HIDDEN and HURT
A biography on Anne Frank

BookWriter (MH)
2010

Family

    On June 12, 1929, Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany. Her older sister, Margot Frank, was born on February 16, 1926. These two Jewish sisters had many differences. Margot was shy, to herself, mellow, quiet, caring, and intelligent. She was also very mature. Anne, on the other hand, was talkative, adventurous, lively, curious, misunderstood, and was very outgoing.
    Through Anne’s eyes, Margot was smarter, quieter, prettier, and more grown-up than herself. The two sisters didn’t often get along, were not close friends, and didn’t confide in each other much. Margot didn’t get much attention in Anne’s diary, but we do know from a letter that Margot sent Anne that Margot wished she had a friend to confide in. She envies Anne’s relationship with Peter, but only the idea of having such a friendship, not actually the boy herself. Margot showed that she was mature and caring by encouraging Anne’s relationship with Peter, and by not being bitter with Anne for having a close friend. Whenever we get glimpses of Margot’s personality, we can’t help but think that she was probably underappreciated by Anne.
    Anne and her mother, Edith Frank, did not have a close relationship as many mothers and daughters do. Anne accused her mother of being cold and tactless, though it’s clear to any reader of the “Diary of Anne Frank” that Edith is hurt by her daughter’s rebuffs. Though, Anne and her mother are both very outspoken and frank.
    As much as Anne adores her father, Otto Frank, she occasionally voices her concern that her father doesn't recognize her for the mature young woman she feels herself to be. Anne saw her father as a kindred spirit. Otto is a perpetual student, inhaling books, history, and news. He encouraged these interests to Anne.

Childhood

    Before World War II interrupted their lives, Hanneli Goslar and Anne Frank did the kinds of things many young girls do. They giggled in class, shared secrets, played games, whispered about boys, and went to parties. Anne and Hanneli were the closest of friends.
    Anne Frank's childhood was very rough. She went to school at the Montessori School. She was very intelligent. For Anne's thirteenth birthday she got a diary and started to write in it every once in a while. Writing in it once in a while became more and more writing.
    On July 6, 1942 Anne and her family went into hiding. This hiding place is called the Secret Annex. The Secret Annex is located in an empty section of the building owned by Otto Frank's Company. While business as usual goes on , something unusual is happening in the back of the building. The entrance to the Secret Annex is disguised by a moveable bookcase.
    During the two years and one month Anne Frank spent hiding in a Secret Annex in Amsterdam during World War II, she kept a diary. Anne Frank's diary, which was published by her father after the war and has been read by millions of people around the world, stating, both the tensions and difficulties of living in such a confined space for that long a duration as well as Anne's struggles with becoming a teenager. Since the publication of her diary, Anne Frank has become a symbol of the children that were murdered in the Holocaust.

5 things you didn’t know about Anne Frank

1. Pseudonyms
    When Anne Frank redid her diary for eventual publication, she created pseudonyms for the people she wrote about in her diary. Do you know what pseudonym Anne chose for herself?

    Even though Anne had chosen pseudonyms for everyone hiding in the Annex, when it came time to publish the diary after the war, Otto Frank decided to keep the pseudonyms for the other four people in the Annex but to use the real names of his own family. This is why we know Anne Frank by her real name rather than as Anne Aulis (her original choice of a pseudonym) or as Anne Robin (the name Anne later chose for herself). In case you are curious, Anne chose the pseudonyms Betty Robin for Margot Frank, Frederic Robin for Otto Frank, and Nora Robin for Edith Frank.

2. Not Just to “Dear Kitty”
    In nearly every published version of Anne Frank's diary, each diary entry begins with "Dear Kitty." However, this was not always true in Anne's original written diary.
    In Anne's first, red-and-white-checkered notebook, Anne sometimes wrote to other names such as "Pop," "Emmy," "Marianne," "Jetty," "Conny," and "Jackie." These names appeared on entries dating from September 25, 1942 until November 13, 1942.
    It is believed that Anne took these names from characters found in a series of popular Dutch books written by Cissy van Marxveldt which featured a strong-willed heroine, Joop ter Heul. Another character in these books, Kitty Franken, is believed to have been the inspiration for the "Dear Kitty" on most of Anne's diary entries.

3. The Inspiration to Publish
    When Anne first received the red-and-white-checkered notebook (which was really an autograph album) for her 13th birthday, she immediately wanted to use it as a diary. As she wrote in her very first entry on June 12, 1942: "I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support." From the beginning, Anne intended her diary to be written just for herself and hoped no one else was going to read it.
    This changed on March 28, 1944 when Anne heard a speech on the radio given by the Dutch Cabinet Minister Gerritt Bolkestein. Bolkestein stated: "History cannot be written on the basis of official decisions and documents alone. If our descendants are to understand fully what we, as a nation, have had to endure and overcome during these years, then what we really need are ordinary documents -- a diary, letters from a worker in Germany, a collection of sermons given by a parson or priest. Not until we succeed in bringing together vast quantities of this simple, everyday material will the picture of our struggle for freedom be painted in its full depth and glory."
    Inspired to have her diary published after the war, Anne began to rewrite all of it on loose sheets of paper. In doing so, she shortened some entries while lengthening others, clarified some situations, uniformly addressed all of the entries to Kitty, and created a list of pseudonyms.
    Although she nearly finished this monumental task, Anne unfortunately didn't have time to rewrite the entire diary before her arrest on August 4, 1944. The last diary entry Anne rewrote was March 29, 1944.

4. A missing Notebook
    The red-and-white-checkered autograph album has in many ways become the symbol of Anne's diary. Perhaps because of this, many readers have the misconception that all of Anne's diary entries lay within this single notebook. Although Anne began writing in the red-and-white-checkered notebook on June 12, 1942, she had filled it by the time she wrote her December 5, 1942 diary entry.
    Since Anne was a prolific writer, she had to use several notebooks to hold all of her diary entries. In addition to the red-and-white-checkered notebook, two other notebooks have been found. The first of these was an exercise book that contained Anne's diary entries from December 22, 1943 to April 17, 1944. The second was another exercise book that covered from April 17, 1944 until right before her arrest. If you look carefully at the dates, you will notice that the notebook that must have contained Anne's diary entries for most of 1943 is missing.
    Don't freak out, however, and think that you didn't notice a year-long gap in diary entries in your copy of Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. Since Anne's rewrites for this time period had been found, these were used to fill in for the lost original diary notebook.
    It is unclear exactly when or how this second notebook was lost. One can be reasonably certain that Anne had the notebook in hand when she created her rewrites in the summer of 1944, but we have no evidence of whether the notebook was lost before or after Anne's arrest.

5. Depression Medicine
    Those around Anne Frank saw her as a bubbly, vivacious, talkative, perky, funny girl and yet as her time in the Annex lengthened, she became sullen, self-reproachful, and morose.
    The same girl who could write so beautifully about birthday poems, girl friends, and royal genealogical charts, was the same one who described feelings of complete misery. On October 29, 1943, Anne wrote, "Outside, you don't hear a single bird, and a deathly, oppressive silence hangs over the house and clings to me as if it were going to drag me into the deepest regions of the underworld.... I wander from room to room, climb up and down the stairs and feel like a songbird whose wings have been ripped off and who keeps hurling itself against the bars of its dark cage."
    Anne had become depressed. On September 16, 1943, Anne admitted that she has started taking drops of valerian for her anxiety and depression. The following month, Anne was still depressed and had lost her appetite. Anne says that her family has been "plying me with dextrose, cod-liver oil, brewer's yeast and calcium."
    Unfortunately, the real cure for Anne's depression was to be freed from her confinement - a treatment that was impossible to procure.

The Holocaust

    The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.

In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe. Although Jews, whom the Nazis deemed a priority danger to Germany, were the primary victims of Nazi racism, other victims included some 200,000 Roma (Gypsies). At least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled patients, mainly Germans, living in institutional settings, were murdered in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans and their collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of other people. Between two and three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect, or maltreatment. The Germans targeted the non-Jewish Polish intelligentsia for killing, and deported millions of Polish and Soviet civilians for forced labor in Germany or in occupied Poland, where these individuals worked and often died under deplorable conditions. From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, German authorities persecuted homosexuals and others whose behavior did not match prescribed social norms. German police officials targeted thousands of political opponents (including Communists, Socialists, and trade unionists) and religious dissidents (such as Jehovah's Witnesses). Many of these individuals died as a result of incarceration and maltreatment.

In the early years of the Nazi regime, the National Socialist government established concentration camps to detain real and imagined political and ideological opponents. Increasingly in the years before the outbreak of war, SS and police officials incarcerated Jews, Roma, and other victims of ethnic and racial hatred in these camps. To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the Germans and their collaborators created ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps for Jews during the war years. The German authorities also established numerous forced-labor camps, both in the so-called Greater German Reich and in German-occupied territory, for non-Jews whose labor the Germans sought to exploit.

Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) and, later, militarized battalions of Order Police officials, moved behind German lines to carry out mass-murder operations against Jews, Roma, and Soviet state and Communist Party officials. German SS and police units, supported by units of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, murdered more than a million Jewish men, women, and children, and hundreds of thousands of others. Between 1941 and 1944, Nazi German authorities deported millions of Jews from Germany, from occupied territories, and from the countries of many of its Axis allies to ghettos and to killing centers, often called extermination camps, where they were murdered in specially developed gassing facilities.

In the final months of the war, SS guards moved camp inmates by train or on forced marches, often called “death marches,” in an attempt to prevent the Allied liberation of large numbers of prisoners. As Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Germany, they began to encounter and liberate concentration camp prisoners, as well as prisoners en route by forced march from one camp to another. The marches continued until May 7, 1945, the day the German armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. For the western Allies, World War II officially ended in Europe on the next day, May 8 (V-E Day), while Soviet forces announced their “Victory Day” on May 9, 1945.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many of the survivors found shelter in displaced persons (DP) camps administered by the Allied powers. Between 1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, including 136,000 Jewish displaced persons from Europe. Other Jewish DPs emigrated to the United States and other nations. The last DP camp closed in 1957. The crimes committed during the Holocaust devastated most European Jewish communities and eliminated hundreds of Jewish communities in occupied eastern Europe entirely.

Hidden
    Thirteen-year-old Anne Frank had been writing in her red-and-white-checkered diary for less than a month when her sister, Margot, received a call-up notice around 3 p.m. on July 5, 1942. Although the Frank family had planned to go into hiding on July 16, 1942, they decided to leave immediately so that Margot would not have to be deported to a "work camp."

Many final arrangements needed to be made and a few extra bundles of supplies and clothes needed to be taken to the Secret Annex ahead of their arrival. They spent the afternoon packing but then had to remain quiet and seem normal around their upstairs renter until he finally went to bed. Around 11 p.m., Miep and Jan Gies arrived to take some of the packed supplies to the Secret Annex.

At 5:30 a.m. on July 6, 1942, Anne Frank awoke for the last time in her bed at their apartment. The Frank family dressed in numerous layers so as to take a few extra garments with them without having to cause suspicion on the streets by carrying a suitcase. They left food on the counter, stripped the beds, and left a note giving instructions about who would take care of their cat.

Margot was the first to leave the apartment; she left on her bike. The rest of the Frank family left on foot at 7:30 a.m.

Anne had been told that there was a hiding place but not its location until the day of the actual move. The Frank family arrived safely at the Secret Annex, located in Otto Frank's business at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.

Seven days later (July 13, 1942), the van Pels family (the van Daans in the published diary) arrived at the Secret Annex. On November 16, 1942, Friedrich "Fritz" Pfeffer (called Albert Dussel in the diary) became the last one to arrive.

The eight people hiding in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam never left their hiding place until the fateful day of August 4, 1944 when they were discovered and arrested.

Hurt
    On a warm August day in 1944, the thing everyone has been afraid of for so long finally happens: they’re discovered and arrested.
    
Silberbauer and a few of his men go into the warehouse on the ground floor of the building. They approach the warehouseman Van Maaren who points in silence, indicating upstairs. They enter the building and go directly to the office. Victor Kugler must escort them to the Secret Annex. The people in hiding have been betrayed…
    The office employees are at work on the second floor when the door suddenly opens. Miep later describes this moment: “The door opened and a small man entered. He pointed the revolver in his hand at me and said: ‘Stay seated! Don’t move!’” Victor Kugler who is working in the adjoining office hears the commotion and goes to see what is going on. Victor Kugler: “I saw four police officers and one was wearing a Gestapo uniform.” One of the policeman points his pistol at Kugler and tells him to lead the way. They all go in the direction of the movable bookcase. It is swung open. The men enter the Secret Annex with their pistols drawn.
    The people in hiding are caught completely off guard. They have lived with the anxiety of being discovered for more than two years and now it is happening. Otto Frank describes that moment: “It was around ten-thirty. I was upstairs with the Van Pelses in Peter’s room and I was helping him with his schoolwork… Suddenly someone came running up the stairs…then the door opened and a man was standing right in front of us with a gun in his hand and it was pointed at us… Downstairs everyone was gathered. My wife, the children, the Van Pelses stood their with their hands up.” A few minutes later, Fritz Pfeffer is also escorted into the room.
    The people in hiding must turn over all their valuables. Silberbauer grabs the briefcase containing Anne’s diary papers. He shakes it empty so he can carry away any valuables he collects. The pages of Anne’s diary fall onto the wooden floor. Otto Frank: “Then he said: ‘Get Ready. Everyone must be back here in five minutes.’” Miep Gies: “Later I heard everyone coming downstairs, very slowly.” After the raid, the people in hiding are taken away in an enclosed truck with both of the male helpers, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, who have also been arrested.
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The Conclusion
Can one person really change the world? Can one teenager really make a difference? Anne Frank taught us that even in the darkest time, good people do significant acts of courage. Have you met some here in this journey? Has their contribution to literature, history, and humanity changed the way you view others and the world? Does who you are make a difference?

You may not live in a context of tragedy like Anne Frank and the others, but you can still make a difference in the world. Where do you begin? You begin with the relationships around you, working in concentric circles out from there. There may be a time when you are called to suffer for what is right. You may struggle for the courage to stand up and be counted. Are you ready?
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Despite everything, I believe that
people are really good at heart.
- Anne Frank