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On this Day: Anne Frank’s Diary Published for the First Time
June 25, 2008 02:00 PM
by
findingDulcinea Staff
On June 25, 1947, young Holocaust victim Anne Frank’s diary is posthumously published when her father, Otto Frank, prints 1,500 copies in Dutch.
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The Frank family had fled their native Germany for the Netherlands in 1933. But the Nazis followed in 1940, and the family went into hiding in patriarch Otto Frank’s food-products warehouse on July 9, 1942. Non-Jewish friends and business associates smuggled them food. Otto, his wife, and his daughters Margot and Anne survived in secret until August 4, 1944, when the annex in which they hid was raided by the Gestapo, acting on a tip from a Dutch informer who remains unknown today.
Anne and Margot were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they both died of typhus in March 1945. Anne’s parents were sent to Auschwitz; the camp was liberated by Russian troops in early January 1945, just days after Anne’s mother had died.
Otto, the only surviving member of the family, returned home and soon found the diary. Anne’s diary, written in Dutch, tells the story of a young woman’s internal struggle to understand and cope with Nazi occupation and anti-Semitism. Astonished at his daughter’s maturity and insightfulness, Otto realized the diary’s significance and struggled to have it published.
He eventually printed 1,500 copies, titled “Het Achterhuis,” or “The Secret Annex.” Known to American readers as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” it has since been published in more than 60 languages and has become one of the most influential—and widely read—literary works in history.
Anne and Margot were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they both died of typhus in March 1945. Anne’s parents were sent to Auschwitz; the camp was liberated by Russian troops in early January 1945, just days after Anne’s mother had died.
Otto, the only surviving member of the family, returned home and soon found the diary. Anne’s diary, written in Dutch, tells the story of a young woman’s internal struggle to understand and cope with Nazi occupation and anti-Semitism. Astonished at his daughter’s maturity and insightfulness, Otto realized the diary’s significance and struggled to have it published.
He eventually printed 1,500 copies, titled “Het Achterhuis,” or “The Secret Annex.” Known to American readers as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” it has since been published in more than 60 languages and has become one of the most influential—and widely read—literary works in history.
Headline Link: Anne Frank's diary
“Friends who had searched the family’s hiding place after their capture later gave Otto Frank the papers left behind by the Gestapo. Among them he found Anne’s diary. … Precocious in style and insight, it traces her emotional growth amid adversity. In it she wrote, ‘In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.’”
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica
Key Players: Anne Frank (1929–1945)
Anne was born in Frankfurt, Germany on June 12, 1929. At the beginning of 1933 Anne and her family fled Germany as the Nazi party took over. In 1940 the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and the Franks were forced to deal with Nazi persecution. In 1942 Anne’s sister Margot received a “call-up,” or a summons to a concentration camp. Anne recorded her emotions, “I was stunned. A call-up, everyone knows what that means. Visions of concentration camps and lonely cells raced through my head.”
Source: Anne Frank Museum
Background: Bergen-Belsen, Anne’s hiding place
Originating as a prisoner of war camp, Bergen-Belsen was changed to a “residence camp” where the Germans kept Jews to use in prisoner of war exchange. The majority of the Jews were not exchanged, and the camp was made into a concentration camp. “Overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, and the lack of adequate food and shelter led to a typhus epidemic. In the first few months of 1945, tens of thousands of prisoners, perhaps as many as 35,000 people, died.”
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Anne, her family, and four others lived for two years in a secret Annex in the attic of her father’s office warehouse. The room’s entrance was hidden behind a bookcase.
Source: Anne Frank Museum
Historical Context: World War II, the Holocaust, other victim’s stories
From 1939 to 1945 the world was embroiled in its greatest military conflict to date. World War II claimed millions of lives and left much of Asia, Africa and Europe in ruins.
Source: The BBC
“The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. ‘Holocaust’ is a word of Greek origin meaning ‘sacrifice by fire.’”
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Anne Frank’s story was the first highly publicized victim’s account of the Holocaust. Part of her legacy is that millions of survivors and victims have since followed in her footsteps and told their own accounts. Solomon Radasky, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz, tells his story. “There we 375,000 Jews living in Warsaw before the war. I doubt that there are 5,000 living there today. It is very, very important for me to tell this story.”
Source: Holocaust Survivors.org
Helen L, a survivor of Auschwitz, tells her story in an interview. “We got a slice of bread which most of the time had green mold on it. For a day. A cup of water. For the day. Or was a cup of tea, really, it was a horrible smelling thing. And then you got, which was your dinner as far as I remember, it looked like there was a couple of, a few potato peels, dirty ones.”
Source: Remember.org
Later Developments: Anne Frank’s legacy & adaptations of her story
Anne’s story is now one of the most read pieces of literature worldwide. More than 25 million copies of her diary have been sold since the original publishing in 1947. Her story has been made into hundreds of plays, movies, and documentaries, including the 1959 major motion picture, “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
Source: Jewish News Weekly of Northern California
Related Topics: ‘Anne Frank Postcard Surfaces After 70 Years’
In April 2008, Amsterdam schoolteacher Paul van den Heuvel found a New Year’s card from 1937, originally sent by Anne Frank to a friend, in his father’s antique shop. “I just found it in a box, which probably came from an Amsterdam flea market,” van den Heuvel said.
Source: findingDulcinea
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