Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By simmons on June 21, 2015

Anne Frank,in full Annelies Marie Frank (born June 12, 1929,Frankfurt am Main, Germanydied February/March 1945,Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Hannover),young Jewish girl whose diary of her familys two years in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands became a classic of war literature.

Early in the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, Annes father, Otto Frank (18891980), a German businessman, took his wife and two daughters to live in Amsterdam. In 1941, after German forces occupied the Netherlands, Anne was compelled to transfer from a public to a Jewish school. Faced with deportation (supposedly to a forced-labour camp), the Franks went into hiding on July 9, 1942, with four other Jews in the backroom office and warehouse of Otto Franks food-products business. With the aid of a few non-Jewish friends, among them Miep Gies, who smuggled in food and other supplies, they lived confined to their secret annex until August 4, 1944, when the Gestapo, acting on a tip from Dutch informers, discovered them.

The family was transported to Westerbork, a transit camp in the Netherlands, and from there to Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland on September 3, 1944, on the last transport to leave Westerbork for Auschwitz. Anne and her sister, Margot, were transferred to Bergen-Belsen the following month. Annes mother died in early January, just before the evacuation of Auschwitz on January 18, 1945. It was established by the Dutch government that both Anne and Margot died in a typhus epidemic in March 1945, only weeks before the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. In 2015 scholars revealed new research, including analysis of archival data and first-person accounts, indicating that the sisters might have perished in February 1945. Otto Frank was found hospitalized at Auschwitz when it was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945.

Friends who had searched the familys hiding place after their capture later gave Otto Frank the papers left behind by the Gestapo. Among them he found Annes diary, which was published as The Diary of a Young Girl (originally in Dutch, 1947). It is precocious in style and insight and traces her emotional growth amid adversity. In it she wrote, In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

The Diary has been translated into more than 65 languages and is the most widely read diary of the Holocaust, and Anne is probably the best-known of Holocaust victims. The Diary was also made into a play that premiered on Broadway in October 1955, and in 1956 it won both the Tony Award for best play and the Pulitzer Prize for best drama. A film version directed by George Stevens was produced in 1959. The well-received play was controversial and was challenged by screenwriter Meyer Levin, who wrote an early version of the play (later realized as a 35-minute radio play) and accused Otto Frank and his chosen screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett of sanitizing and de-Judaizing the story. The play was often performed in high schools throughout the world and was revived (with additions) on Broadway in 199798. A new English translation of the Diary, published in 1995, contained material that had been edited out of the original version, making the revised translation nearly one-third longer than the first. The Frank familys hiding place on the Prinsengracht, a canal in Amsterdam, has become a museum and is consistently among the most-visited tourist sites in Amsterdam.

Read more:
Anne Frank | biography - German diarist | Britannica.com

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