HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2024-08-07T13:22:19.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/people/anne-frank/feed/atom HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Why we should remember the English translation of Anne Frank’s diary]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-remember-anne-frank-diary-translation/ 2024-08-07T13:22:19.000Z 2022-04-28T10:22:52.000Z When was Anne Frank’s diary first published?
Originally written in Dutch, the diary was first published in 1947 in the Netherlands as Het Acterhuis: Dagboekbrieven 12 Juni 1942–1 Augustus 1944 (The Secret Annex: Diary-Letters 12 June 1942–1 August 1944). Anne Frank herself had chosen the title for the book, which she planned to publish after the war.
“The title alone,” she observed, “would be enough to make people think it was a detective story.”
What was the significance of the English translation?
In 1952, two English language editions were published, in the US and the UK. The title was changed to Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. The emphasis was on the work of a young person whose life had been tragically cut short. The book was successful in the US, as well as in France and Germany, but in the UK there was little interest at first and by 1953 it was out of print. However, it eventually became a bestseller and has now been translated into more than 70 languages.
What does the diary tell us about Anne and her life?
Frank’s diary stops before her arrest and deportation to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Readers are drawn to the diary because it allows us supposedly to read about the Holocaust while not actually having to deal with its horrors. It reveals a highly articulate, vivacious young girl who, although suffering the misery and stress of hiding in cramped and difficult conditions, still manages to retain – at least to some extent – what Frank herself calls her “illogical gaiety”.
Why should we remember it today?
Though Anne’s diary stops before the last appalling months of her life unfold, our interest in the Holocaust must not. We are nearing a time when no witness to the Holocaust will remain alive, so it is now left to us – those born after the events – to confront the daunting task of retrieving some sort of meaning from the tragedy.
Anne Frank was one of 1.5 million Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust. Her story reminds us not only of the extremity and magnitude of this event, but also of the intensely personal nature of Holocaust experiences. Today it has become more important than ever to treat the experiences of the victims of each and every episode of ethnic cleansing, genocide and war with the respect and cautious humility they deserve.
- Learn more about the Holocaust
Zoë Waxman is a departmental lecturer in modern Jewish history at the University of Oxford
This article first appeared in the April 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Forgotten voices: the history behind Holocaust Memorial Day]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/holocaust-memorial-day-history-why/ 2025-02-14T14:22:32.000Z 2021-01-27T08:05:00.000Z Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January is a keystone of the national calendar. And who would argue that it shouldn’t be? What could be more important than to commemorate every year the unique atrocity of the Holocaust? Indeed, my impression is that most people think that Holocaust Memorial Day has been with us since the end of the war. But that’s far from the truth.
In fact, the first Holocaust Memorial Day was held in Britain in 2001. And it wasn’t until 2004 that the United Nations made a formal statement of commitment to commemorate the atrocity, recognising that the Holocaust “shook the foundations of modern civilisation” and was a crime of “unprecedented character and horror”. Similarly, it wasn’t until relatively recently that large-scale Holocaust museums became prevalent. The United States Holocaust Museum opened in Washington to the public in 1993 and Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe opened in 2005.
Doesn’t it seem extraordinary that it took so long for these memorials to be created and for the world to come together in agreement to honour the memory of the dead on a Holocaust Memorial Day? Why, in particular, did it take the United Nations nearly 60 years to recognise the “unprecedented character and horror” of the Holocaust and agree to the creation of a special memorial day every year?
The liberation of Auschwitz
Our first clue as to the answer lies in the circumstances of the liberation of Auschwitz. This camp, more than any other, is symbolic of the Holocaust. Auschwitz is the site of the largest mass murder in the history of the world. Around 1.1 million people were killed there – 1 million of them Jews. It’s no accident, therefore, that the date chosen for Holocaust Memorial Day in this country is the day that Auschwitz was liberated – 27 January.
But when Red Army soldiers of the 1st Ukrainian Front first approached Auschwitz in 1945 they did not appreciate the immense significance of the place. Ivan Martynushkin, a lieutenant in the Red Army, reached Auschwitz/Birkenau just hours after the camp had been secured by his comrades. “We had a feeling that we had done something good,” he says, “a very good deed, that we had somehow fulfilled our duty.”
But though he and his comrades had “feelings of compassion” for the Auschwitz survivors they encountered, they did not think that they were witnessing something special: “You have to understand the psychology of people who have been at war… I already had more than a year of direct combat experience behind me, and during that time I had seen camps – not like this one, but they were nevertheless smaller prison camps. I had seen towns being destroyed. I had seen the destruction of villages. I had seen the suffering of our own people. I had seen small children maimed. There was not one village which had not experienced this horror, this tragedy, these sufferings.”
While the liberation of Auschwitz was not ignored in newspapers at the time, it was given much less prominence than one would expect from the perspective of today. The Pravda correspondent Boris Polevoi wrote an article that was published on 2 February, and the Jewish Chronicle in Britain followed up the story a few days later. However, there wasn’t the sense in the media that something truly astonishing had been uncovered at Auschwitz. That was partly because there had already been extensive coverage of the discovery of Majdanek camp six months before. And since Zyklon B had been used for killing at both Auschwitz and Majdanek, it was possible at first for the general public not to understand the unique significance of Auschwitz within the Nazi state.
Even more important for the way understanding of the Holocaust would develop, was the manner in which Polevoi in his Pravda article chose to interpret what had happened at Auschwitz. Following Marxist beliefs, Polevoi saw Auschwitz as the logical conclusion of capitalism – a giant factory where the workers were murdered when they were no longer useful. From this point onwards there would be a fissure between the communist and non-communist worlds over the historical significance of Auschwitz. In particular, the Soviets would seek to reduce the emphasis on Jewish suffering, often referring to the dead only as “victims of fascism”.
Rewriting history
All of the major Nazi death camps were now in territory controlled by the Red Army, and subsequently in postwar communist Poland. History was written – and often re-written – to put the communists centre stage in the struggle against Nazism. One Polish history of the Warsaw ghetto uprising stated that communist fighters had organised the revolt (when in fact it was orchestrated by the Jewish resistance). All criticism of the Soviet Union was banned and the true history was distorted to grotesque levels.
In the west the emphasis was on highlighting iconic events of the conflict like the Battle of Britain and D-Day. The role of the western Allies in acquiescing to Stalin’s rule of eastern Europe was inconvenient for any ‘heroic’ narrative of the war. The fact that the Polish had simply swapped the rule of one dictator, Adolf Hitler, for that of another, Josef Stalin, was especially embarrassing – not least because the catalyst for war, as far as the British and French were concerned, had been the Nazi invasion of Poland. In that context, the fact that around half of the victims of the Holocaust had been Polish, and Poland still remained under repressive rule, was a huge problem for the western Allies in their desire to present the war as a ‘total victory’.
Holocaust survivors
As for the survivors of the Holocaust, they moved in their hundreds of thousands away from their prewar homelands, with many settling in Israel and America. Until recently the conventional wisdom had been that large numbers of these survivors chose to keep quiet about their wartime suffering in an attempt to start afresh. But pioneering scholarly work over the last few years has exploded this ‘myth of silence’ by demonstrating that many survivors did talk about their experiences at the hands of the Nazis – though in some cases, while the survivors wanted to talk, their acquaintances and workmates were not that keen on listening.
- Laurence Rees on the perpetrators of the Holocaust: “What they told us was, at the time, they felt it was the right thing to do”
At first glance one might think that the one country where survivors would be encouraged to speak about their suffering would be Israel. But the situation there was complex. While in April 1951 the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) announced the creation of a Holocaust memorial day, there was ambivalence among some Israelis about the behaviour of Holocaust survivors during the war. As Moshe Tavor, a soldier who fought in the Jewish Brigade in the British Army put it: “I’m a different type of person than those Jews who lived in small towns in Poland. As kids we’d pretend we were old Jewish heroes and fight mock wars. I feel very connected to the people who fought here [in Israel] 2,000 years ago, and I was less attached to the Jews who went like sheep to the slaughter – this I couldn’t understand.”
The desperately unfair taunt that Holocaust survivors went to their deaths like “sheep to the slaughter” was not uncommon – a number of survivors in Israel have told me personally that they heard such insults on their arrival after the war. The apparent pacifity of many of the survivors was in stark contrast to the heroic image that the new Israeli state wanted to project. This explains why the original declaration in 1951 creating Holocaust Memorial Day – in Hebrew ‘Yom Hashoah U’Mered HaGetaot’ – translates into English as ‘Holocaust and Ghetto revolt remembrance day’. The emphasis from the beginning was on ‘resistance’ as much as suffering.
It was the trial and eventual execution of Adolf Eichmann (who helped facilitate the mass deportation of Jews to the death camps) in Israel in 1961 that opened many people’s eyes to the true scale and horror of the Holocaust for the first time. In the courtroom survivors took centre stage as never before and – in contrast to the Nuremberg trials immediately after the end of the war – were able, one after another, to confront one of the key perpetrators directly. Most dramatically, Auschwitz survivor Yehiel De-Nur testified in front of Eichmann and then fainted.
The meaning of ‘Holocaust’
The Eichmann trial also paved the way during the 1960s for an increased awareness of the word ‘Holocaust’. Though Israel’s declaration of independence had used the term as far back as 1948 to describe the Nazis’ campaign of murder against the Jews, it wasn’t in general use until much later. Dictionaries in the early 1960s still referred to a ‘Holocaust’ in non-specific terms as a ‘complete destruction’ or a ‘burnt sacrifice’. The adoption of the word by the general public to describe the mass murder of the Jews was gradual, but certainly by the time the successful NBC mini-series Holocaust was broadcast on American TV in 1978, the idea that this ‘unique’ crime deserved a ‘unique’ descriptive term had been generally accepted.
Of course, there are problems with the word ‘Holocaust’ – most obviously that there isn’t universal agreement about what precisely the word means. Some people use the term to describe only the extermination of the Jews, others to describe any act of genocide – for example the ‘Rwandan Holocaust’. But an even bigger difficulty, in my view, is that a narrow definition of ‘Holocaust’ can result in a misunderstanding of the history. While the extermination of the Jews was a unique crime at the epicentre of the Nazis’ plans to racially reshape Europe, you can’t comprehend Nazi thinking if you omit their potentially exterminatory intention towards other groups. This included the plan to destroy tens of millions of Slavs via the General Plan for the East, the ‘euthanasia’ actions against people with mental or physical disabilities, and the murder of countless Poles and gypsies in camps like Auschwitz.
However, none of that is a reason not to appreciate the benefits that a broad acceptance of the word has brought. Notwithstanding the definitional arguments, there is now general agreement that the word ‘Holocaust’ recognises the extermination of the Jews as a crime of singular horror and importance in the history of the world. In short, it’s important to remember that you can’t have a ‘Holocaust’ memorial day or a ‘Holocaust’ museum without the word ‘Holocaust’. This isn’t quite as obvious a statement as it first sounds. Because for 20 years after the war there wasn’t one descriptive word in general circulation for the crime. Labelling is important.
The collapse of communism
But it took one final historical upheaval to prepare the ground for the explosion of public awareness in the Holocaust. And that was the collapse of communism in eastern Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For the first time, those who had experienced the Second World War and had lived behind the iron curtain could speak openly about the conflict. I remember, for example, meeting a former member of the Nazi killing squads who was living in Lithuania, and filming him for my series Nazis: A Warning from History in the mid-1990s. His testimony was shocking – but instructive – and would have been impossible to obtain if the communists had still been in power. Even though he had already served 20 years in a Gulag for his crimes, he had been forbidden by the communist authorities to talk about the war.
And it wasn’t just people who were released from the restrictions of communism, it was places as well. For the first time it was possible to have free access not just to Auschwitz, but also the sites of other death camps, like Sobibor and Treblinka. Significantly, not until well after the fall of communism would the signage at the Auschwitz museum be changed to reflect in a proper manner the suffering of the Jews.
- Holocaust denial on trial
We tend to forget how effective repression can be in stifling and distorting historical knowledge. How much, for example, is known in this country about the appalling conflict between China and Japan that raged from 1937–45? Because the Chinese government controls access to the key archives and vital eyewitnesses, it is impossible to make a TV series about this war in the same way I made Nazis: A Warning from History. Not that I didn’t try. I filmed in China for my series Horror in the East 15 years ago, but it was so hard to get eyewitnesses to speak without fear of repercussions that I had to say to my bosses at the BBC that my planned six-part series should be shortened to two. Even when we approached Chinese eyewitnesses privately and offered them anonymity, away from the prying eyes of our government minder, the majority remained too frightened to speak.
The Chinese government’s attitude to the filming was governed by their own narrow political interests. They were happy that we interview survivors of the Nanking massacre, but refused to allow eyewitnesses from the murderous Japanese actions in the north of China to talk on camera. One night my government minder got drunk and told me why he thought this was. “The truth is,” he said, “we’re looking for the Japanese to build a big DVD factory around there.”
I filmed in the former Soviet Union back in the 1980s and experienced exactly the same self-serving attitude by the authorities towards history. And there’s no doubt that after the war this prevented a complete historical analysis of the actions of the Nazis on territory subsequently controlled by the Soviets.
However, it is also certainly the case that a movement towards commemorating the Holocaust in a more high-profile way had begun before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In America, though the Holocaust Memorial Museum did not open until 1993, the United States Congress had agreed as far back as 1980 that such a museum should be established. In Britain, the Holocaust Educational Trust, which does such important work, was formed in 1988. But despite all that, I can’t see how a United Nations consensus around Holocaust Memorial Day would have been possible if the Soviet Union still existed, and many of the dead were simply classed as “victims of fascism”.
The history of Holocaust memorial is thus an instructive one, reminding us that it can take many years before a consensus is formed about the importance of past events. And, if repressive regimes remain in place, sometimes this worldwide consensus can never happen at all.
Laurence Rees is a writer and broadcaster who has made numerous series for the BBC including Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (2005) and Nazis: A Warning from History (1997)
This article was first published in the January 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[A brief history of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Anne Frank died]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/bergen-belsen-concentration-camp-holocaust-ww2-history-facts-anne-frank-died-liberated-conditions/ 2024-10-20T17:42:05.000Z 2020-04-14T13:39:51.000Z Please note: This article contains images some readers may find distressing
When was the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp first set up?
Bergen-Belsen was established as a concentration camp in 1943. However, it had been used as a prisoner of war (PoW) camp since 1940, with close to 20,000 Soviet PoWs dying in 1941–42 as a result of starvation and disease.
In fact, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was composed of three camps. In spring 1943, the SS and the German Foreign Office set up a so-called ‘exchange camp’ (Austauschlager) for Jewish hostages alongside the PoW camp. In some cases, entire families were held there with the intention of exchanging them for commodities, ransom money, or for Germans interned abroad. However, few exchanges ever took place.
The SS also set up a camp in the spring of 1944 for sick and dying male prisoners from other camps who were no longer able to perform forced labor. Many of the male prisoners in the men’s camp (Männerlager) had been imprisoned for political reason (in April 1945, a few days before Bergen-Belsen was liberated, the SS set up a sub-camp of the men's camp at the neighbouring Bergen-Hohne barracks).
A women’s camp (Frauenlager) was added in the summer of 1944. These women and girls were used as forced labourers in the nearby satellite camps for the armaments industry. Many of the women were Jewish and had been deported from Auschwitz concentration camp to Bergen-Belsen.
How many people were held at Bergen-Belsen, and how many died?
Around 15,000 men, women and children had been crammed into the Jewish exchange camp in 1943 and 1944. The men and women’s camps each held more than 50,000 prisoners. Roughly 52,000 of around 120,000 prisoners from across Europe died in Bergen-Belsen, most of them in the spring of 1945.
What were the conditions like?
Living conditions varied greatly depending on when and in which part of the camp complex you were detained. Until the winter of 1944–45, conditions in the Jewish exchange camp were relatively decent in comparison to the men’s camp or the women's camp. The worst conditions were in the men's camp, since the men housed there were basically left to die.
Starting in early 1945, transports arrived in great numbers to Bergen-Belsen from other concentration camps that had been evacuated near the front, e.g. Auschwitz. A total of 85,000 additional prisoners arrived at Bergen-Belsen until April 1945. As a result, food was scarce and overcrowded conditions led to the outbreak of diseases such as typhus and dysentery. Soon, apocalyptic conditions prevailed and the SS did nothing to contain the misery. In March 1945 alone, some 18,000 prisoners died. Towards the end of the war, there were more than 1,000 deaths per day.
Was Bergen-Belsen a death camp? What’s the difference between a concentration camp and a death camp?
Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp, but due to the high death rate in the final months of the war, one could indeed call it a death camp in the end. However, aside from the 200 men who were poisoned with carbolic acid injections in the summer of 1944, there was no active killing at Bergen-Belsen. Mass deaths were not planned as such; there were no gas chambers and no shootings. Yet the SS consciously accepted the extremely high death rates, especially in the men's camp, where inmates died as a result of organised, deliberate neglect.
In fact, Bergen-Belsen differed from both the extermination camps – where mass murder took place in the gas chambers – and from other Nazi concentration camps, whose main function was to detain all ‘undesirables’ (racial, political or social) and exploit them for the wartime economy.
The women's camp at Bergen-Belsen could be considered the closest to a concentration camp. These inmates were used for forced labor in the war economy, as was the case in other concentration camps, such as Buchenwald or Dachau during the second half of the war.
The men's camp, on the other hand, was set up only for sick and dying male prisoners, and the Jewish hostage camp was fundamentally different from other concentration camps. The inmates held there were not supposed to die (but were needed for a possible exchange); they were allowed to wear civilian clothes instead of the striped prisoner uniform, and a small number of them were actually released (around 2,500).
When was Anne Frank sent to Bergen-Belsen? How long was she there, and how did she die?
Due to the popularity of her diary after the war, Anne Frank is probably the most well-known victim of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Together with her sister, Margot, she was deported from Auschwitz to the women's camp of Bergen-Belsen in early November 1944. In Bergen-Belsen, both sisters, who were already severely weakened by their time in Westerbork and Auschwitz, contracted typhus. According to reports from fellow inmates, they died in late February or early March 1945 and their bodies were burned or buried in one of the many anonymous mass graves on the camp’s grounds.
- 12 things you need to know about Anne Frank and her diary
- How was Anne Frank’s diary edited by her father? Find out here
Who was the leader of the camp?
The first commandant of Bergen-Belsen was SS*-*Sturmbannführer (Major) Adolf Haas. He started working in the concentration camp system in 1940 and served as commandant of Wewelsburg concentration camp before his transfer to Bergen-Belsen in 1943. In December 1944, he was sent into battle.
His successor was SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Josef Kramer. Kramer had been working in the concentration camp system since 1934, most recently as commandant of Natzweiler and Auschwitz-Birkenau. He stayed at Bergen-Belsen from December 1944 until the liberation of the camp on 15 April 1945, when he was arrested by the British forces. At the British Belsen Trial in Lüneburg, he was sentenced to death and executed in Hameln in December 1945.
Of course, Haas and Kramer were not the only ones responsible for the catastrophic conditions in Bergen-Belsen. Many other members of the SS and Wehrmacht, who were guards or commandant functionaries at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, as well as the military and civilian authorities of the SS, Wehrmacht and the Foreign Office, also bore much responsibility.
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Who liberated Bergen-Belsen and what did they find when they arrived? When did the camp officially close?
Bergen-Belsen was liberated by British troops on 15 April 1945.
Due to the rampant typhus epidemic, the SS did not evacuate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as the British troops were approaching. Instead, the Wehrmacht and the British negotiated a local armistice, under which the camp’s commandant, Josef Kramer, handed over the camp to British soldiers without a fight.
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The British witnessed an unimaginable horror: 10,000 unburied corpses in various stages of decomposition lay scattered on the camp’s grounds, and 50,000 others lay ill and dying. British soldiers and civilian relief workers had the dead buried in mass graves to stem the further spread of typhus. They moved the survivors to emergency hospitals in the neighboring Bergen-Hohne barracks. Yet despite the help of the British, 14,000 liberated inmates were too sick to recover and died between April and June 1945.
What happened to the survivors?
As soon as survivors were fit enough to travel, they could return to their countries of origin. But many Jews and Polish survivors in particular stayed in the Bergen-Hohne barracks and were given the status of “displaced persons” (DPs).
Due to restrictive immigration regulations, Jewish survivors had to wait for the opportunity to emigrate to the USA or Palestine. The Jewish Displaced Persons (DP) Camp at Bergen-Belsen was dissolved in 1950. The Polish DP camp, meanwhile, was disbanded in September 1946.
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Can you visit Bergen-Belsen today?
The site of the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is now a large cemetery. Mass graves and monuments from 75 years ago are a reminder of the site’s horrible past. There is little left of the physical camp. Visitors can have an in-depth look at the history of the PoW camp and concentration camp as well as the Bergen-Belsen DP (displaced persons) camp in the documentation centre’s extensive permanent exhibition. Multi-lingual guided tours and seminars are offered for groups of visitors. In 2019, a part of the former DP camp in the neighboring barracks opened its doors to visitors.
Jens-Christian Wagner is a German historian who specialises in the history of National Socialism, particularly forced labour and concentration camps, and in politics after 1945. He is also director of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, which has offices at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[12 things you need to know about Anne Frank and her diary]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/facts-anne-frank-diary-when-found-died-amsterdam-hiding-how-long/ 2024-10-10T16:03:22.000Z 2020-03-09T14:35:00.000Z Here, Zoe Waxman, senior research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, shares 12 interesting facts about Anne Frank and her diary…
Anne Frank's diary is (arguably) the most famous diary of all time
Anne Frank’s diary, originally written in Dutch and published in 1947 in Holland as Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven 12 Juni 1942–1 Augustus 1944 (The Secret Annexe: Diary-Letters 12 June 1942–1 August 1944), had an initial print run of only 1,500 copies, but has since become something of a phenomenon. It has been translated into more than 60 languages – from Albanian to Welsh – including Farsi, Arabic, Sinhalese and Esperanto. In 2009 it was added to the Unesco Memory of the World Register.
The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam – Anne’s hiding place during the Second World War – is also the most visited site in the Netherlands, and Anne now even has her own unofficial Facebook page. Children from all around the world continue to write letters to Anne as if she were their friend. She has remained irrevocably the eternal child.
- Read more | How was Anne Frank's diary edited by her father?
Anne's sister, Margot Betti Frank, also wrote a diary
Anneliese Marie Frank, known as 'Anne' to her friends and family, was born in Frankfurt-am-Main on 12 June 1929. She was the second and youngest child of an assimilated Jewish family. Her sister, Margot Betti Frank, who was three years older than Anne, also wrote a diary – although it has never been found.
Margot was the more studious sister. Anne, while intelligent, was often distracted by talking to her friends during school.
Anne Frank received her diary as a 13th birthday present
Anne chose her own diary – an autograph book bound with white and red checked cloth, and closed with a small lock – as a present for her 13th birthday. This birthday, on Friday 12 June 1942, was the last before she and her family went into hiding. To mark the occasion, Anne's mother, Edith, made cookies for Anne to share with her friends at school. Anne also enjoyed a party with a strawberry pie and a room decorated with flowers.
Anne's first entries describe how her family were segregated and discriminated against. Anne addressed many of her entries to an imaginary girl friend, 'Dear Kitty' or 'Dearest Kitty'.
Anne Frank and her family went into hiding after her sister was summoned to a German work camp
After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Anne’s family decided to escape to Amsterdam, in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, to flee the rapidly escalating anti-Semitism in Germany. Anne and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam on 6 July 1942, the day after Anne's elder sister, Margot, received a call-up for a German work camp. Anne's parents, Otto and Edith, had already planned to go into hiding with their daughters on 16 July, and had been arranging a secret hiding place. They went into hiding earlier than planned following Margot's call-up, seeking refuge in the house behind Otto's office on Prinsengracht 263 and leaving behind Anne’s beloved cat named Moortje.
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Four other Jews lived in the secret annex alongside the Frank family
The Franks were soon joined by four other Jews: Hermann and Auguste van Pels with their son Peter (the boy Anne was to fall in love with), and for a time, Fritz Pfeffer, a German dentist. Anne's diary describes in great detail the tension between the eight individuals, who had to stay indoors at all times and remain quiet so as not to arouse the suspicion of staff working in the warehouse downstairs. The entrance to the annex was concealed behind a moveable bookcase.
Anne Frank spent a total of two years and 35 days in hiding
During that time she was unable to see the sky, could not feel the rain or sun, walk on grass, or even walk for any length of time. Anne focused on studying and reading books on European history and literature. She also spent time on her appearance: curling her dark hair and manicuring her nails. She made lists of the toiletries she dreamt one day of buying, including: “lipstick, eyebrow pencil, bath salts, bath powder, eau-de-Cologne, soap, powder puff” (Wednesday 7 October 1942).
Anne wanted to become a famous writer
While in hiding Anne hoped that she would one day be able to return to school and she dreamt of spending a year in Paris and another in London. She wanted to study the history of art and become fluent in different languages while seeing “beautiful dresses” and “doing all kind of exciting things”. Ultimately she wanted to become “a journalist, and later on a famous writer” (Thursday 11 May 1944).
With no friends to confide in, Anne used the diary to express her fear, bordedom, and the struggles she faced growing up. On 16 March 1944, she wrote: "The nicest part is being able to write down all my thoughts and feelings, otherwise I'd absolutely suffocate." In addition to her diary, Anne wrote short stories and collated her favourite sentences by other writers in a notebook.
Anne rewrote her diary after listening to a BBC broadcast
On 28 March 1944, Anne and her family listened to a BBC programme broadcast illegally by Radio Oranje (the voice of the Dutch government-in-exile). Gerrit Bolkestein, the Dutch minister of education, art and science, who was exiled in London, stated that after the war he wished to collect eyewitness accounts of the experiences of the Dutch people under the German occupation. Anne immediately began rewriting and editing her diary with the view to future publication, calling it The Secret Annex. She did this at the same time as keeping her original, more private diary.
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The Franks were discovered just two months after the Allied landings in Normandy
By listening daily to the broadcasts of Radio Oranje and the BBC, Anne’s father, Otto Frank, was able to follow the progress of the Allied forces. He had a small map of Normandy that he marked with little red pins. On Tuesday 6 June 1944, Anne excitedly wrote: “Is this really the beginning of the long-awaited liberation?” Tragically, it was not to be. Two months after the Allied landings in Normandy, the police discovered the Franks’ hiding place.
Anne Frank's diary was rescued by Miep Gies, her father's friend and secretary
On 4 August 1944, everyone in the annex was arrested. On 4 August 1944, three days after Anne’s final diary entry, the Gestapo arrested Anne together with her family and the other people they were hiding with. They were betrayed by an anonymous source who had reported their existence to the German authorities. Otto's secretary, Miep Gies, who had helped the Franks go into hiding and visited them frequently, retrieved Anne's diary from the annex, hoping to one day to return it to her.
The exact date of Anne Frank's death is unknown
Anne was first sent to Westerbork, a transit camp in the Netherlands, before being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. More people were murdered at Auschwitz than at any other camp – at least 1.1 million men, women and children perished there, 90 per cent of them Jews.
Anne and her sister Margot survived Auschwitz only to be sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. There the two girls died of typhus shortly before the camp was liberated by the British Army on 15 April 1945. The exact date of their deaths is unknown. Margot was 19 years old and Anne was just 15.
Anne Frank's father was initially unsure about publishing her story
Anne's father, Otto, was the only person from the secret annex to survive. He returned to Amsterdam following the liberation of Auschwitz, learning en route of his wife's death. In July 1945 he met one of the Brilleslijper sisters, who had been at Bergen-Belsen with Anne and Margot. From her, he learned that his daughters were dead.
Miep Gies passed on Anne's diary to Otto Frank in July 1945. Otto later recalled: "I began to read slowly, only a few pages each day, more would have been impossible, as I was overwhelmed by painful memories. For me, it was a revelation. There, was revealed a completely different Anne to the child that I had lost. I had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings."
After initially feeling uncertain about publishing Anne's diary, he finally decided to fulfill his daughter's wish. The diary of Anne Frank was first published in the Netherlands on 25 June 1947.
Zoe Waxman is a senior research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and the author of Pocket Giants: Anne Frank (The History Press, 2015), a biography of Anne Frank.
This article was first published on HistoryExtra in March 2016
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Censoring Anne Frank: how her famous diary has been edited through history]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/anne-frank-diary-how-edited-hidden-pages-father-otto-what-she-really-wrote/ 2024-10-11T15:44:02.000Z 2020-03-09T09:34:56.000Z Otto Frank sifted through the documents – a chequered autograph book, an exercise book, a sheaf of loose papers. Their author, 15-year-old Anne Frank, had died of typhus in a German concentration camp a few months earlier, in spring 1945. Now Otto, her father, was reading words he had never imagined his daughter could write. As he read, he came to an unnerving conclusion: he had never really known her.
“I knew that Anne wrote a diary,” he said in a later interview. “But I must say I was very much surprised about the deep thoughts Anne had. It was quite a different Anne than I had known as my daughter. My conclusion is… that most parents don’t know, really, their children.”
Burdened with the responsibility of stewardship for his daughter’s words, Otto Frank would spend the rest of his life overseeing the publication and dissemination of Anne Frank’s diary. Along the way, though, his editorial decisions would inadvertently cover up the unsuspected depths he had discovered inside.
By the time the Frank family was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, they had been in hiding in Amsterdam for two years. Anne and her sister, Margot, and their parents, Edith and Otto Frank, sought refuge on Prinsengracht 263 with Hermann van Pels, a business associate of Otto’s, along with his wife, Auguste, and their son, Peter. Fritz Pfeffer, a family friend, completed the group.
Their hiding place was the back portion of the building where Otto’s business still ran. Only a small group of Otto’s colleagues had any idea the building was also a sanctuary. The cadre of devoted workers risked their lives to provide Otto and his family with food and moral support.
On 4 August 1944, their luck ran out. Though the identity of their betrayer has never been discovered, someone reported their existence to the Gestapo. During their arrest, the police ransacked their living quarters, taking everything of value. But they left behind a treasure, strewn in pieces along the floor: Anne’s diary.
Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, two of Otto’s employees, gathered up the papers and stored them in a locked drawer. They planned to give them to Anne when she returned.
She never did. Less than a year later, the 15-year-old died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Otto was the only survivor of the eight who had been in hiding. After Otto received news of his daughter’s death, Gies gave him the diary. Initially refusing to read them, he finally dove in.
- A brief history of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Anne Frank died
- Listen to Mary Fulbrook and Richard J Evans discuss the legacies of the Holocaust
- A brief history of Auschwitz – the most deadly site of the Holocaust
Did Anne’s father edit her diary?
He couldn’t stop reading. Anne’s words were a revelation to Otto. He began sharing translated portions of the diary with his mother, then telling others. Eventually, persuaded by a historian and a friend who convinced him the diary was a significant document, he agreed to seek publication.
But the manuscript that Otto Frank pitched to Dutch editors didn’t contain his daughter’s entire diary. Anne herself had begun editing large swathes of her diary with publication in mind after hearing a radio broadcast that called on Dutch people to preserve diaries and other war documents. Otto respected some of those editorial decisions, but overlooked others – for example, he included material about Anne’s crush on annexe dweller Peter van Pels.
Otto made his own cuts, too: he removed passages in which Anne was critical of her parents’ marriage, and expurgated sections about sexuality and her often brutal comments about friends, family members and acquaintances. In an early passage from the diary that Otto eliminated completely from the first editions, Anne describes her classmates as everything from “a detestable, sneaky, stuck-up, two-faced gossip” to “pretty boring.”
The cuts made the book short enough for publication, but publishers were reluctant to release books about the Second World War for fear of alienating war-weary customers. Eventually, though, Otto found a publisher. Het Achterhuis (“The House Behind”) was published in 1947. It was an immediate success in Europe.
But English-language readers almost missed their chance to read the book. The French-language translation languished in a pile of rejected books at Doubleday in New York until editor Judith Jones chanced upon it. She encouraged her boss to acquire it and – with an English translation by Barbara Mooyaart-Doubleday, a cover that featured Anne’s photograph, and a foreword by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt – Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was published in English in 1952.
It was an instant success, gaining worldwide fame and soaring to immediate symbolism. It was especially revered for its impact among young readers. “As seen through Anne’s eyes,” wrote Mary Lane for The English Journal in 1956, “the evils of discrimination have made a terrific impact on these young people’s minds.” At the time, the events Anne recounted were so recent that Lane was able to write to Otto Frank and even visit Miep Gies in Amsterdam. But though readers like Lane said the book helped them see adolescents in a new light, they had no idea how much material Otto and his publishers had suppressed.
Hoax, fraud or forgery?
Meanwhile, the world wrangled over the Holocaust. As Anne’s diary garnered more and more readers and international fame, it became the target of deniers who argued it was a fraud or forgery. The very writing that had endeared Anne to generations of readers convinced some that the book had been written by an adult; others questioned the day-to-day accounts of life in the hideaway. Otto Frank sued some deniers, but they continued to publicise unfounded theories that he co-authored or even wrote the entire diary himself.
Holocaust deniers, misinterpreting the results of libel and defamation lawsuits, published books and pamphlets claiming the diary was a hoax. In response to this speculation, the Netherlands Forensic Institute undertook an exhaustive forensic analysis of the diary in the early 1980s that proved the book had been written by Anne. Graphologists and others have reiterated those findings during a variety of analyses over the past six decades.
Those forensic findings were published in 1989 along with new material in a comprehensive critical edition of the diary. The book also contained a tantalising reference to additional material that had been excluded at the Frank family’s request. A decade later, that material screamed into the public consciousness when the contents of the five “suppressed pages” became public.
Otto Frank, who died in 1980, had given Cor Suijk, a former employee of the Anne Frank House, five additional pages of the diary for safekeeping. Suijk had let biographer Melissa Müller read the pages, and she included them in her 1998 book Anne Frank: The Biography. But before the book was published, the Anne Frank Fonds [a charitable foundation founded by Otto] in Switzerland sued Muller to prevent the pages from seeing the light of day. She was forced to paraphrase the pages in her book, and the original pages were only published in 2003 after Suijk gave them to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in exchange for a $300,000 donation to Suijk’s foundation.
Sexual anatomy and dirty jokes
A glimpse at the five original pages explained Otto’s reluctance to publish them: they deal with Anne’s impressions of her parents’ marriage, which she characterised as “tepid”. And tiny fragments of new material continue to come to light: in 1995, an expanded version of the diary included Anne’s description of her own genitalia. And in 2016, conservators photographing the diary for preservation purposes realised that brown paper inside the diary was actually pasted over two pages of dirty jokes and information on sex education.
Revelations that Anne Frank wrote about sexual anatomy, masturbation, menstruation, same-sex attraction and scatology [the study of faeces] complicate readers’ image of the teenage author, who spent two formative years in hiding and whose journey to adulthood was cut tragically short. (They have also fuelled censorship attempts, as when a Michigan mother petitioned for the book’s removal from a seventh-grade classroom, and when a Virginia school district began assigning a version of the book that did not include the passage about Anne’s genitalia.)
A legacy misunderstood?
But perhaps more insidious are the ways in which readers have misinterpreted Anne Frank’s legacy over time. The most well-known quote from her book: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” has been upheld as evidence of hope for humanity despite the horrors of the Holocaust. But Anne actually penned the words at the end of a long, introspective entry in which she examines loneliness, fear and the increasing terror of war.
“It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death,” she wrote in the same entry. “I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions.”
Twenty days after she penned her most famous words, Anne and her family were arrested. She spent the rest of her brief life on the move, transported between concentration and death camps in Europe and separated from her mother, her father, and friends. She died less than a year later, in circumstances that prove the prescience of her observations about suffering and persecution.
Today, Anne Frank is arguably the Holocaust’s most famous victim, but her fame risks overshadowing the up to 1.5 million Jewish children thought to have been murdered during the genocide. Ironically, those who would uphold her as a martyr needn’t look farther than her own diary for proof of how ill-suited she was for the role. Her words – censored or restored – portray a changeable, sly, flawed, curious, restless youth, one who would have denied she stood for all.
Anne Frank’s real diary challenges the sainted image attributed to her by those who would have her symbolise all of those murdered and uprooted by hatred, even as they force readers to acknowledge the depth and nuance of the children in their lives. As she wrote in one of her last entries in 1944, “I haven’t got the reputation of being a ‘little bundle of contradictions’ for nothing!”
Erin Blakemore is a journalist based in the US and the author of The Heroine's Bookshelf (Harper, 2010). Find out more at erinblakemore.com
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[My favourite place: Amsterdam, Netherlands]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/my-favourite-place-amsterdam-netherlands/ 2023-11-08T16:11:52.000Z 2018-03-17T13:29:14.000Z Before visiting Amsterdam for the first time, some 20 years ago, I purchased a guidebook and was briefly taken in by the banal tourist description of the city as ‘the Venice of the North’. Both destinations are indeed waterborne. Both were built on bog and marshland reclaimed from the sea. But there, as any visitor will quickly discover, the comparison ends.
The novelist Henry James saw Venice as “perfect poetry” and Amsterdam as “perfect prose”, a description that still applies to present-day Amsterdam. For there is something essentially prosaic and unpretentious about the Dutch city, and these are qualities that stem in large part from its history.
Amsterdam had its origins, about 1,000 years ago, at the junction of the Amstel and Ij rivers. In the 17th century it succeeded in throwing off the former domination of the Catholic church and the foreign power of Spain to develop as a great trading centre.
The voyages of the Dutch East India Company at the beginning of the 1600s brought back great riches, spawning the creation of the world’s first market in the sale of company shares. Foreigners flocked to the city and at one point Amsterdam had four times the income per capita of Paris.
Three new canals were constructed, wrapped in a semi-circle around the medieval centre in perhaps the greatest engineering feat of the age: seven miles of canal, dug by hand. Now a Unesco-recognised World Heritage site, it was a masterpiece of town planning and bourgeois architecture.
Walk around the canals today, in that cold, bright northern light, and it’s impossible to resist the attraction of the gracious gabled homes built by the newly prosperous merchant class. Each one rests on 40 or so pairs of piles, solid foundations driven into the peat and clay. They were designed to serve as storehouses, workshops, and as homes, with the householder often living under, not over, the shop.
I say ‘walk’ because that is the best way to see the city, though when crossing the road watch out for bikes! The city has 1 million bicycles (for an estimated population of 1.1 million) and 68 per cent of journeys by Amsterdammers are made by bike. Rush-hour bike-jams are a constant problem.
For an insight into the bourgeois individualism of 17th-century Amsterdam, head to the Rijksmuseum where – alongside pieces by Van Gogh and Vermeer – you’ll find extraordinary works by Rembrandt. Rembrandt didn’t paint the canals or houses. Instead, in paintings such as De Staalmeesters, a group portrait of the sampling officials of the Drapers' Guild, he reinvigorates genre painting by transforming mundane subject matter into something tantalising and mysterious. He brings a sense of interiority to his representations of these six men engaged in examining a swatch of fabric.
Gedogen is a Dutch expression meaning ‘technically illegal, but officially tolerated’, and has obvious relevance to Amsterdam’s attitude to soft drugs and the stench of marijuana permeating the streets from its coffee shops. The Dutch, and Amsterdammers in particular, have been famous for centuries for their tolerance. However, this ‘live and let live’ approach was born out of expediency and not, as mythologisers would have us believe, from visionary idealism. The disparate elements of Amsterdam society in the golden age, religiously and ethnically eclectic, submerged their differences to maintain their trading empire.
The reality of this situation broke through with sudden, inhuman ferocity during the Second World War. Of the 80,000 Jews in Amsterdam in 1940, an estimated 58,000 had been killed by 1945, most of them in concentration camps. The sight today of long queues of visitors, many of them youngsters, snaking from the entrance to the ‘secret annexe’ where Anne Frank and her family were kept hidden from the Nazis, is comforting as a testament to Frank’s precious immortality. So too is Amsterdam’s record in the postwar years of a renewed determination to extend personal freedoms – from the legalisation of prostitution to the celebration of the first legal gay weddings.
Advice for travellers
Best time to go
April and May are especially good months in which to see the city and visit the nearby famous bulb and tulip fields.
Getting there
Eurostar has recently introduced a twice-daily train direct from London to Amsterdam, taking just 3 hours 41 minutes. There are also direct flights to Amsterdam from a variety of UK airports.
What to pack
Russell Shorto’s book Amsterdam (2013) presents a fascinating argument for the view that Amsterdam is the world’s most liberal city. Donna Tartt’s challenging novel about a Dutch painting, The Goldfinch (2013), is partially set in Amsterdam.
What to bring back
A copy of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, which can be purchased from the Anne Frank House on Prinsengracht. Since its publication in 1947 the book has sold 31 million copies in 70 languages.
Readers' views
Walk, boat the canals, visit the Rijksmuseum and Anne Frank’s house. Moreover, just wander about the old downtown @hppily_
Take a boat ride on the canals and river Amstel @kellydanceclub
Mark Bostridge is a writer and critic. His books include The Fateful Year: England 1914 (Viking, 2014).
This article was first published in the April 2018 issue of BBC History Magazine
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