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Okla-homey
8/4/2009, 07:09 AM
August 4, 1944, The Frank Family is Captured

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Annelies Marie Frank

65 years ago today, acting on a tip from an informer, the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied Holland captures 15-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family in a sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse.

Gestapo was the popular nickname for the German secret police derived from its official name "Geheime" (secret) "Staatspolizei" (state police).

The Franks had taken shelter there in their hiding place two years earlier 1942 out of fear of the Nazis and deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. The official policy of the Nazis was to first isolate Jews from the rest of European society and ultimately exterminate them as a race for the betterment of Hitler's sick and twisted notion of the ideal world.

The Frank's occupied the small space with another Jewish family and a single Jewish man, and were aided by Christian friends, who brought them food and supplies. Anne spent much of her time in the "secret annex" working on her diary. The diary survived the war, overlooked by the Gestapo that discovered the hiding place, but Anne and nearly all of the others perished in the Nazi death camps.

Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, on June 12, 1929. She was the second daughter of Otto Frank and Edith Frank-Holländer, both of Jewish families that had lived in Germany for centuries. With the rise of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in 1933, Otto moved his family to Amsterdam to escape the escalating Nazi persecution of Jews.

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The apartment building on the Merwedeplein where the Frank family lived in Amsterdam from 1934 until 1942

In Amsterdam, Anne's father ran a successful spice and jam business in the great European trade city. Anne attended a Montessori school with other middle-class Dutch children, but with the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 she was forced to transfer to a Jewish school because the Hitlerite occupation government would not allow Jewish children to "infect" non-Jewish children by attending school with them. In 1942, Otto began arranging a hiding place in an annex of his warehouse on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam.

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The main façade of the Opekta building on the Prinsengracht in 2002. Otto Frank's offices were in the front of the building, with the Achterhuis (secret annex) in the rear.

On her 13th birthday in 1942, Anne began a diary relating her everyday experiences, her relationship with her family and friends, and observations about the increasingly dangerous world around her. Less than a month later, Anne's older sister, Margot, received a call-up notice to report to a Nazi "work camp" in Holland.

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Jews in occupied Holland were required by their Nazi masters to wear this insignia prominently attached to their outer clothing whenever in public so all would know and avoid contact with them.

Fearing deportation to a Nazi concentration camp, the Frank family took shelter in the secret annex the next day. One week later, they were joined by Otto Frank's business partner and his family. In November, a Jewish dentist--the eighth occupant of the hiding place--joined the group.

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For two years, Anne kept a diary about her life in hiding that is marked with poignancy, humor, and insight. The entrance to the secret annex was hidden by a hinged bookcase, and former employees of Otto and other Dutch friends delivered them food and supplies procured at high risk.

Anne and the others lived in rooms with blacked-out windows, and never flushed the toilet during the day out of fear that their presence would be detected. In June 1944, Anne's spirits were raised by the Allied landing at Normandy, and she was hopeful that the long-awaited liberation of Holland would soon begin.

On August 1, 1944, Anne made her last entry in her diary. Three days later on August 4th, 25 months of seclusion ended with the arrival of Gestapo agents. Anne and the others had been given away by an unknown informer, and they were arrested along with two of the Christians who had helped shelter them.

They were sent to a Nazi concentration camp in Holland called Westerbork, and in September Anne and most of the others were shipped to the Auschwitz death camp in western Poland.

In this movement to Auschwitz, of the 1019 passengers, 549 people – including all children under the age of fifteen years – were selected and sent directly to the gas chambers where they were killed. Anne had turned fifteen three months earlier and was spared.

With the other females not selected for immediate death, Anne was forced to strip naked to be disinfected, had her head shaved and was tattooed with an identifying number on her arm. By day the women were used as slave labour, and by night were crowded into freezing barracks. Disease was rampant and before long Anne's skin became badly infected by scabies.

In the fall of 1944, with the Soviet liberation of Poland underway, Anne was moved with her sister Margot to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Suffering under the deplorable conditions of the camp, the two sisters caught typhus and died in early March 1945. The camp was liberated by the British less than two months later.

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Anne and sister Margot's memorial at the Bergen-Belsen death camp.

After the war, it was estimated that of the 110,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation, only 5,000 survived.

Otto Frank was the only one of the 10 to survive the Nazi death camps. After the war, he returned to Amsterdam via Russia, and was reunited with Miep Gies, one of his former employees who had helped shelter him. She handed him Anne's diary, which she had found undisturbed after the Nazi raid.

In 1947, Anne's diary was published by Otto in its original Dutch as Diary of a Young Girl. An instant best-seller and eventually translated into more than 50 languages, The Diary of Anne Frank has served as a literary testament to the nearly six million Jews, including Anne herself, who were brutally annihilated in the Holocaust.

The Frank family's hideaway at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam opened as a museum in 1960. A new English translation of Anne's diary in 1995 restored material that had been edited out of the original version, making the work nearly a third longer.

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picasso
8/4/2009, 08:43 AM
One incredibly talented girl.

On my last visit to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. I wrote in the suggestion box that they should have a larger exhibit for her. At the time there was a little hard to find corner mentioning her story.

On a side, during our visit there (on the day we played oSu in '03) they had survivors giving tours and having a reunion. It was quite an experience.

soonerboy_odanorth
8/6/2009, 11:34 PM
War is hell. But nothing can explain Hitler's "final solution"... evil with no bounds.

I have to say, my 13 year-old has asked about Schindler's List (he's a movie buff) and I now think he is ready. But it pains me that he is going to watch it, just because it is a very small segment of the atrocities that were committed... and at that was the victory amid those atrocities. Statistically most of the stories resulted in anonymous extermination. The atrocities of Viet Nam and the war in Southeast Asia are certainly never to be dismissed or forgotten... but when I hear one famous line from the movie, I think more of WWII and the doom of generations of European Jews....

"The horror.... the horror.... "

God rest their souls... and I wonder if Jesus Himself even can forgive their persecutors.

TheBobbyTrain
8/7/2009, 08:56 AM
look up how the buchenwald (sp?) concentration camp was liberated. some nazi's probably weren't too awful happy with how that one turned out.

StoopTroup
8/7/2009, 09:08 AM
Man Homey...that first pic reminded me of....

http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Business/images/anne-frank.jpg

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