If we take note of the date, June 12 1929, the girl in the photograph would have been 75 years old. It is difficult to imagine her with the signs of time in her face or hair.
On the date of her birth in Frankfurt am Maine the young girl was remembered and commemorated. When her father, Otto, gave her a very special gift for her 13th birthday, she wrote: “… you were the first thing I saw, maybe one of my nicest presents”… 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.
These are reflections she writes at the beginning of her little book that made this eternal adolescent famous. She wrote an almost prophetic phrase: “I want to continue living after my death”.
For Anne Frank, the diary was a valuable support, an oasis in which she sought refuge and opened her heart. Through it we learn of how she felt, her joys and sadness, her desires and hopes; those never abandoned her not even during the most difficult moments in hiding with the rest of her family and four more persons in that small room. The house number was 263 on Prinsegracht Street in Amsterdam, Holland, where the Jews Otto Frank and his wife Edith had arrived in 1933 with their two daughters Margot and Anne, fleeing from the Nazis.
Living in shadows
In 1941 Anne Frank had to leave her Montessori School and change to the Jewish Lyceum. On July 5, 1942 Margot received a call-up notice from the SS – the secret Nazi organization in charge of massive execution programs. For Otto Frank that was enough. The time had come to take the family into hiding to survive…”I was stunned. A call-up. Everyone knows what that means. Visions of concentration camps and lonely cells … Mother’s gone to Mr. Van Daan to ask whether we can move to our hiding place tomorrow. The van Daans are going with us. There will be seven of us altogether”.
As of July 8, 1942, life changed abruptly for Anne. She would no longer see Harry, her young boyfriend to whom she was so attracted. She would no longer ride her bicycle around the city. Good-bye school, friends, parties …
“Margot and I started packing our most important belongings into a schoolbag. The first thing I stuck in was this diary, and then curlers, handkerchiefs, schoolbooks, a comb and some letters. Preoccupied by the thought of going into hiding, I stuck the craziest things in the bag but I am not sorry. Memories mean more to me than dresses”.
With the help of good persons, Miep Gies, an employee of Otto Frank since 1933, among them, the family prepared to escape death on July 6, 1942.
“I was exhausted and even though I knew it’d be my last night in my own bed, I fell asleep right away until Mother called me at five-thirty the next morning …”
“… I still didn’t know where our hiding place was. At seven-thirty we also closed the door behind us; Moortje, my cat, was the only living creature I said good-bye to…she was to be taken to the neighbors who would giver her a good home”.
The first notation Anne Frank made in her Diary was dated June 12, 1942. A month later she was in hiding.
“You no doubt want to hear what I think of being in hiding. Well, all I can say is that I don’t really know yet. I don’t think I’ll ever feel at home in this house, but that doesn’t mean I hate it. It’s more like being on vacation in some strange pension…Our Annex is an ideal place to hide in. It may be damp and lopsided, but there’s probably not a more comfortable hiding place in all of Amsterdam … in all of Holland”.
She decorated the walls of her room with postcards and posters of her favorite subject: the movies. The long months of hiding in that small refuge were, undoubtedly, terrible for the sensitive young girl (…) forced as she was to stay locked up in a room, sitting in a chair, unable to talk during the day nor of opening the water faucet or flushing the toilet.
The Diary of Anne Frank is really moving; they reveal the hardships they suffered. The closeness of the surroundings made placed these people in very close contact that, in addition to the tension of their situation, provoked arguments among the refugees. It was unavoidable that Anne, only 15, so full of the will to live, felt misunderstood although the firmness of a belief for a better future never abandoned her. She also kept on dreaming: when would the war end; did she want to be a writer or a journalist.
She wrote her last entry August 1, 1944. Three days later their hiding place where they had stayed for two years, the Frank and Pels families and Fristz Pfeffer was raided by the German occupation forces. They were betrayed.
That day, in the Dutch capital “… it was a very normal day but shortly before eleven a catastrophe struck the house at 263 Prinsegracht Street. Miep Gies recalled years later.
The beginning of another tragedy
The Frank and hundreds of Jews were taken to the extermination camp of Auschwitz. Edith, Margot and Anne were in block 29. Dressed in drab gray, Anne managed to get some long johns that gave her a comic look. She was still charming. She shared her coffee; she was calm and quiet and somewhat absorbed in thought. Having been discovered and being in a concentration camp had affected her deeply.
It is believed that mother and daughters were together and supported each other; that Edith tried to keep her daughters alive. Any discord reflected in the Diary was forgotten. Due to the lack of hygiene first Anne and then Margot got scabies that left them with spots and scars. The first to die was their mother. Regarding the daughters, it is thought that they kept to themselves and did not pay attention to the others. They looked terrible. In March of 1945 they died of typhus in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen where they were thrown into a common grave with other victims.
Had she not written the Diary that has traveled the world, Anne Frank would have only been a name and a statistic among the more than eight thousand Jews who fell into the hands of their Nazi persecutors in Holland. This unique book was first released in 1947 by the only survivor of the eight hiding in that small refuge, Otto Frank, the father. The Diary, written by an adolescent in Dutch, has been translated to 55 languages and is the most published book after the Bible.
The words of this young German of wanting to live after death were prophetic. She is reborn after each reading of her moving tale in any corner of the world. The Diary of Anne Frank is, also, a constant denunciation of fascist cruelty.
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