This week I watched The Diary of Anne Frank from 2009. It was based on Anne Frank’s actual diary and her accounts on how she and her Jewish family hid from the Nazi’s during WWll. Ann Frank is one of the most famous victims of the Holocaust because of her diary. She was only 13 when she went into hiding. Her writings from the two years she spent so close to her family were eventually discovered and published by her father, Otto Frank, after he survived Auschwitz.
After Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power there in 1933, Anne, her parents and older sister moved to the Netherlands from Germany because of how terribly Jews were being treated. In 1942, Frank and her family went into hiding in a secret apartment behind her father's business in German-occupied Amsterdam as things started to get worse and worse for Jewish people. “Jews were required to wear a yellow star, Jews were forbidden to use trams, Jews were required to turn in their bicycles, Jews were forbidden to use any public sports centers, Jews were not allowed to watch any form of entertainment and so on.” Jews were forced to think that they were lower and inadequate to everyone else just because of their religious beliefs. Hitler wanted to create what he saw was the perfect German, this meant that anyone who did not fit into his perfect image was persecuted or killed.
There was another family that also went into hiding with the Franks - the Van Pels family. Anne called them the Van Daan family in her diary. The members of the van Pels family were: Mr. and Mrs. Van Pels and their 15 year-old son Peter. Fritz Pfleffer, a dentist, also went into hiding with the two families.
Eventually, the people in the office downstairs became suspicious when they heard sounds and found random things in the office that the Frank’s helpers accidentally dropped. Soon after, The Nazi’s raided the secret annex hidden behind a bookcase and brought the families to prison camps. Otto Frank was the only one out of the families that survived the concentration camps. Anne Frank and her sister died only a few weeks before the Bergen-Belsen camp was liberated.
This movie was so sad. Living in such cramped quarters and under such emotional distress would cause even the strongest people to come unhinged. The families’ lives were flipped upside down and everything they knew was gone. But, they had each other for two years. I thought the movie really portrayed the time period well and was very realistic. It is hard to believe all of the terrible things the Jews went through at the concentration camps and before.
The Bookcase Hiding the Secret Annex
Pictures of the members of the Van Pel and Frank families.
Comments
Excellent summary Hannah!