist.[13]
In 1933, after Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party won the federal election and Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich, Edith Frank and the children went to stay with Edith's mother Rosa in Aachen. 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 accommodation for his family.[14] He began working at the Opekta Works, a company that sold the fruit extract pectin. Edith travelled back and forth between Aachen and Amsterdam and found an apartment on the Merwedeplein (Merwede Square) in the Rivierenbuurt neighbourhood of Amsterdam, where many more Jewish-German refugees settled.[15] In November 1933, Edith followed her husband and a month later Margot moved to Amsterdam.[16] Anne stayed with her grandmother until February, when the family reunited in Amsterdam.[17] The Franks were among 300,000 Jews who fled Germany between 1933 and 1939.[18]
After moving to Amsterdam, Anne and Margot Frank were enrolled in school—Margot in public school and Anne in the 6th Montessori School. Anne joined the 6th Montessori School on 9 April 1934; in 1957, it was posthumously renamed "Anne Frank School".[19][20][21] Despite initial problems with the Dutch language, Margot became a star pupil in Amsterdam. Anne soon felt at home at the Montessori school and met children of her own age, like Hanneli Goslar, who would later become one of her best friends.[22]
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.[23][24] Hermann van Pels was employed by Pectacon as an advisor about spices. A Jewish butcher, he had fled Osnabrück with his family.[24] In 1939, Edith Frank's mother came to live with the Franks, and remained with them until her death in January 1942.[25]
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.[25] Otto Frank tried to arrange for the family to emigrate to the United States—the only destination that seemed to him to be viable[26]—but Frank's application for a visa was never processed,[27] because the U.S. consulate in Rotterdam was destroyed in the German bombing on 14 May 1940, resulting in the loss of all the paperwork there, including the family's visa application.[28]
After the summer holidays in 1941, Anne learned that she would no longer be allowed to go to the Montessori School, as Jewish children had to attend Jewish schools. From then on Anne, like her sister Margot, went to the Jewish Lyceum (Joods Lyceum),[29] an exclusive Jewish secondary school in Amsterdam opened in September 1941.[30]
Death
Anne Frank died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March 1945. The specific cause is unknown; however, there is evidence to suggest that she died from a typhus epidemic that spread through the camp, killing 17,000 prisoners.[99] Gena Turgel, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, knew Anne at the camp. In 2015, she told the British newspaper The Sun: "Her bed was around the corner from me. She was delirious, terrible, burning up." She said she had brought Frank water to wash.[100] Turgel, who worked in the camp hospital, said that the epidemic took a terrible toll on the inmates: "The people were dying like flies—in the hundreds. Reports used to come in—500 people who died. Three hundred? We said, 'Thank God, only 300.'"[100] Other diseases, including typhoid fever, were rampant.[101]
Witnesses later testified Margot fell from her bunk in her weakened state and was killed by the shock. Anne died a day after Margot.[102][103] The dates of Margot's and Anne's deaths were not recorded. It was long thought that their deaths occurred only a few weeks before British troops liberated the camp on 15 April 1945,[104] but research in 2015 indicated that they may have died as early as February.[105] Among other evidence, witnesses recalled that the Franks displayed typhus symptoms by 7 February,[1][106][107][108] and Dutch health authorities reported that most untreated typhus victims died within 12 days of their first symptoms.[105] Additionally, Hanneli Goslar stated her father, Hans Goslar, died one or two weeks after their first meeting;[109] Hans died on 25 February 1945.[110] 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.[111]
Otto Frank survived his internment in Auschwitz. After the war ended, he returned to Amsterdam in June 1945 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, during his journey to Amsterdam,[112] 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. Sanne Ledermann, often mentioned in Anne's diary, had been gassed along with her parents; her sister, Barbara Ledermann, a close friend of Margot's, had survived.[113] 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.[114]
Anne Frank Children's Human Rights Memorial in Antigua, Guatemala
Anne Frank Center in New York
Byron Gómez Chavarría, Mural of Anne Frank with birds and hand prints of children (2017), Anne Frankschool, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 2020
Anne Frank Children's Human Rights Memorial designed by Sam Philipe, Jerusalem
On 3 May 1957, a group of Dutch 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 acrylic glass. The House provides information via the internet and offers exhibitions. From the small room which was once home to Peter van Pels, a walkway connects the building to its neighbors, 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.[156] One of Amsterdam's main tourist attractions, it received an average of 1.2 million visitors between 2011 and 2020.[157]
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. 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. The Anne Frank Fonds represents the Frank family and administers the rights, inter alia, to the writings of Anne and Otto Frank and to the letters of the Frank family. It is the owner of the rights to translations, editions, compilations, and authorised books about Anne Frank and her family. The Fonds 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.[158]
In 1997, the Anne Frank Educational Centre (Jugendbegegnungsstätte Anne Frank) was opened in the Dornbusch neighbourhood 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."[159]
The Merwedeplein apartment, where the Frank family lived from 1933 until 1942, remained privately owned until the 2000s. After featuring in 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 their 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.[156]
Anne Frank is included as one of the topics in the Canon of the Netherlands, which was prepared by a committee headed by Frits van Oostrom and presented to the Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Maria van der Hoeven, in 2006. The Canon is a list of fifty topics that aims to provide a chronological summary of Dutch history to be taught in primary schools and the first two years of secondary school in the Netherlands. A revised version, which still includes her as one of the topics, was presented to the Dutch government on 3 October 2007,[160] and approved in 2020.[161]
In June 2007, "Buddy" Elias donated some 25,000 family documents to the Anne Frank House. Among the artefacts 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.[162]
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."[163] 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.[164] The parties built a steel construction that was expected to prolong the life of the tree up to 15 years.[163] However, it was only three years later, on 23 August 2010, that gale-force winds blew down the tree.[165] Eleven saplings from the tree were distributed to museums, schools, parks and Holocaust remembrance centres 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, the scene of a desegregation battle; Liberty Park (Manhattan), which honours victims of the September 11 attacks; and other sites in the United States.[166] Another horse chestnut tree honouring Frank was planted in 2010 at Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama.[167]
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,[168] first performed in 1959, and the choral works Annelies (2005)[169] and The Beauty That Still Remains by Marcus Paus (2015).[170] 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.[171]
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".[139] Philip Roth called her the "lost little daughter" of Franz Kafka.[172] Madame Tussauds wax museum unveiled an exhibit featuring a likeness of Anne Frank in 2012.[173] Asteroid 5535 Annefrank was named in her honour in 1995, after having been discovered in 1942.[174]
As of 2018, there are over 270 schools named after Anne Frank worldwide. 100 of them are in Germany, 89 in France, 45 in Italy, 17 in the Netherlands (among them the 6th Montessori School in Amsterdam which Frank herself attended until 1941), 4 in Brazil, 4 in the United States (among them the Anne Frank Inspire Academy), 2 in Bulgaria and one each in Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, El Salvador, Spain, Hungary, Israel, Nepal, Uruguay and Sweden.[175] In 2020, the first of a series of Anne Frank Children's Human Rights Memorials was placed adjacent to a high school in Maaleh, Adumim, outside of Jerusalem.[176] In 2021, the second memorial was unveiled in Antigua, Guatemala,[177] and another is in fabrication in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to be opened on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27 January 2022.[178] In 2023, a plan to rename a daycare centre in Tangerhütte, Germany, named for Anne Frank since 1970, was met with international outcry and eventually dropped.[179][180]
On 25 June 2022, a slideshow Google Doodle was dedicated in the honour of Anne Frank marking the 75th anniversary of the publication of her diary.[181]