In a short and tumultuous life, Anne Frank, a German girl, was born in 1929 and upon turning 12-years-old received a diary from her father, Otto Frank, where she accurately captured the atrocities of Nazi Germany in the mid-1940s.
Damián Estrada
Particularly in 1942, Anne, a teenager of Jewish descent, began her precocious narrative to vent about what happened between the dirty walls of the hiding place that, at this time, protected her family in Amsterdam (Holland), while they were fleeing the relentless Holocaust that hounded all those with Jewish blood in their veins.
The common feeling of fear that battered her people during the genocide that left close to 6 million dead, has found few ways of making itself felt as it has in the book that Anne’s father would publish for the first time in 1947.
Photo from Pixabay
She did under the Dutch name “Anne Frank: Het Achhterhuis” (“The Secret House”, in English), although afterwards it was popularised as “The Diary of Anne Frank”.
This was the name the hiding place was known by, where she produced the pages that made up the diary, the same place where Anne’s family and another family, the Van Pels, found refuge for two years.
The young girl described with peculiar exactness the experiences in that hidden den located inside a warehouse in Holland, including the cares of her mother Edith Frank-Hollander, the activities of her sister Margot and the company of Herman and Auguste Van Pels, amongst other refugees.
Such was Anne’s level of forethought, very uncommon in someone of her age, that to protect the identity of the Van Pels family she refers to them in the text as the Van Daans.The Diary of Anne Frank, fist published in Dutch in 1947, is not just a compendium of descriptions and notes, but also a well-written work that includes stories such as Anne and The Theory, The Dentist, and Kaatje amongst others.
Dutch national, Miep Gies (1909-2010) was key in the preservation of the legendary diary. She risked her life to keep it safe in the most difficult years of the Holocaust, so that later Otto Frank could show the world the insecurities described by his daughter.
Photo by Rodrigo Galindez goo.glPdIK59
Worst fears
The most terrible fears of that child observer became reality on the 4th of August 1944, when some neighbours whose names are still unknown, denounced the refugees in the warehouse, among them little Anne.
The same day several Gestapo officers commanded by Superior Nazi Chief Karl Silberbauer, captured all the main characters in the diary to then split them up and send them to various concentration camps.
Ghetto de Varsovia – Photo from Pixabay
All of them, except Otto, died in the most distant circumstances and places, including Anne Frank, who spent a month along with her sister, Margot, in Auschwitz before being moved to Bergen-Belsen where both died in March 1945, victims of typhus…Anne was 15-years-old. Another sad story is that of her mother in the months before her death (January 1945), as she saw them take her daughters from her, she lost her mind and many witnesses allege that she constantly asked about them and kept food under her pillow so that she could then feed it to them later, despite having seen them leave for Bergen-Belsen.
Photo from Pixabay
The diary became an international phenomenon, although it had greater resonance in countries like Israel, USA and the UK, where it remained as the best-selling book for 20 consecutive weeks and its global sales exceeded 20 million copies, translated into more than 60 languages.
Many agree that the work summarises an age, it serves as a warning for future generations and for not letting the thirst for power and lack of good sense of a small and unscrupulous group serve as a pretext for ending our most precious right: life itself. (PL)
(Translated by Donna Davison – Email: donna_davison@hotmail.com)