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Anne FrankJewish girl, victim of Nazi terror in the Netherlands
Date of Birth: 12.06.1929
Country:  Denmark |
Content:
Biography of Anne Frank
Anne Frank, a Jewish girl and victim of Nazi terror in the Netherlands, is one of the most famous and discussed victims of the Holocaust. Her personal writings, made during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, became known as "Anne Frank's Diary." The young girl herself referred to her diary as "Het Achterhuis" or "The Secret Annex." Published as a book, Frank's writings became a bestseller and formed the basis for several plays and films.
Early Life
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank was born in Frankfurt, Weimar Germany, into an assimilated Jewish family. She spent most of her life in Amsterdam and its surroundings. Her father, Otto Frank, had a passion for science and owned an extensive library. Her mother, Edith Frank, was more religious than her husband, but both of Anne's parents, being liberal Jews, did not strictly adhere to all Jewish customs and traditions.
The Frank family moved to Amsterdam in 1933, as soon as the National Socialists came to power in Germany. Frank was one of the 300,000 Jews who fled from German territories between 1933 and 1939. She and her older sister Margot attended a Montessori school, where Anne showed her abilities in reading and writing.
The Diary
In May 1940, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, and the occupation government targeted Jews. On her thirteenth birthday, June 12, 1942, Anne received a gift from her father, a diary she had previously pointed out to him in a store window. The gift was an autograph album with a small lock, and the young girl decided to use it for her personal writings.
Initially, Frank wrote about her daily life, but over time, she began to discuss some of the changes brought about by the German occupation. In her diary, she mentioned her desire to become an actress and her love for movies, but Dutch Jews had been banned from attending cinemas since January 8, 1941.
As pressure on Jews intensified in July 1942, the Frank family began hiding in the annex of the building where her father worked. On August 4, 1944, the Dutch police and Gestapo raided several houses, having received a tip from an unknown informant, and captured all members of Anne's family.
The End
After staying in the transit camp Westerbork, Anne and her family were deported to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944. Otto Frank was forcibly separated from his daughters and wife. All the prisoners were brought before Dr. Josef Mengele, a sadistic doctor who decided who would be sent to the gas chambers and who would be allowed to enter the camp. All children under the age of 15 were condemned, but Anne, who had just turned 15 a few months earlier, became the youngest among the prisoners of Auschwitz to escape the gas chamber.
She endured slave labor, terrible conditions in overcrowded barracks, and rampant epidemics. When Margot and Edith Frank were offered relatively peaceful work in an ammunition factory, they refused, not wanting to leave Anne alone, as she was still in the infirmary due to scabies.
By the time Soviet troops were approximately 100 kilometers away from Auschwitz, a selection took place in the women's section of the camp. After another examination by Mengele, the Frank sisters were transported to Bergen-Belsen. In March 1945, a typhus epidemic spread throughout the camp, claiming the lives of approximately 17,000 prisoners. Other diseases, including abdominal typhus, took the lives of those who had survived the initial wave.
Anne's sister, Margot, died in a state of illness, falling onto the cement floor where she lay in oblivion until she was electrocuted. Showing clear signs of abdominal typhus, Anne stopped fighting for her life after her sister's death. She died a few weeks before the British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. The exact dates of Anne and Margot's deaths are unknown. In order to prevent further spread of the epidemic, the decision was made to burn the camp. The Frank sisters were buried in a mass grave in an unknown location.
Otto Frank was the sole survivor in his family. After the war, he returned to Amsterdam, where the diary of Anne, saved by the efforts of friends, was handed over to him. He did everything possible as the guardian of his daughter's legacy to have her writings published in 1947. The Russian edition of "Anne Frank's Diary" was first published in 1960.
It was established that the arrest of the Frank family in 1944 was carried out by Austrian Obersturmführer Karl Josef Silberbauer. However, due to a lack of sufficient evidence of his guilt, Karl was only temporarily suspended from his work in West German criminal police, and no legal proceedings were initiated. He was even later employed by the intelligence service of the Federal Republic of Germany.
