“I know what I want.
I have a goal.
I have opinions.
A religion and love.
I'll make my voice heard.
I'll go out into the world and work for mankind.”
Anne Frank, a teenage girl living in the Netherlands,
wrote these words in her diary,
which she kept for
more than two years while in hiding during the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was the systematic, state sponsored
persecution and murder of approximately 6 million
European Jews by the Nazi regime
and its collaborators.
Anne Frank was among the one
and a half million European Jewish children
killed during the Holocaust.
In January 1933,
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany.
Their ideology was racist, nationalist
and anti-democratic.
The Nazis were antisemitic, which means
they were prejudiced against or hated Jewish people.
People like Anne and her family.
In the spring and summer of 1933.
The Hitler led Nazi Party carried out
violence towards Jewish people living in Germany
looking to escape Nazi persecution.
Otto Frank moved his family from their home in Germany
to Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
And and her sister Margot were four and seven years old.
Over the next six years, the Nazi controlled government
gradually stripped away the rights and freedoms of the many
Jewish people who remained in Germany.
They targeted and excluded Jews from
German society.
Antisemitic signs were put up all over Germany.
The Nazi German regime enacted antisemitic measures,
such as discriminatory laws and organized violence
targeting Germany's Jews.
Across the border in the Netherlands,
the Frank family was safe.
But Nazi Germany started expanding its territory.
In September 1939,
Nazi Germany invaded Poland, starting World War Two,
as Nazi Germany took more territory.
Millions of Jewish people came under its control.
They, too, lost their rights and were now in danger.
About eight
months later, on May 10th, 1940,
Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands,
Belgium, Luxembourg and France.
The German authorities, who now controlled the Netherlands
put in place new laws discriminating
against Jewish people.
When she began her diary in 1942
and wrote about this time.
“Our freedom was severely restricted
by a series of anti-Jewish decrees.
Jews were required to wear a yellow star.
Jews were required to hand in their bicycles.
Jews were forbidden to ride in cars.
Jews were forbidden to go to theaters, cinemas
or any other forms of entertainment.
Jews were required to attend Jewish
schools.” Anne’s father
Otto applied to immigrate to the United States.
But the United States had laws that limited
the number of people allowed to enter each year.
It was very difficult to immigrate.
The war soon made
it impossible for the Franks to leave the Netherlands.
Nazi Germany
and its collaborators
soon began to deport Jews from all over
Europe to specialized camps
called killing centers in Eastern Europe.
These deportations included the Jews from the Netherlands.
During the Holocaust, more than two and a half million
Jews were murdered in these killing centers.
Hundreds of thousands more were imprisoned
in concentration camps.
Forced to work until many died of starvation, disease
or violence.
In addition, special squads murdered as many as 2 million
Jews in mass shootings.
In 1942, authorities began sending out notices
to Jewish people living in the Netherlands.
The notices ordered
Jewish people to report to the authorities.
There were serious punishment
if they failed to obey the order.
German authorities
eventually deported
100,000 Jewish people from the Netherlands
to killing centers where most were murdered.
On July 5th, 1942,
16 year old Margot
Frank got a notice to report for so-called work.
Otto Frank had been preparing for this day.
He created a hiding place for the family behind a bookcase
in a series of rooms
at the back of his business,
right in the middle of Amsterdam.
Anne called it the secret annex.
The Frank family went into hiding the day
after Margot received the call up notice.
Anne was 13 years old.
Otto's coworker,
Hermann van Pels, his wife Auguste and 15 year
old son Peter, joined the Franks in hiding.
In her diary, Anne called them the van Daans.
After a few months living in the hiding place,
the families decided they had room for one more.
Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist
whom Anne called Albert Dussel in her diary.
Otto had recruited
trusted friends
to help hide the families in the secret annex
for the next two years.
These brave people risked their lives to bring food,
books, clothing and news to those in hiding.
On March 28th, 1944,
a broadcast from Dutch leaders in London urged
the Dutch people to keep diaries, letters and other items
that would document life under German occupation.
Anne, who heard the broadcast on the annex’s illegal radio
decided that she would like to publish the diary
she had started in 1942.
She went through her entries
and prepared them for publication,
even rewriting some of her old entries
to add more details.
On June 6th, 1944,
the residents of the secret annex were excited to hear
that allied forces had landed in Normandy, France.
This invasion,
known as D-Day, marked a major
turning point in World War Two.
Anne wrote:
“We don't know yet, but where there's hope, there is life.
It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.”
They had been in hiding
for nearly two years.
On August 4th, 1944,
all of the residents of the secret annex were arrested.
Some of their helpers were arrested, too.
Historians are still trying to figure out
how the residents of the secret annex were caught.
Some argue they were betrayed
by one of the business's employees or by a neighbor,
while others argue
they could have been discovered
by police who were searching the building
for something else.
After their arrest,
the eight residents of the secret annex
were sent to the Westerbork Transit camp.
After a month,
they were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration
camp and killing center
in German
occupied Poland, where they were selected for labor.
The families were separated.
Otto Frank never saw his wife or children again.
Edith Frank,
Anne's mother, died of disease and starvation in Auschwitz
in January 1945.
Anne and Margot were later sent to Bergen-Belsen,
a concentration camp in Germany.
In February 1945,
they both got very sick and died.
Anne was 15, and Margot
was 19 years old.
Bergen-Belsen was liberated by British
and Canadian soldiers
approximately six weeks after the girls died.
Otto was liberated at Auschwitz by the Soviet army.
He was the only resident of the secret annex
to survive the Holocaust.
Otto returned to Amsterdam after the war, where Miep Gies,
one of the young Dutch helpers, gave him Anne’s diary.
She had saved it in the hopes of returning it to
and after the war.
Otto knew it was Anne's dream to become a published author.
He published her diary
in 1947, two years after the war ended.
Otto spent the rest of his life
making sure that his family's
lives and experiences in hiding would be remembered.
He died in 1980.
“I want to be useful
or bring enjoyment to all people,
even those I've never met.
I want to go on living even after my death.
When I write, I can shake off all my cares.
My sorrow disappears.
My spirits are revived. But.
And that's a big question.
Will I ever be able to write something great?
Will I ever become a journalist or a writer?”
Anne Frank.
Anne wrote her diary
for more than two years while hiding in the secret annex.
She died in the Holocaust when she was 15 years old.
She was not famous in her lifetime,
but her diary has now been
translated into more than 70 languages.
It has been read by people around the world who continue
to learn from her story.