Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten

Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

ANNE
FRANK
MEMORIES THAT

WILL NEVER
BE FORGOTTEN

Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza (262228)

Politics, Society and Culture: Germany and Europe
Prof. Dr. Christoph Mergard
IBM 3
HFU Furtwangen University
2020

0
Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten
Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

CONTENT

INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................................2

1. PART ONE: EVERYTHING STARTED ......................................................................................................3

1.1 Anne’s first years .................................................................................................................3
1.2 A little more about her early life and education .................................................................3
1.3 Nazi germany invades the netherlands ..............................................................................4
2. PART TWO: THE STORM .....................................................................................................................5

2.1. Anne keeps a diary .............................................................................................................5

2.2. Anne had to go into hiding in the Secret Annex ................................................................5
2.3. The hiding place is discovered ............................................................................................7
3. PART THREE: ONE LAST HOPE ............................................................................................................8

3.1. Anne is deported to Auschwitz ...........................................................................................8

3.2. Anne dies from Exhaustion in Bergen-Belsen .....................................................................8
.......................................................................................................................................................9
4. PART FOUR: FROM DIARIST TO ICON .....................................................................................................9
4.1. Something precious: Anne’s diary becomes world famous ................................................9
4.2. Otto and the memory of Anne ......................................................................................... 10
4.3. A multi-faceted icon ......................................................................................................... 10
4.4. The anne frank house ....................................................................................................... 11
4.5. Anne frank zentrum .......................................................................................................... 11
5. CONCLUSION: ANNE AS PART OF ALL OF US........................................................................................... 12

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................. 13

1
Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten
Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

INTRODUCTION
Without a doubt, when talking about the Second World War, the first thing that comes to our minds
is the "JEWISH" world, sometimes we would like to relate it for other things but unfortunately, it is.
For human society, the Second World War was something that impacts, by the revelation of images
that came to light after many years.

But in particular, I want to refer to a person, who thanks to the media and the participation of his
family, they achieved to provide us with a lot of important information, not only to capture what the
Jews lived in the Second World War but specifically to understand the life from a person like us and
she is Anne Frank.

Anne Frank has been a historical figure who

has become well known for her famous
diary, it is not certain that it is a real writing
since many people claim that it is a fake
while others claim that it is real, but beyond
for being real or not, the truth is that the
period and the context where the story is
told are not far from reality.

The period of the Second World War and

the advance of the Nazis across Europe was
marked by persecutions towards the Jews
who had to hide in basements, farms or attics within the properties of the locals who welcomed
them and if for some reason the Gestapo (Secret State Police) discovered them were deported and
sent to the concentration camps, and the locals who refused to confess were shot or sent to the
concentration camps.

Anne Frank's diary offers a crude perspective on what actually happened in that period, it is very
well described how the Jews had a different treatment in Nazi Germany, whether as being
distinguished by a star, buying in special shops and above all they did not have the same rights as
German citizens.

Many Jews upon seeing Hitler's rise to power chose to flee to other countries, others stayed and
were sent to concentration camps and others upon realizing what was happening fled before being
captured by the Gestapo.

Those who fled to countries that were later defeated by the Nazis lived in hiding places and
somehow they had to adapt to survive in the low conditions that were there, they had to sleep on
the ground, divide the food, they could not get out more however many managed to survive and
unfortunately many more were deported or killed.

2
Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten
Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

1. PART ONE: EVERYTHING STARTED

1.1 ANNE’S FIRST YEARS

Anne Frank, Annelies Marie Frank in full, was born in 1929 in Frankfurt
am Main. Frank's mother was Edith Frank. Her father, Otto Frank, was
a lieutenant in the German army during World War I, later becoming
a businessman in Germany and the Netherlands. Anne’s sister Margot
was three years her senior. Unemployment was high and poverty
was severe in Germany, and it was the period in which Adolf Hitler
and his party were gaining more and more supporters. Hitler hated
the Jews and blamed them for the problems in the country. He took
advantage of the rampant antisemitic sentiments in Germany.

The hatred of Jews and the poor economic situation made Anne's parents, Otto and Edith Frank,
decide to move to Amsterdam. He went first, and Anne, her mother and her sister Margot followed
a little later, in 1934, where Anne attended first a Montessori school, then the Jewish Lyceum, also
there, Otto founded a company that traded in pectin, a gelling agent for making jam.

1.2 A LITTLE MORE ABOUT HER EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

The Franks were a typical upper-middle-class,

German-Jewish family living in a quiet, religiously
diverse neighborhood near the outskirts of
Frankfurt. But she was born on the eve of dramatic
changes in German society that would soon disrupt
her family's happy, tranquil life as well as the lives of
all other German Jews.

Due in large part to the harsh sanctions imposed on

Germany by the Treaty of Versailles that ended
World War I, the German economy struggled
terribly in the 1920s. During the late 1920s and early
1930s, the virulently anti-Semitic National German
Socialist Workers Party (Nazi Party) led by Adolf Hitler became Germany's leading political force,
winning control of the government in 1933.

"I can remember that as early as 1932, groups of Storm Troopers came marching by, singing, 'When
Jewish blood splatters from the knife," Otto Frank later recalled.

3
Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten
Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

When Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 20, 1933, the Frank family immediately
realized that it was time to flee. They moved to Amsterdam, the Netherlands between 1933 and
1934. Otto later said, "Though this did hurt me deeply, I realized that Germany was not the world,
and I left my country forever".

Frank described the circumstances of her family's emigration years later in her diary : "Because we're
Jewish, my father immigrated to the Netherlands in 1933, where he became the managing director
of the Dutch Opekta Company, which manufactures products used in making jam”. After years of
enduring anti-Semitism in Germany, the Franks were relieved to once again enjoy freedom in their
new hometown of Amsterdam. "In those days, it was possible for us to start over and to feel free",
Otto recalled.

Before long, Anne felt right at home in the Netherlands.

She learned the language, made new friends and went
to a Dutch Amsterdam's Sixth Montessori School in
1934, and throughout the rest of the 1930s, she lived a
relatively happy and normal childhood. Frank had many
friends, Dutch and German, Jewish and Christian, and
she was a bright and inquisitive student.

1.3 NAZI GERMANY INVADES THE NETHERLANDS

Her father worked hard to get his business off the ground, but it was not easy. Otto also tried to
set up a company in England, but the plan fell through. Things looked up when he started selling
herbs and spices in addition to the pectin. On the 1st of September 1939, when Anne was 10 years
old, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and so the Second World War began. Not long after, on 10
May 1940, the Nazis also invaded the Netherlands. Five days later, the Dutch army surrendered.
Slowly but surely, the Nazis introduced more and more laws and regulations that made the lives of
Jews more difficult. For instance, Jews could no longer visit parks, cinemas, or non-Jewish shops.
The rules meant that more and more places became off-limits to Anne.

Otto Frank managed to keep control of his company by officially signing ownership over to two of
his Christian associates, Jo Kleiman and Victor Kugler while continuing to run the company from
behind the scenes, since Jews were no longer allowed to run their own businesses, but it was
increasingly difficult.

As Frank later wrote in her diary, "After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first
there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the
trouble started for the Jews”.

Beginning in October 1940, the Nazi occupiers imposed anti-Jewish measures in the Netherlands.
Jews were always required to wear a yellow Star of David and observe a strict curfew. Frank and
her sister were forced to transfer to a segregated Jewish school.

4
Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten
Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

2. PART TWO: THE STORM

2.1. ANNE KEEPS A DIARY

On her thirteenth birthday, just

before they went into hiding, Anne
was presented with a diary which she
named as Kitty and wrote each entry
as a letter. During the two years in
hiding, Anne wrote about events in
the Secret Annex, but also about her
feelings and thoughts. In addition,
she wrote short stories, started on a
novel and copied passages from the books she read in
her Book of Beautiful Sentences. Writing helped her pass the time. When the Minister
of Education of the Dutch government in England made an appeal on Radio Orange to hold on to
war diaries and documents, Anne was inspired to rewrite her individual diaries into one running story,
titled Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex).

Living in such close quarters was a challenge, especially for the energetic Anne, who longed to run
outside and feel the sun on her face. Her sole comfort was her diary, her most prized possession. It
was only on the pages of her diary that she could freely vent her feelings and frustrations. “ I’m
longing—so longing— for everything,” Anne wrote in an entry. “To talk, for freedom, for friends, to
be alone. And I do so lone ... To cry!”

2.2. ANNE HAD TO GO INTO HIDING IN THE SECRET ANNEX

The Nazis took things further, one step at the time. Jews had to start wearing a Star of David on
their clothes and there were rumors that all Jews would have to leave the Netherlands. When Margot
received a call-up to report for a so-called ‘labor camp’ in Nazi Germany on 5 July 1942, her parents
were suspicious. They did not believe the call-up was about work and decided to go into hiding the
next day in order to escape persecution. In the spring of 1942, Anne’s father had started furnishing
a hiding place in makeshift quarter, in an at the back of his company building, which they referred
to as the Secret Annex.

5
Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten
Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

Jews using the yellow Star of David. For being identifies as Jews.

Before long, they were joined by four more people: Otto's business partner Hermann van Pels as
well as his wife, Auguste, and son, Peter, a dentist named Fritzz Pfeffer came a few months later. He
received help from his former colleagues, Otto's employees Kleiman and Kugler, as well as Jan and
Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, provided food and information about the outside world.

The hiding place was cramped. Anne had to keep very quiet and was often afraid. The families spent
two years in hiding, never once stepping outside the dark, damp, sequestered portion of the building.
Anne and the others in the annex spoke in whispers and tiptoed around-they didn’t dare flush a
toilet or open a window, even on the hottest days. The smallest noise-a cough, a laugh, a dropped
dish-could give them away.

THE SECRET ANNEX

This is the attic in the annex, where food and
supplies were stored. Anne liked to come to this
attic to write and to look out the window. Inset:
This steep staircase led to the attic. Peter van
Pels’s living area was at the bottom of the stairs.

6
Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten
Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

And yet, life went on, and the residents of the secret annex fell into a routine. Every morning, they
had breakfast at 7, before the warehouse opened for business. During the day, Margot, Peter, and
Anne did schoolwork. (Anne loathed the math problems her father assigned her). Lunch was served
at 13:15, when the employees in the warehouse went home to eat. In the evenings, Anne and the
others ate dinner gathered around the radio, eagerly listening to the daily news broadcasts from
Britain.

When the helpers snuck into the annex with food and other provisions, they often brought grim
news of the outside world. World War II was raging across Europe. Many of the Jewish families the
Franks knew had been taken away by the Nazis. People were starving. Bombs were falling mere
blocks away. Anne could often hear the rapid fire of shooting on the street outside the annex.

Yet there was always hope too. The Allies—Britain, the U.S., and the Soviet Union (today Russia)—
were fighting against Hitler. The residents of the annex told each other it was only a matter of time
before the Allies drove the Nazis out of the Netherlands, before they could leave the annex and be
free. But weeks of waiting turned into months. And months turned into years.

During that time, she recorded in sharp and often funny detail everything that went on—the modest
dinners cobbled together from rotting potatoes, her fights with Auguste van Pels, the challenge of
finding enough privacy to take a sponge bath.
(The annex did not have a bathtub.)

In her beautiful, looping cursive, Anne wrote

that she wanted to live forever, that she
wanted her life to have meaning. She vowed
to become a famous writer, with her first book
to be based on her now overflowing diary.
She began going back to old entries, revising
and rewriting. “I can shake off everything if I
write”, Anne wrote in April1944. “My sorrows
disappear, my courage is reborn.”

2.3. THE HIDING PLACE IS DISCOVERED

Anne started rewriting her diary, but before she was done, she and the other people in hiding were
discovered and arrested by police officers on 4 August 1944. The police also arrested two of the
helpers. To this day, no one knows for certain who betrayed those living in the annex.

When the officers were gone, two of the helpers, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, crept into the annex,
their hearts heavy with fear and sadness. The officers had ransacked the place and stolen anything
they thought held value. But they had left something precious behind. Strewn across the floor of the
attic were the pages of Anne’s diary. The women gathered them up. Miep told herself that she would
keep them safe, locked away in her desk. She would return them to Anne after the war, when this
nightmare was finally over.

7
Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten
Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

3. PART THREE: ONE LAST HOPE

3.1. ANNE IS DEPORTED TO AUSCHWITZ

Via the offices of the Sicherheitsdienst (the German security police), a prison in Amsterdam, and
the Westerbork transit camp, the people from the Secret Annex were put on transport to the
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration
and extermination camp. The train
journey took three days, during which
Anne and over a thousand others were
packed closely together in cattle
wagons. There was little food and
water and only a barrel for a toilet.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Nazi
doctors checked to see who would
and who would not be able to do
heavy forced labor. Around 350
people from Anne's transport were
immediately taken to the gas
chambers and murdered. Anne, Margot and their mother were sent to the labor camp for women.
Otto ended up in a camp for men, this was the last time that Otto Frank ever saw his wife or
daughters.

3.2. ANNE DIES FROM EXHAUSTION IN BERGEN-BELSEN

After several months of hard labor hauling heavy stones and grass mats, Frank and Margot were
again transferred. They arrived at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany during the
winter, where food was scarce, sanitation was awful, and disease ran rampant. Their mother was not
allowed to go with them. Edith fell ill and died at Auschwitz shortly after arriving at the camp, on
January 6, 1945.

In early November 1944, Anne was put on transport again. She was deported to the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp with Margot. Their parents stayed behind in Auschwitz. The conditions in
Bergen-Belsen were horrible too. There was a lack of food, it was cold, wet and there were
contagious diseases. Anne and Margot contracted typhus in the early spring of 1945. Specifically, in
March 1945 within a day of each other they both died owing to its effects, Margot first, Anne shortly
afterward. Only a few weeks before British soldiers liberated the German Bergen-Belsen

8
Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten
Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

concentration camp where they were interned. Frank was just 15 years old at the time of her death,
one of more than 1 million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust.

At the end of the war, Frank's father Otto, the was the only one of the people from the Secret Annex
to survive the war. He was liberated from Auschwitz by the Russians and during his long journey
back to Amsterdam and searching desperately for news of his family, he knew that his wife Edith
had died. On July 18, 1945, he met two sisters who had been with Anne and Margot at Bergen-
Belsen and delivered the tragic news about they were no longer alive either.

Bergen-Belsen Camp: The camp was

liberated on April 15, 1945, by
the British 11th Armored Division. The
soldiers discovered approximately
60,000 prisoners inside.

4. PART FOUR: FROM DIARIST TO ICON

4.1. SOMETHING PRECIOUS: ANNE’S DIARY BECOMES WORLD FAMOUS

When Otto arrived at home and after tried to overcome the bad news, he went into his office
and shut the door. In that moment, his time spent in the secret annex must have seemed like a
lifetime ago. Miep Gies knocked softly. She had something to give him, something precious: Anne’s
diary.

9
Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten
Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

Miep told Otto that out of respect for Anne, she had not read a word of it. Now Anne’s words
belonged to him. Anne's writing made a deep impression on Otto. He read that Anne had wanted
to become a writer or a journalist and that she had
intended to publish her stories about life in the Secret
Annex. Friends convinced Otto to publish the diary and in
June 1947, 3,000 copies of Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex)
were printed. And that was not all: the book was later
translated into around 70 languages and adapted for stage
and screen. Otto decided to honor Anne’s wish, to share her
words with the world.

“If God lets me live...I shall not remain insignificant”, Anne

wrote in April 1944, only a few months before the officers
stormed the annex. “I shall work in the world for mankind”.
Indeed, she has. Her diary has given voice to those silenced by the Holocaust. She has inspired
millions of people with her courage and honesty, and with her refusal to give up hope during one
of history’s darkest times. In this way, Anne’s wish came true.

4.2. OTTO AND THE MEMORY OF ANNE

His motive for making the decision of publishing the diary was rooted in a commitment to
advocating for universal human rights as a response to the Holocaust. Both Anne and her father
understood Jewishness not as inimical to universalism but rather as being realized in its embrace.
Thus, Otto envisioned the Anne Frank House as both a site of Holocaust remembrance and an
educational institution, where “young people of all nations could seek ways to work for peace”. This
led to the establishment of an International Youth Center at the Anne Frank House, which for several
years organized annual “meetings and conferences, at which the problems of discrimination,
democracy, cross-cultural communication, religion, and international cooperation are discussed”.
On the other hand, Otto was committed to close regulation of how Anne’s life and work would
appear in public. Under his aegis, there was only one licensed drama based on the diary, and
permission to excerpt Anne’s writing in books, plays, or films was granted on a very limited
basis. Only a small number of sites or institutions dedicated to Anne’s memory were sanctioned,
and there was to be no official Anne Frank memorabilia.

4.3. A MULTI-FACETED ICON

As a result of this extensive embrace, Anne Frank has become an iconic figure, whose paradigmatic
status is as manifold as it is widespread. She has been invoked variously as ‘´”an archetypal Jew,
Holocaust victim, human rights cham­pion, girl, adolescent writer, diarist, or feminist voice”. None
of these attributes either fits Anne perfectly or completely explains her significance; rather, this

10
Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten
Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

complex of paradigms is key to

understanding Anne Frank as an icon.
Indeed, her posthumous renown exemplifies
how the meaning of an icon is not fixed;
instead, its significance shifts as notions of
what an icon represents respond to the
evolving desires of those embracing it. The
values invested in Anne’s life and work
reflect larger developments in how people
across the spectrum of nationalities,
religions, and ideologies have grappled with
the significance of the Holocaust. Greater interest in studying the writings of young women has
prompted reappraisals of Anne’s diary as a literary landmark. And the inspiration that activists have
found in Anne’s life and work have made her an emblematic figure of human rights, notwithstanding
the fact that her murder at the age of fifteen cut short her potential of becoming a public advocate
for social justice.

4.4. THE ANNE FRANK HOUSE

After the end of World War II, the Secret Annex was on a list of buildings to be demolished, but a
group of people in Amsterdam campaigned and set up the foundation now known as the Anne
Frank House. The house preserved Frank’s hiding spot; today it is one of the three most popular
museums in Amsterdam. In June 2013, the Anne Frank House lost a lawsuit to the Anne Frank Fonds,
after the Fonds sued the House for the return of documents linked to Anne and Otto Frank.

Frank’s physical diary and other writings, however, are property of the Dutch state and have been
on permanent loan to the House since 2009. In 2015, the Fonds, the copyright holders of Frank’s
diary, lost a lawsuit against the Anne Frank House after the House began new scientific research on
the texts in 2011. In 2009, the Anne Frank Center USA launched a national initiative called the Sapling
Project, planting saplings from a 170-year-old chestnut tree that Frank had long loved (as denoted
in her diary) at 11 different sites nationwide.

4.5. ANNE FRANK ZENTRUM

The Anne Frank Zentrum (Anne Frank Centre) is located just next to the Hackeschen Höfe in Berlin’s
new Mitte district in an area near the S-Bahn Hackescher Markt known as the Scheunenviertel. The
permanent exhibition "All about Anne" is housed in the Haus Schwarzenberg, a lively cultural center
where history lives on today. It was in this house that businessman Otto Weidt provided a safe house
for persecuted Jews at the height of the Nazi deportations, in his workshop for the blind. The

11
Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten
Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

exhibition skillfully links past and present with guided tours, audio information points, films and an
interactive Learning Centre, offering a varied program designed for schools and youth centers.

5. CONCLUSION: ANNE AS PART OF

ALL OF US
Anne Frank’s renown has endured beyond the lives of almost all the people who knew her; it will
soon outlast her cohort of eyewitnesses to World War II. As remembering the Holocaust passes
beyond the last generation of people who experienced it, Anne will remain a fixture of its public
recollection as one of the best known of this genocide’s millions of victims. Rethinking Anne Frank’s
iconic stature will also continue, as new generations read her diary and learn about her life, and as
the passage of time both suggests more possibilities for ascribing symbolic value to Anne and raises
new questions about the implications of doing so.

Today, when people read Anne’s diary or visit the building in which most of it was written, they not
only encounter an extraordinary work, created during the Holocaust. They also discover that they
are joining a vast international body of this book’s readers and the museum’s visitors, each of whom
forges an individual understanding of Anne’s life, which she revealed with deeply personal candor
in her writing. There is much to learn from the story of this one young woman amid the terrible
times in which she lived and died. In addition, the wealth of responses that Anne Frank has inspired
is itself instructive, revealing the many possibilities of finding meaning at this powerful confluence of
remembrance and imagination.

12
Anne Frank Memories That Will Never Be Forgotten
Daniela Alejandra Melo Mendoza 262228

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY
• https://www.history.com/news/anne-frank-diary-symbol-holocaust

• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anne-Frank

• https://www.thejc.com/culture/features/david-gillham-s-new-book-which-imagines-
anne-frank-as-a-survivor-1.482549

• https://www.bs-anne-frank.de/english/

• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/25/anne-frank-full-story-bart-van-es

• https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/25/arts/anne-frank-the-girl-and-the-icon.html

• https://www.berlin.de/en/museums/3108938-3104050-anne-frank-zentrum.en.html

• https://bergen-belsen.stiftung-ng.de/en/history/

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o8jSbCanv0

• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anne-Frank

• https://natieangelik.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/ensayo-sobre-anne-frank/

https://www.diarioarmenia.org.ar/darte-la-libertad-ensayo-sobre-ana-frank/

• https://www.thejc.com/culture/features/david-gillham-s-new-book-which-imagines-
anne-frank-as-a-survivor-1.482549

• https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/anne-frank-1

13