Children…

Anne frank
Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main in Germany in June
1929. She began writing her diary, one of the most famous
accounts of the Holocaust, at the age of 13. It has been translated
into over 50 languages, and now includes a complete
unabridged version.
Shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933, Anne and her
family (her father Otto, her mother Edith and her sister Margot)
escaped to the Netherlands. Like many other German Jews, the
Franks believed that they had now found refuge from Nazi persecution.
The picture shows six-year-old Anne (to the right) with her
friend Sanne in Amsterdam in 1935.
The family’s everyday existence in Amsterdam came to an
abrupt end in May 1940, when the German army occupied
the country. Nazi persecution of Jews in the Netherlands and
throughout Western Europe led Otto Frank to organise a hiding
place for his family to avoid deportation to the death camps in
Poland. In July 1942, the family left its flat and went into hiding
in a secret annex to Otto Frank’s business.
On 8 July that year, Anne wrote in her diary: “The stripped beds,
the breakfast things on the table, the pound of meat for the cat in the
kitchen – all of these created the impression that we’d left in a hurry.
But we weren’t interested in impressions. We just wanted to get out
of there, to get away and reach our destination in safety. Nothing else
mattered.”
Even though they received help from neighbours, the Gestapo was
finally tipped off, and on 4 August 1944, the family was arrested.
Just like the over 100,000 Dutch Jews before them, the
Frank family was taken to the Westerbork transit camp, and then
sent to Auschwitz at the beginning of September 1944.
Edith Frank died shortly before Auschwitz was liberated in
January 1945. Anne and Margot were sent to the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp in Germany, where they died of typhoid fever
in March 1945, not long before the camp’s liberation. Otto Frank
survived captivity in Auschwitz, eventually making it to the Netherlands,
where Anne’s diary was returned to him by family friends
who had been keeping it safe.
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