ANN FRANK

Anne Frank was born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt Germany. She was the second child of Otto Heinrich Frank and Margot Frank. On her birth cert was Annelies Marie, but her friends family called her Anne. Sometimes her father called her little Anne. The Franks were Jews and lived in a mixed community of Jewish and non-Jewish people, and the Frank children grew up with Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish friends. The Frank family did not do all of the customs or traditions of Judaism. Edith the more caring parent, and Otto, a German officer from World War One were also interested in the education of their children. They had a big library and both parents showed the kids to read.

On March 13, 1933, elections were held in Frankfurt for the local council, and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party won. Anti-Jewish laws came out straight away, and the Franks began to fear what would happen to them if they stayed in Frankfurt. Later that year, Edith and the children went to Aachen, where they stayed with their grandmother, Rosa Hollander. Otto remained in Frankfurt, but after receiving an offer to start a company in Amsterdam he moved there with the rest of the family.

Otto began working at the Opekta works, a company which sold fruit, in Amsterdam. By February 1934, Edith and the children had arrived in Amsterdam, and the two of the girls were put into a public school and Anne in preschool. Margot showed skills in maths, Anne always wrote, covering her work with her hands, and not discussing the subject of her writing. These early writings have not survived. Anne and Margot were also seen as highly different people, Margot being well behaved, and quiet, while Anne was honest and loud.

In 1938 Otto Frank started a second company with a man called Hermann Van Pels, a butcher, who had left Osnabruck in Germany with his family. In 1939, Edith’s mother came to live with Anne’s family, and stayed with them until she died in January 1942. In May 1940 Germany attacked the Netherlands, and they began bullying Jews using the racist laws, The registration and seperation of Jews followed. Yellow stars also had to be worn all the time

For her thirteenth birthday on June 12, 1942, Anne got a book that

she had showed to her father in a shop window a few days earlier.

Although it was an autograph book with a small lock on the front,

Anne decided she would use it as a diary. She started writing in it

straight away, writing about herself, her family and her friends,

her school life, boys she talked with and the places she liked to go.

The writing shows her life was the same as any normal schoolgirl,

she also showed changes that were made since the Germans took over Holland. She wrote about the yellow star that all Jews were

forced to wear in public, and she listed some of the restrictions of

Amsterdam's Jewish population.

In July 1942, Margot Frank got a call-up notice from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration ordering her to report for transfer to a work camp. Anne was then told of a plan that Otto had thought up with his most trusted employees and Edith and Margot had been aware of for a short time. The family was to go into hiding in rooms above and behind the company's premises on the Prinsengracht, a street along one of Amsterdam's canals

On the morning of Monday, July 6, 1942, the family moved into the hiding place. Their apartment was left in a state of mess to create the idea that they had left suddenly, and Otto Frank left a note that hinted they were going to Switzerland. The need for secrecy forced them to leave behind Anne's cat, Moortje. As Jews were not allowed to use public transport, they walked several kilometres from their house, with each of them wearing several layers of clothing as they did not want to be seen carrying suitcases.

The attic was a three-story space at the back of the building in which Miep Gies openly lived with her family.(Gies was Otto’s assistant in an office and became a good friend of the family. She discovered and preserved Anne's diary after her arrest and deportation). The atic was entered from a landing above the Opekta offices. Two small rooms, with a bathroom and toilet, were on the first floor, and above that a large open room, with a small room beside it. From this smaller room, a ladder led to the secret attic. The door to the attic was later covered by a bookcase.

Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl were the only employees who knew of the family in hiding, and with Gies husband Jan Gies and Voskuijl's father Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl, were their "helpers" for the time of their hiding. They provided the only contact between the outside world and the people of the house, and they kept them informed of war news and politics. They catered for all of their needs, ensured their safety and supplied them with food, a task that grew more difficult. Anne wrote of their devotion and of their efforts to boost morale in the household during the most dangerous of times. All knew that if they were caught they could face the death penalty for sheltering Jews.

The Franks were joined by the van Pels family In late July, 16-year-old Peter, and father Auguste, Fritz Pfeffer joined them in November, Fritz Pfeffer was a dentist and friend of the family. Anne said in her diary how happy she was by having new people to talk to, in the group tensions quickly grew because they were forced to live in such bad conditions. When Anne was sharing her room with Pfeffer, she realised how hard to get on with he was, Auguste van Pels and Anne also had a lot of disagreements, who she thought was a fool .Anne and her mothers relationship became a bad relationship, Anne wrote in her diary that they had very little in common as her mother was too remote. Anne sometimes argued with her sister Margot, she wrote of an unexpected bond that had grown between them, but she remained closest emotionally to her father. Some time later, after first dismissing the shy and hard Peter van Pels, she recognized a kinship with him and the two entered a romance.

Anne spent most of her time reading and studying, also continuing to write in her diary. She also wrote about her feelings, beliefs and dreams, subjects she felt she could not talk about with anyone. As her confidence in her writing grew, and as she began to mature, she wrote of more subjects such as her belief in God, and how she saw life. She continued writing until her last entry on August 1, 1944.

When Anne was in the attic she continued her learning under her father's control, and on her own she wrote short stories, essays, and an unfinished novel. Life in the attic was mainly quiet during the day, at times they had to stop them selves from using water and using the toilet to avoid being heard by other people in the building. If they wanted to continue living they would have to remain undiscoverd. Through the kindness of four friends of the family who risked their own lives, the people in the attic were giving food and other things witch they needed to survive, as well as friendship and news from the outside world. On the 6^th of June 1944 (D-Day), news came that the war had turned in favor of the Allies, hope increased for the group in the attic. Then suddenly, on the 4^th of August 1944 their hiding place was raided, and they became prisoners of the Nazis. Anne, her sister Margot, and her father and mother were first taken to Westerbork prison in The Netherlands. Then they were shipped by car to Auschwitz. The voice of a loudspeaker dominated all others it said: 'Women to the left, men to the right!' I saw them go away. The men never saw the women again.

Anne was remembered by a person who survived Auschwitz as a leader and as someone who remained sensitive and caring when most prisoners protected themselves from feeling anything. In March 1945, two months before the Germans gave up, Anne died of typhoid fever in the concentration camp.

From the eight of the secret attic, only Anne's father Otto Frank survived. When he came back to Holland from Auschwitz, Anne's diary and papers were given to him. Anne's writings had been left behind by the secret police in their search for valuables, and were found in the hiding place by two Dutch women who had helped the family survive. Otto kept her diary for nearly twenty-six months, capturing experiences which range from a visit to the ice cream shop to her thoughts about human nature. What came from Anne's diary is a young person with talent who was once and childish young girl and became a talented, individual . Anne's talented writing remained unknown to anyone but herself. After reading her diary, her father Otto Frank surprised saying that he never knew his little daughter was so deep and such a talented writer. Shortly after the war ended, Otto gave out type`s of copies of the diary to his friends, who quickly recognized it should be not kept private. It was published two years after Anne died, the diary has since been translated into at least forty languages and adapted into a Prize-winning play The Diary of Anne Frank, which was made into a motion picture.

Part (3)

Evaluation of

Sources

(1) A website I used was http://www.Annefrank.com

This is a good website because it has lots of valuable information from Anne’s early life to her last diary entry on August 1^st 1944. This website has lots of pictures of Anne as a young girl and also when she was getting older and

when she and her family were in hiding. I think this was a good source because the photographs made the history of her life more real.

(2) A book I used was Anne frank (The diary of a young girl) and this book was translated by Susan Massotty. This book was published by Puffin Books in 2002. This was the diary that Anne Frank kept. It was a great source because it retained Annes actual words

(3) Another book I used was The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert and was published by Holt paperbacks. The book looked at the Nazi war on the Jews. This book was very detailed and a difficult source to read. There were very few photographs and maps and there was no mention of Anne Frank

Part (1)

Outline plan

I decided to do my Laving Cert essay on Anne Frank. The reason for this is that we learned about her and read her diary in Primary School and I was interested in it so I wanted to learn more about how she went into hiding and how her family coped under the Nazi regime.

My aims were to

(1) Find out about the history of her family

(2) Find out about her early life

(3) Find out how her family ended up in hiding

(4) Find out what life was like when they were in hiding

(5) And to find out what happened the family after the war

When I picked the topic I then went to get information. I first went on to the internet and found a few web sites and I also got the diary. Here are my sources

www.Annefrank.com

The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert

Anne frank The diary of a young girl by Anne Frank

Anne frank reflections on her life and legacy by Hyman Aaron Enzer and Sandra Solotarrof Enzer