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Anneliese Marie Frank

by Lily from Grass Valley

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." -Anne Frank

Anneliese Marie Frank, now called Anne Frank, was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 12, 1929. Her Mother was Edith Hollander Frank & her Father was Otto Frank. Otto was a successful businessman, but in fall 1933, he, his wife & his eldest daughter, Margot, moved to Amsterdam to form a new business. Anne was left with her grandmother in Aachen, Germany. She finally joined her family a year later, in 1934. She was 4, in 1933, when Hitler & his Nazis came to power, taking over the land. After her sister Margot got a letter ordering her to report to a work camp in Germany, her family went into hiding in an apartment attic, behind Otto's business. To avoid detection, her father left clues suggesting they had gone to Switzerland.

On August 4, 1944 - after 2 years 1 month in hiding - Anne Frank and 7 others in the "Secret Annex" were discovered by the Gestapo - the German secret state police - who had learned about the hiding place from a unknown tipster. After their arrest, the Franks & the other 7 companions were sent by the Gestapo to Westerbork, a holding camp in the northern Netherlands. From there, in September 1944, the group was transported by freight train to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination and concentration camp complex in German-occupied Poland. Anne and Margot Frank were spared immediate death in the Auschwitz gas chambers and instead were sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northern Germany. In early March 1945, the Frank sisters died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen; their bodies were thrown into a mass grave. Several weeks later, on April 15, 1945, British forces liberated the camp. Otto was the only one left of the people in the "Secret Annex."

When Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam following his release from Auschwitz, Miep Gies, Otto's secretary, gave him five notebooks and some 300 loose papers containing Anne's writings. Gies had recovered the materials from the "Secret Annex" shortly after the Franks' arrest by the Nazis and had hidden them in her desk. (Margot also kept a diary, but it was never found.) Otto Frank knew that Anne wanted to become an author or journalist, and had hoped her wartime writings would one day be published. Anne had even been inspired to edit her diary for posterity after hearing a March 1944 radio broadcast from an exiled Dutch government official who urged the Dutch people to keep journals and letters that would help provide a record of what life was like under the Nazis.

Page created on 6/12/2013 12:00:00 AM

Last edited 6/12/2013 12:00:00 AM

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