The 10th of May, 1940, World War 2, the Netherlands. Nazi Germany invades Holland
and the German Air Forces – the Luftwaffe – use paratroopers in the capture of tactical points and
to assist in the advance of ground troops across the country. The invasion is accompanied by heavy
aerial bombardment of Rotterdam and culminates on the 14th of May with the destruction of its entire
historic center. Because the Germans threaten to bomb the city of Utrecht in the same way,
the Dutch forces surrender one day later. Soon after the Nazis start to occupy the whole country
and pass new anti-Jewish laws which are designed to exclude Jewish people from society
and restrict their livelihood. 15,000 Jews who fled from Nazi
Germany to the Netherlands between 1933 and 1939 are once again under Nazi domination.
One of them is a Jewish teenager who would become the world’s most famous diarist Anne Frank.
Annelies Marie Frank was born on the 12th of June 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany to Otto
and Edith Frank. Anne had also a sister, Margot, who was three years her senior. The sisters had a
happy childhood playing almost every day in the garden with the children of their neighborhood
The Franks were liberal Jews and lived in an assimilated community
of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of various religions on the outskirts of Frankfurt.
Their life changed dramatically when on the 30th of January 1933, Adolf Hitler, the leader of the
Nazi Party, was appointed chancellor of Germany by the German President Paul von Hindenburg.
The Nazi regime quickly began to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jewish people
and established first the concentration camps, imprisoning its political opponents,
homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, and others classified as “dangerous”.
Because of business problems and growing antisemitism,
Otto Frank decided to leave Germany and move to the Netherlands.
In September 1933, he founded a franchise for the Amsterdam branch of Opekta company that traded in
pectin, a gelling agent for making jam. The rest of the family moved to Amsterdam soon after.
The Franks were among 300,000 Jews who fled from Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939.
After the experiences in the Third Reich, the family felt soon at home in Amsterdam
and the girls enrolled in Dutch schools. They made new friends and despite initial problems
with the Dutch language, they became excellent students, especially Margot.
While the girls seemed to be happy about their new life in their country, for their
parents the situation was more challenging. Otto had to work hard to get his company going
and build a new life for his family. However, the financial situation of the family improved in 1938
when Otto started a new company called Pectacon, which was a wholesaler of herbs and spices.
Seeing the development in Nazi Germany and its aggressive expansion, he even wanted to
set up a new business in Great Britain and move there but this plan did not work out.
The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939. Anne Frank
was 10 years old when Germany invaded the Netherlands on the 10th of May 1940.
The life of the Franks, who were once again under Nazi domination, changed completely.
The criminal Nazi regime from which they ran away in 1933 finally caught up with them in the
country which became their new home and had made them feel free to live their own life.
The Netherlands became an occupied territory, and it did not take long for the Nazis to
begin introducing new anti-Semitic laws and regulations restricting the lives of Jews.
Jewish civil servants were fired and Jewish businesses as well as
the Jews themselves had to be registered. They could no longer visit parks, cinemas,
or non-Jewish shops. Many places thus became off-limits to Anne who could no longer go to
the same school as all Jewish children had to go to separate Jewish schools.
According to new laws, Jews were no longer allowed to run their own businesses
and the Nazis forced Otto Frank to give up his companies. However, Otto had managed to transfer
control of his businesses to his employees soon enough to keep his companies out of Nazi hands.
The situation got worse in 1941 when Jewish men were arrested during raids and then deported to
the Mauthausen concentration camp. Among them were friends and acquaintances of the Franks
and reports of their deaths would soon to follow.
Otto understood that the situation was critical and tried to emigrate to the
Unites States and Cuba. However, he never managed to obtain the necessary documents.
It was in the spring of 1942 when Otto Frank, anticipating deportation of his own family,
decided to set up a hiding place in an empty part of his business premises at Prinsengracht 263.
Regulations which forced Jews to wear a yellow badge in the form of a Star of David as a means
of identification were announced in the Netherlands on the 29th of April 1942.
Those caught without the badge after the 5th of May, when they came into effect,
was arrested and detained for six-week period. The systematic deportation of Dutch Jews to the
death camps started in the summer of 1942. Transports regularly left the transit camps
of Westerbork and Vught. Out of 140,000 Jews who lived in the Netherlands by the beginning of the
Second World War, 107,000 including little children were deported mostly for Auschwitz
and Sobibor by September, 1944. Out of the 107,000, only 5,000 returned after the war.
Before going into hiding, the 12th of June 1942 was probably the last happy moment for the Frank
family. It was the day when Anne celebrated her 13th birthday and received her diary.
A diary which would one day make her famous and in which she would write
about her feelings and thoughts during the difficult times that were to come.
Less than one month later, on the 5th of July 1942, Margot, Anne’s sister,
received a call-up to report for a so-called ‘labor camp’ in Nazi Germany. Knowing the faith of
their friends and acquaintances who had been sent to such camps and never returned, the Franks did
not hesitate for a moment. The next morning, they went into hiding in order to escape persecution.
In the secret annex the family would spend long 761 days.
After 7 days, the Franks were joined by the Van Pels family made up of Hermann, Auguste,
and 16-year-old Peter from whom Anne would receive her first kiss in the secret annex.
In November, they were joined by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and family friend.
It is Anne’s diary thanks to which we know how the Frank family and 4 others
lived for more than 2 years in a three-story space entered through a revolving bookcase.
The people in hiding were completely dependent on six helpers. They were employees and friends
of Anne’s father who provided food, clothing, and everything necessary to the 8 people in
the Secret Annex between 1942 and 1944. Writing helped Anne pass the time and it
is thanks to her diary that we can get a glimpse into the everyday life of the people in hiding.
It was important to be silent especially from 8:30 AM when the men in the warehouse,
which was located below the secret annex, started their work day. Any sound could cause suspicion.
The morning was devoted to reading, studying, and preparing for their lunch break.
At 12:30 PM, when the warehouse workers went home for lunch, a few of the helpers came up to the
Secret Annex to have lunch with those in hiding. Miep Gies usually stayed in the office to keep an
eye on things. The people in hiding could see other faces and listen to the “Radio
Oranje” which was a programme broadcasted by the BBC where Dutch Queen Wilhelmina,
who on the 13th of May 1940 had escaped from the invading German troops and travelled to England,
spoke 34 times during the course of the war. While in the afternoon some people in hiding
took a nap , Anne used to write or study. Then they had a coffee, prepared dinner and at 5:30 PM,
when the warehouse workers went home, the people in hiding could leave the Secret
Annex and spread out through the building. They would cook dinner and took turns using
the bathroom as they did in the morning before the warehouse workers started their working day.
The situation became more dangerous after September 1942,
when special units were formed, made up of Dutch collaborators that began hunting for hiding Jews.
An estimated 25,000 Jews went into hiding in the Netherlands.
Two thirds of them survived and one third were betrayed and discovered.
The 8 people in the Secret Annex belonged to the later group. To this day, we do not know the
reason for the police raid, but the hiding period came to an abrupt end on the 4th of August 1944.
Dutch police officers headed by SS officer Karl Silberbauer went to investigate a tip-off that
Jews were hiding in the upstairs rooms at Prinsengracht 263. The hiding place had been
discovered and Otto and the others were arrested. While Silberbauer confiscated their valuables and
money, he scattered out the papers and notebooks. After people from the Secret Annex were then taken
to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, two other helpers took the documents before the
Secret Annex was emptied by order of the Nazis. Anne’s diary and her other manuscripts survived.
From a prison in Amsterdam, they were sent to the Westerbork transit camp.
They ended up in the prison barracks, and the men and women were separated.
Otto had to work during the day but in the evening he could be with Edith, Margot, and Anne.
After a few weeks, they were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Their train was the last one to leave Westerbork for this extermination camp
located in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The train journey took three horrible days, during which Anne and over a thousand others were packed
closely together in cattle wagons. There was little food and water and only a barrel for a
toilet. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Nazi doctors checked to see who would and who would not be
able to do heavy forced labor. Around 350 people from Anne's transport were immediately
taken to the gas chambers and murdered. While Otto ended up in a camp for men, Anne,
Margot and their mother Edith were sent to the labor camp for women.
After the war, survivors described them as an inseparable trio. Otto would never see them again.
When in early November 1944, Anne and Margot were deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp,
their parents stayed behind at Auschwitz. Edith died of weakness and disease on the 6th of January
1945, three weeks before the Red Army liberated the camp.
At Bergen-Belsen, Anne reunited with her friend - Nanette Blitz - who survived the Holocaust
and described Anne “ as bald, emaciated, and shivering”. She added that Anne did not wish
to live any longer as she believed her parents were both dead. However,
Anne also did tell her that she hoped to one day write a book based on her diary when the war ends.
Sanitary conditions were terrible and there was no water for washing
and hardly enough for drinking and cooking. Between January and March
1945 when the prisoners were sent on death marches from the other concentration camps,
about one-third of the prisoners who arrived in the transports were already dead, and almost
80 percent of the rest had to be fetched by truck from the station as they were too week
and sick to walk. On one occasion out of a transport of 1,900 inmates over 500 arrived dead.
The prisoners got almost no food during these death marches and there was no food when they
arrived at the camp either. The camp was so overcrowded that during winter months
when it was freezing cold, the prisoners had to sleep in a sitting position on the floor
and somehow try to share only 200 blankets in a camp of tens of thousands of prisoners.
Due to starvation, thirst and the outbreak of typhus epidemics,
the average daily mortality rate of prisoners was between 250 and 300.
In these terrible conditions, Anne and Margot contracted typhus as well.
After the war, Gena Turgel, a survivor of Bergen Belsen who worked in the camp hospital
and knew Anne remembered seeing her and in in her own words said that Anne was “ delirious,
terrible and burning up.” She also brought Anne water with which to wash. But unfortunately,
Anne and her sister did not survive After Margot fell from her bunk in
her weakened state and was killed by the shock, Anne died one day later.
They both died in February 1945 owing to the effects of typhus,
Margot first, Anne shortly afterwards.
It was initially believed that the sisters died a few weeks before the camp’s liberation on the 15th
of April 1945. However, it was later revealed that they may have died as early as February.
Anne and Margot are among the millions of victims who were senteced to death by starvation,
thirst, illnesses, ill treatment or extermination with Zyklon B gas.
However, there was one person from the Secret Annex who survived. It was Otto, Anne’s father.
He was liberated on the 27th of January 1945 when the Soviets entered Auschwitz.
On the way back to the Netherlands he found out that his wife Edith had died
but he hoped that Anne and Margot had somehow survived. He returned to the liberated Netherlands
on the 3rd of June 1945 - 9 days before what would have been Anne’s 16th birthday.
All hope was lost one month later when he learned about the death of his daughters.
Miep Gies, one of the helpers of the Secret Annex, passed him Anne’s diary.
After he found enough courage to read it, he was astonished by her writing.
He also read about Anne’s dreams to become a writer and journalist and her intention to
publish her stories about their life in the Secret Annex after the war would be over.
In the end, Anne’s dreams would come true. First 3,000 copies of her book - “Secret
Annex” - were published in 1947. Since then, the book has been translated into over 70 languages.
People all over the world were introduced to Anne's story and in 1960, the hiding place
which for 2 years became the home to 8 people who tried to survive the atrocities of the
criminal Nazi regime, became a museum: the Anne Frank House. Today, you can even visit
her room that has walls brightened with picture postcards and movie stars which Anne collected
and see her original diary and other manuscripts which she wrote until her arrest.
Anne Frank, a teenage girl who perished in the death camp and whose only “sin” was
that she was a Jew, has become a symbol which will live forever and will always
remind us of the dangers of discrimination and racism, and hatred towards each other.
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