Informative Essay On Anne Frank

Anne Frank was my age, 15, when she was murdered by Nazis during World War II. I can’t even fathom what she must have gone through in the months before her death. Through her diary, one can understand the hardships of the Jewish people in Nazi Germany occupied countries

Anne Frank was born in 1929 just at the beginning of turmoil in German society. At the beginning of her life, Frank’s family was a relatively normal German-Jewish family living just outside of Frankfurt. Her father, Otto Frank, was a business owner and her sister, Margot Frank, was three years older than her. They moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1933 because of the threat to their lives because of their Jewish Heritage.

After Germany’s loss in WWI, it’s spirits were dampened and it became very angry at the world. It’s anger was personified in the form of a man named Adolf

Hitler. During the period of time after WWI in which Germany was in deep economic struggle, the extremely anti-Semitic National German Socialist Workers Party formed. This new political stronghold threatened Frank’s and many other German-Jews very existence.
Anne Frank and her family believed they were safe in Amsterdam, with Otto taking the position of managing director at a business and Anne going to school and living a normal life through the rest of the 1930s. On May 15, 1940 after 5 days of fighting, the Dutch surrendered to the Nazis, marking the beginning of the Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. Anne wrote
“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.”
October 1940 is when it really became evident that the Franks may have to go into hiding. The Nazis starting making Jews wear the a yellow Star of David, follow a very strict curfew, go to segregated Jewish schools, and forbade them from owning businesses. Otto officially signed ownership of his business over to his two Jewish friends, Kleiman and Kugler, but secretly ran his company without the Nazis knowing.
In July 1942, a letter was received by Margot Frank that summoned her to work at a work camp in Germany. After seeing this letter, the Franks decided it was time to go into hiding in a small attic apartment behind Otto’s business. The Franks were joined in hiding by the Van Pels, which included Peter van Pel. A small group of Otto’s employees risked their lives to deliver new, food, and supplies to the Franks, Van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer, a Jewish dentist.
It was very tense for the 8 people in the small attic. Anne Frank called the attic the Secret Annex in the diary she had received for her 13th birthday, which was not but one month before the family went into hiding. The 8 people had to be quiet during the day in order to avoid detection and they couldn’t go outside. While in hiding, Anne passed the time by writing in her diary, and she wrote about typical teenage things, but at the same time she displayed mature insight about the war and humankind itself.
After 25 months of hiding on August 4, 1944, the people in the Secret Annex were discover by the German secret state police, who were tipped by an anonymous person.

The families were separated, and in September of 1944, the family was transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination and concentration camp in Poland. Anne and Margot were not killed in the Auschwitz gas chambers but were rather sent to Bergen-Belsen, which was a concentration camp located in northern Germany. The sisters died in March of 1945 from typhus at Bergen-Belsen. After their death, their bodies were simply thrown into an unmarked mass grave. A few weeks after their death in April, Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British. Otto Frank was the only member of the Secret Annex to have survived the Holocaust, having been liberated from Auschwitz by Soviet troops in January of 1945.

Anne Frank would be proud to see how she is remembered by the world. Her diary has been published and her story has been told on both stage and screen. Her diary and her story shows how you can never really kill the human spirit, no matter how hard you

try.