Carol Ann Lee - Anne Frank and the Children of the Holocaust

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Table of Contents

THE FRANKS NEED A PLACE TO HIDE.

Although she had no way of knowing it then, Anne paid her last visit to Jacqueline and her family during the first week of July, when she arrived at the van Maarsens flat on Hunzestraat to show off a new dress. Mrs. van Maarsen told her that it looked very sweet on her. Anne smiled and replied, Why of course it does. Its brand new.

The morning of Sunday, July 5, 1942, was sunny and hot. Annes father walked to the Jewish hospital in town to visit some of the elderly patients there, leaving Anne and Margot at home with their mother. Hello called around to make arrangements with Anne for an outing later that afternoon. When he had gone, Anne stretched out on the terrace to read. At three oclock, the doorbell rang, and there was a call from the street, Miss Margot Frank? Mrs. Frank went down to answer it. A policeman handed her a registered envelope.

Inside was a card ordering Margot to report to the SS the next morning.

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INTRODUCTION

In September 1939, when World War II began, there were more than one and a half million Jewish children living in countries occupied, or soon to be occupied, by Hitlers armies. By 1945, when the war ended, over a million of those childrenincluding Anne Frankwere no longer alive.

Most of them were not killed by bombing raids or in the line of duty; they were deliberately murdered by the leaders and followers of a political party that believed they had no right to live, simply because they were Jewish. Other children whose ethnic origin, religion, or parents political choice meant that they had no place in a Nazi led society were also targeted.

Because the Nazis were in power for so long (1933- 1945), thousands of children never had a normal childhood. Something as simple as going to a local swimming pool with friends or kicking a soccer ball around a park during the summer evenings was strictly forbidden. Ordinary activities such as going to the movies were banned to them. After the war broke out in 1939, these same children faced an even more terrible future. Often torn away from their families, they were pushed into ghettos (sealed-off areas of towns where Jews were forced to live in extreme poverty) and slave-labor camps, where starvation and disease raged. Thousands more were killed by firing squads.

In the spring of 1942, mass deportations began, with trains rolling out from every occupied country taking Jews to the concentration camps in Eastern Europe. Children were sent with their families or alone to the camps, where hardly any of the very young survived; they were not able to work hard, and therefore the Nazis had no use for them. Most children under the age of fifteen were killed. Girls were less likely to survive than boys because they were seen as the weaker sex and could give birth. The Nazis wanted to ensure that Jewish life was destroyed, not created.

Despite all this, children often turned out to be braver and more capable than many adults. Being so young, they were able to adapt more quickly to certain situations. In the ghettos, for example, children smuggled food and sold anything they could find to raise money for their families. They also refused to give in to despair: They sang songs, made their own games and toys, and studied schoolbooks, even though all these things were forbidden. Like Anne Frank, many children kept diaries, using whatever paper was available to them. They wrote in office ledgers, on scraps of newspaper, and evenin the case of a young brother and sister in the Lodz ghettoin the margins of an old French novel.

The diary of Anne Frank is the best known, and she has become a symbol of all the children who died during the Holocaust. In total, six million Jews were killed by the Nazis. Such a huge number is hard to imagine. But in the same way that we can learn more about Anne Franks world by understanding the Holocaust, by looking in detail at her short life, we begin to understand that six million means six million individuals who once had hopes and dreams for the future just like us. In this way, we realize that the Holocaust isnt about impossible numbers; its about people.

ONE:

AS WE ARE JEWISH...

Anne Frank was born in the German city of Frankfurt-am-Main on June 12, 1929. Her grandfather was a country boy who came to Frankfurt to make his fortune. He opened his own bank business in the city and married a young woman whose ancestors had lived in Frankfurt for over four hundred years. Annes father, Otto, was born on May 12, 1889 (the same year as Adolf Hitler), and had a happy, privileged childhood. He and his two older brothers Robert and Herbert, and younger sister Leni, were brought up in a large house in Frankfurts Westend district. Their home was filled with antiques and enormous family portraits in gilt frames. At the back was a large garden; the front overlooked an elegant square.

Anne later wrote that her father had had a real little rich boys upbringing, parties every week, balls, festivities, beautiful girls, waltzing, dinners, a large home, etc. A photograph of a family gathering in Germanys Black Forest in 1900 shows Otto Frank (then nine years old) in a crisp white sailor suitthe trendiest outfit for boys at that timewhile Leni, Robert, and Herbert are also fashionably dressed. They all attended good schools, spoke several languages, learned how to ride, and played musical instruments. Anne loved to hear her father talk about his childhood when she was in hiding; to her it seemed like a distant fairy tale.

When Otto Frank was eighteen, he began studying economics at Heidelberg University. There he met Nathan Straus, whose family owned Macys department store in New York. Nathan and Otto quickly became good friends, and when Nathan went back to America, he invited Otto to join him there, working in Macys, which was then the worlds biggest department store. Otto eagerly accepted, juggling his time at Macys with another job at a New York bank. Then one day Otto received a telegram telling him that his father had died, and he returned to Germany. He found a new job with an engineering company in Dussel dorf and was still working there when World War I broke out in 1914.

Although the Franks were Jewish, they did not have much interest in their religion. Otto rarely attended synagogue and didnt read or speak Hebrew, the ancient Jewish language. The district where the Franks lived was popular with many Jewish families and had a synagogue at its center, but Otto was brought up to take more pride in his German roots than in his religion. Not long after the war began, he and his brothers joined the German army, and his mother and sister worked in hospitals, taking care of wounded German soldiers.

Otto was by now in his twenties, a natural leader who was friendly and fair with everyone he met. He was made an officer, and then a lieutenant, and proved himself a brave soldier on the Somme and at Cambrai, two of the worst battles in history. He was certain that his country would win the war, but in 1918 Germany surrendered and Otto returned to Frankfurt.

The Franks bank business had lost a great deal of money during the war. Otto tried to improve the situation by opening a branch of the bank in Amsterdam, where business was better than it was in Germany. Unfortunately, it wasnt a success, and once more he went back to Frankfurt. By now, Otto was thirty-six years old. He had been engaged when he was nineteen, but it hadnt worked out, and now he was eager to marry and have children.

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