Anne Frank – My Jewish Learning
Posted By simmons on August 15, 2015
The story of the young diarist. By Lawrence Graver
Reprinted with permission from The Yale Holocaust Encyclopedia (Yale University Press).
Anne Frank (1929-1945) was a German-Dutch Jewish girl whose diary of life in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam is the best-known personal document associated with the Holocaust and one of the most widely read books of modern times.
Born Anneliesse Marie in Frankfurt am Main on 12 June 1929, she was the second daughter of Otto Heinrich (1889-1980), a member of an assimilated, successful Frankfurt banking family that had suffered financial setbacks during the economic crises of the 1920s, and Edith Frank-Hollander (1890-1944), the daughter of a well-to-do manufacturer in Aachen.
After the Nazis came to power in March 1933 and began to persecute the Jews, Otto Frank tried to protect his family and livelihood by moving to Amsterdam (a city he knew well), where he established an independent branch of Opekta Work, a firm that made pectin, a powdered fruit extract in jams and jellies. His wife and children joined him in the winter of 1933-34 and the Franks moved to an apartment on Merwedeplein, a quiet neighborhood in the south of the city.
In the late 1930s, Anne and her sister Margot lived the conventional lives of upper middle-class Dutch children, attending a local Montessori school and socializing with a wide circle of friends; but after the Germans invaded Holland in May 1940 and began to restrict the economic and social activities of Jews, the girls were compelled to attend a segregated school (the Jewish Lyceum), and their father transferred overt control of Opekta and a subsidiary firm to Gentile co-workers.
He also began to make preparations to go into hiding in a sealed-off set of rooms behind his office and warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht.
In May 1942, Jews in Holland were ordered to wear yellow stars for instant identifications; and on 29 June plans were announced to deport all Jews to labor camps in Germany. On 6 July, the morning after Margot received a call-up notice, the Frank family and three friends (Hermann, Auguste, and Peter van Pels), fearing deportation and worse, moved into what became known as the secret annex, or Het Achterhuis (the house behind). An acquaintance, the dentist Fritz Pfeffer, subsequently joined them there.
Did you like this article? MyJewishLearning is a not-for-profit organization.
Please consider making a donation today.
Lawrence Graver is Professor Emeritus at Williams College, and author of An Obsession with Anne Frank, and other books.
Reprinted with permission from The Yale Holocaust Encyclopedia (Yale University Press).
Anne Frank (1929-1945) was a German-Dutch Jewish girl whose diary of life in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam is the best-known personal document associated with the Holocaust and one of the most widely read books of modern times.
Born Anneliesse Marie in Frankfurt am Main on 12 June 1929, she was the second daughter of Otto Heinrich (1889-1980), a member of an assimilated, successful Frankfurt banking family that had suffered financial setbacks during the economic crises of the 1920s, and Edith Frank-Hollander (1890-1944), the daughter of a well-to-do manufacturer in Aachen.
After the Nazis came to power in March 1933 and began to persecute the Jews, Otto Frank tried to protect his family and livelihood by moving to Amsterdam (a city he knew well), where he established an independent branch of Opekta Work, a firm that made pectin, a powdered fruit extract in jams and jellies. His wife and children joined him in the winter of 1933-34 and the Franks moved to an apartment on Merwedeplein, a quiet neighborhood in the south of the city.
In the late 1930s, Anne and her sister Margot lived the conventional lives of upper middle-class Dutch children, attending a local Montessori school and socializing with a wide circle of friends; but after the Germans invaded Holland in May 1940 and began to restrict the economic and social activities of Jews, the girls were compelled to attend a segregated school (the Jewish Lyceum), and their father transferred overt control of Opekta and a subsidiary firm to Gentile co-workers.
He also began to make preparations to go into hiding in a sealed-off set of rooms behind his office and warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht.
In May 1942, Jews in Holland were ordered to wear yellow stars for instant identifications; and on 29 June plans were announced to deport all Jews to labor camps in Germany. On 6 July, the morning after Margot received a call-up notice, the Frank family and three friends (Hermann, Auguste, and Peter van Pels), fearing deportation and worse, moved into what became known as the secret annex, or Het Achterhuis (the house behind). An acquaintance, the dentist Fritz Pfeffer, subsequently joined them there.
Earlier, on June 12, Anne started keeping a diary in an album she received as a gift from her parents for her thirteenth birthday, writing on the front page: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope that you will be a great source of comfort and support. The you was not on the diary itself but an imaginary friend, Kitty, to whom she described the daily lives of the incarcerated Jews and her own reactions to growing up in hiding.
During the early months of confinement, Anne wrote vividly about domestic routines and tensions (notably quarrels with her mother), teenage concerns, fear of discovery, longing for independence and freedom, and the stark accounts that reached her of the Nazi persecution of Jews in Amsterdam and elsewhere. As time passed, however, she also recorded with urgency, humor and beauty an expanding awareness of herself as a sexual, moral, political and philosophical being, and as a writer.
In March 1944, in her twenty-first month in hiding, she heard a broadcast from London in which the education minister of the Dutch government in exile urged his countrymen and women to keep accounts of what they endured under German occupation, and she decided to rewrite and edit her diary for publication after the war.
Recasting earlier passages, fictionalizing the names of the actual inhabitants, and sharpening her style, she produced an unfinished, but unfailingly interesting tale of fugitives in hiding, a bitter-sweet adolescent romance involving Peter, and a stirring psychological drama of a girl becoming a young woman. While sequestered, she also wrote a handful of short stories that were to appear in 1956 as Tales of the Secret Annex.
On 4 August 1944, German and Dutch security police (tipped off by an unidentified informer) raided the secret annex and arrested the eight Jews who had been sheltered there for twenty-five months. Annes original and revised diaries, scattered on the floors, were recovered that afternoon by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, two of the Gentiles who had courageously kept the occupants alive (the others were Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman and Jan Gies).
The Franks, van Pels and Pfeffer were taken first to a local police station, then to the transit camp at Westerbork and finally in September to the extermination camp at Auschwitz Birkenau. Hermann van Pels and Edith Frank died there; Peter van Pels perished in Mauthausen, Fritz Pfeffer in Neuengamme, and Auguste van Pels most likely in or near Theresienstadt.
Anne and Margot were sent to Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus and starvation in March 1945, a few weeks before the liberation of the camps by the British and three months short of Annes sixteenth birthday. Otto Frank, the only one of the group to survive, had been freed when Auschwitz was liberated by the Russian army in late January 1945. (See Willy Lindwer, The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, 1991.)
After Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam in June 1945 and eventually learned that his daughters were dead, Miep Gies gave him Annes diaries and exercise books. In the weeks that followed, he began copying out sections that might interest relatives and friends. Since parts of the diary existed in several versions, Frank served as editor as well as transcriber.
When others read his selections, they were convinced of the manuscripts unusual value both as a document of the war and an engrossing story of a lively young girls maturation, and they urged Frank to seek a publisher. At first he thought the diary would attract little attention from outside the immediate family, but he was persuaded to allow friends to make inquiries.
In early April 1946 (after several Dutch firms turned it down), the Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool printed on its first page an eloquent article by the historian Jan Romein, praising the diary as a strikingly graphic account of daily life in wartime and a revelation of the real hideousness of Fascism, which had destroyed the life of a talented, endearing young girl. Uitgeverji Contact published Het Achterhuis in an edition of 1,500 in June 1947, and it received uniformly positive reviews.
Publishers in other countries were at first skeptical that there would be a market for what some saw as the mundane jottings of a little Dutch girl and a bleak reminder of the recently ended war, but French and German translations appeared in 1950.
The turning point in the history of the diary was its remarkable reception in the United States in the summer of 1952. Thanks mainly to a brilliant review by the novelist Meyer Levin on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl (after having been rejected a dozen times) was an immediate best-seller, providing an intensely personal experience for tens-of-thousands of readers.
Adapted for the theater by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett in 1955, The Diary of Anne Frank induced tears in large audiences, many of whom felt as if one of the unknown Jewish dead in Europe had risen from a mass grave and taken on a distinctive identity. Honored by the Pulitzer prize and the Tony and Drama Critics awards, the play was soon staged in many other countries.
A film version by George Stevens in 1959 further popularized the heart-rending, yet in these versions, reassuring story of the child, her fate, and her book. In America a broad public found it easier to relate to a romantic rendering of the victimization of a real/fictional child than to the almost unimaginable number six million. Dozens of translations followed and sales reached into the many millions.
See the original post here:
Anne Frank - My Jewish Learning
- Anne Frank (Author of The Diary of a Young Girl) - October 10th, 2015
- Articles about Anne Frank - latimes - October 10th, 2015
- Anne Frank the Writer | An Unfinished Story - October 5th, 2015
- Anne Frank (2001) - Rotten Tomatoes - September 7th, 2015
- Anne Frank (Author of The Diary of a Young Girl Book ... - September 7th, 2015
- Anne Frank - Google Cultural Institute - September 7th, 2015
- Anne Frank United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - August 15th, 2015
- Ann Dunham - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - August 11th, 2015
- Anne Frank Wikipdia - August 9th, 2015
- Anna Frank - Wikipedia - August 9th, 2015
- Anne Frank | Stacie M Stark - August 6th, 2015
- Anne Frank captured - Aug 04, 1944 - HISTORY.com - August 5th, 2015
- The Diary of a Young Girl - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - July 24th, 2015
- Ann Coulter - Official Home Page - July 23rd, 2015
- The My Hero Project - Anne Frank - July 19th, 2015
- Anne Frank: The Whole Story - YouTube - July 13th, 2015
- Diary of Anne Frank: Read TIME's Original Review of the Book - June 27th, 2015
- Anne Frank | biography - German diarist | Britannica.com - June 21st, 2015
- Anne Frank Made Me Throw Up | Dani Alpert - June 16th, 2015
- The Diary of Anne Frank - June 9th, 2015
- The Diary of Anne Frank: review | Toronto Star - May 31st, 2015
- Anne Frank : Anne Frank - May 25th, 2015
- The Diary of Anne Frank | ArtSWFL.com - May 20th, 2015
- Eye opening experience! - Review of Anne Frank House (Anne ... - May 19th, 2015
- Crowded but worthwhile experience - Review of Anne Frank ... - May 17th, 2015
- Mass grave may hold Anne Frank: Holocaust survivors help pinpoint new site near concentration camp which may contain ... - April 12th, 2015
- #notsilent Author Lydia Syson remembers Anne Frank - Video - April 11th, 2015
- The Diary of Anne Frank - Video - April 10th, 2015
- The Diary of Anne Frank Full Movie - Video - April 3rd, 2015
- PCN Pilgrim Festival Chorus Anne Frank spring concert - Video - April 2nd, 2015
- Anne Frank is Illuminati - Video - April 1st, 2015
- Download PDF Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl - Video - March 29th, 2015
- Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl Audiobook Unabridged YouTube - Video - March 29th, 2015
- Amsterdam Day 3 Vlog - Zoo, Macaroon and Anne Frank House Day. - Video - March 27th, 2015
- The Diary of Anne Frank 1959 Full Movie - Video - March 26th, 2015
- Meet the Sister Anne Frank Hardly Knew in "Anne Frank: Beyond the Diary" Premiering Saturday, April 18 at 10/9c on ... - March 26th, 2015
- American Horror Story Season 2 Episode 1 - 13 [HD] [TV Series] - Video - March 25th, 2015
- March Q&A (Part 1) - Video - March 25th, 2015
- American Horror Story : I Am Anne Frank (1) (Season 2 Episode 4) Full Episode Online - Video - March 24th, 2015
- Verzauberte Prinzessin (1) - Video - March 22nd, 2015
- Vlog Amsterdam/ Tag 1 - Video - March 22nd, 2015
- Partnerships, not apologies, will secure peace in Asia | Walter Hatch | TEDxColbyCollege - Video - March 20th, 2015
- THE SHORT LIFE OF ANNE FRANK - Discovery History Biography War (full documentary) - Video - March 19th, 2015
- "chants de nol 2014" cole Anne Frank Port Saint Louis du Rhne - Video - March 16th, 2015
- Awesome Project FTW!!! - Video - March 16th, 2015
- THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK at Writers Theatre - Trailer - Video - March 13th, 2015
- Forever trusting who we are {Remembering Anne Frank} - Video - March 12th, 2015
- American Horror Story Season 2 Episode 1 Full '= - Video - March 11th, 2015
- Anne Frank was imprisoned in Auschwitz for a short time - Video - March 9th, 2015
- Anne Frank's friend recalls the moment 13-year-old was given the diary - March 9th, 2015
- The Diary of Anne frank: A Fake movie Trailer - Video - March 8th, 2015
- Anne Frank Teil 1 von 2 - Video - March 7th, 2015
- Mead drama students bring 'The Diary of Anne Frank' to stage - Video - March 4th, 2015
- DRIVE-BY Achievement - Trophy FAR CRY 4 Open World SANDMAN 1911 Vehicle Kills Walkthrough - Video - February 22nd, 2015
- Anne Frank - Emma - Video - February 19th, 2015
- Anne Frank and Me, Part Five - Video - February 17th, 2015
- Synopsis | Anne Frank Lp: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife By Francine Prose - Video - February 16th, 2015
- BAD FANFICTION:- Until The End of Time (Anne Frank x Goku) - Video - February 15th, 2015
- The Diary of Anne Frank FULL MOVIE - Video - February 13th, 2015
- NEWS9:Exhibition remembering the life of Anne frank - Video - February 11th, 2015
- Meine Tochter Anne Frank - Video - February 10th, 2015
- The Diary of Anne Frank FULL MOVIE - Video - February 10th, 2015
- "Candlefire" (from Diary of Anne Frank) Michael Nyman - P. Barton, piano - Video - February 8th, 2015
- Super Serious BASE JUMPING & FREE FALLING Stunts Battlefield: HARDLINE Open Beta Awesome Moments - Video - February 7th, 2015
- Anne Frank - Then and Now - Video - February 5th, 2015
- Virtual Tour of the Learning Commons - Video - February 4th, 2015
- Synopsis | Diary Of Anne Frank In Dari Persian Or Farsi By Anne Frank - Video - February 3rd, 2015
- Anne Frank Short Monologue - Video - January 31st, 2015
- Anne Frank and Me,MMHS - Video - January 31st, 2015
- College Anne Frank La Verpilliere - AS Course d'orientation - Video - January 28th, 2015
- 'Auschwitz I got over but the loss I never did' - Video - January 27th, 2015
- Hotel Teun, Hotels in Amsterdam, Netherlands - Video - January 26th, 2015
- The Diary of Anne Frank FULL MOVIE OFFICIAL - Video - January 23rd, 2015
- Holocaust research project|| Anne Frank vs Arek Hersh || Janie Pan and Morgan Pickett - Video - January 23rd, 2015
- Book Haul 1/22/15! - Video - January 22nd, 2015
- Le Journal d'Anne Frank | O dirio de Anne Frank | O destino a ns pertence - Video - January 18th, 2015
- anne frank unit test - Video - January 16th, 2015
- anne frank discussion questions - Video - January 16th, 2015
- Berlin Comedy Podcast With Daniel Louis Vezza #1 - Anne Franks Cat - Video - January 15th, 2015
- Darling Petel - Video - January 11th, 2015
Comments