Frank, Anne

Frank, Anne (1929–1945) young Holocaust victim whose published diary moved the world Annelies Marie Frank, better known as Anne Frank, was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, of Jewish parents. Her father, Otto Frank, a prosperous Frankfurt businessman, realized the gravity of Nazi anti-Semitism and, in 1933, left Germany with his wife and two daughters for what he assumed would be the safe haven of Amsterdam. The German invasion of the Netherlands came in May 1940, and the following year, as the German occupiers instituted anti- Semitic policies in the Netherlands, Anne Frank was forced to transfer from a public school to a Jewish one. As anti-Semitism escalated to the Final Solution in the occupied countries, Otto Frank understood that he and his family would be deported to what he assumed was a forced-labor camp. To escape this fate, Frank took his family into hiding, with four other Jews, on July 9, 1942. They found refuge in the back room office and warehouse of Frank's wholesale food business. Christian Dutch citizens, sympathetic to the plight of the Jews, smuggled in food and other supplies at great risk to themselves. However, not all Netherlanders were so noble. Informers tipped off the local Gestapo, which raided the Franks' hiding place on August 4, 1944. The family was sent to a local transit camp at Westerbork and thence, on September 3, 1944, to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. From here, Anne and her sister Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in October. Their transportation to the camps had been the last from the Netherlands. Anne's mother died in January, just days before Auschwitz was evacuated on January 18, 1945. Anne and her sister succumbed to typhus, epidemic in the camps, in March 1945, shortly before Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the Allies. Alone among his family, Otto Frank survived and was liberated from Auschwitz by Red Army troops on January 27, 1945. Even after their deportation, the Franks had not been abandoned by their Dutch friends. They found in the Franks' hiding place numerous papers and personal effects the Gestapo had failed to confiscate. They saved these, and when Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam, they gave the material to him. He discovered a diary Anne had kept during their desperate confinement. Frank edited it (to some extent bowdlerizing it), and it was published in Dutch in 1947 as Diary of a Young Girl. An extraordinary document, it is an intimate view of the Holocaust through the eyes of an adolescent girl, a vision the more poignant because the diary records all that interested any girl of Anne's age, including her growth into young womanhood, in addition to the terror outside Otto Frank's back room. It is a profoundly human document and a monument to the durability of the human spirit Anne Frank even in the greatest adversity. "In spite of everything," Anne wrote in a particularly memorable passage, "I still believe that people are really good at heart." Diary of a Young Girl, often called "The Diary of Anne Frank," has appeared in more than 50 languages and is certainly the most widely read document to emerge from the Holocaust. In 1995, a new English translation was published, which restored extensive material Otto Frank had expunged from his original version. The government of the Netherlands and the city of Amsterdam preserve the Frank family's hiding place, on the Prinsengracht Canal, as a museum and memorial.