Hayley's School Homework Page

Anne Frank's Time Line

May 12, 1889

Anne's father, Otto Frank, is born in Frankfurt, Germany.

1900

Anne's mother, Edith Hollander, born in Aachen, Germany.

1908-1909

Otto Frank in America working at Macy's Department Store in New York.

1914-1918

Otto Frank serves in the German Army during World War I and attains the rank of lieutenant.

1925

Anne's parents marry and settle in Frankfurt, Germany.

June 12, 1929

Anne (Annelies Marie) Frank is born in Frankfurt, Germany.

1933

Frank family moves to Amsterdam, Holland, when Hitler comes to power in Germany.

June 12, 1942

Anne receives a diary for her thirteenth birthday.

July, 1942

Margot Frank gets a call to report to a transit camp.

July 6, 1942

The Frank family moves into the 'secret annex' joined by the van Daan family one week later.

Aug 4, 1944

The Franks are arrested, taken to a police station, the to Westerbork, a transit camp in

Holland.

Sept 2, 1944

And and the others in the annex are sent to Auschwitz.

Oct 30, 1944

Anne and her sister, Margot, are sent to Bergen-Belsen.

Jan 6, 1945

Edith Frank dies of starvation in Auschwitz.

Jan 7, 1945

Auschwitz is liberated. Otto Frank is the only survivor from the annex.

March 1945

Margot dies of typhus in Bergen-Belsen.

April 1945

Anne dies of typhus in Bergen-Belsen.

1929 - 1944

In 1942, Anne Frank and her family fleeing the horrors of Nazi occupation, hid in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse. Over the next two years, Anne describes in her diary her frustrations at being confined, hungry, bored and the threat of discovery. Her diary ends when they are discovered in 1944.

Since its initial publication in 1947, The Diary of Anne Frank has sold more than 25 million copies. Anne Frank has become Hitler's most famous victim and a symbol of 10 million murdered, more than ten percent of whom were children.

Anne Frank died at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945. She received a blank diary on her 13th birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

Her marvellously detailed, engagingly personal entries chronicle 25 trying months of

claustrophobic, quarrelsome intimacy with her parents, sister, a second family, and a middle-aged dentist who has little tolerance for Anne's vivacity. The diary's universal appeal stems from its riveting blend of the grubby particulars of life during wartime and candid discussion of emotions familiar to every adolescent.

Edith and Otto Frank

The story of the Frank family began in Germany in the 1920's when Otto and Edith Frank led a happy life, highlighted by the births of their daughters Margot and Anne.

She and her older sister Margot, frequently spent their summer in Aachen, Germany, with their grandmother. In 1933, in response to Hitler's anti-Jewish decrees, Otto Frank opened a branch of his company, Opteka, in Amsterdam and began planning to bring his family there.

Anne Frank and her sister Margot

The Frank family finally moved into a house on Medwedplein in southern Amsterdam in 1933 and Anne began to attend the nearby Montessori school, where she excelled. Anne made many friends and was an exceptional student.

The family's feelings of security collapsed, however, when in 1940, Hitler's troops conquered Holland and the freedom of the Jews began to be severely restricted. Dictates on where Jews could shop, swim or go to school became a part of everyday life.

Aware of where those restrictions might ultimately lead, Otto Frank spent the year preparing and stocking an annex behind his business office at Prinsengracht 263 into a hiding place.

Prinsengracht 263, Anne Frank`s hiding place

On her 13th birthday in 1942 Anne received as a gift from her parents, a diary. She immediately took to writing her intimate thoughts and musings. A few short weeks later, however, Margot received a notice from the Nazi SS to report for work detail at a labour camp. On July 5th, 1942, Anne and the Frank family moved to the "Secret Annex" adjacent to Otto Frank's former office on Prinsengracht.

The last photo of Anne Frank

When the thirteen-year-old and her family went into hiding from the Nazis, who were victimising and arresting Jews, the diary went with her. She called it "Kitty," and for the two years she spent in hiding, the diary was her solace, her confidant, her friend.

What she recorded there were, in many ways, the ordinary thoughts and feelings of a teenage girl. But she was a teenage girl living under extraordinary circumstances in ominous times. Eight people eventually came to live in the secret annex. There were the four members of the Frank family, Otto Frank, Edith Frank, Margot and Anne, three from the Van Pels family, Herman and Auguste Van Pels and their son Peter, and an elderly dentist named Pfeffer.

In addition, four people acted as helpers for the people in the annex, and brought them food, supplies and news of the outside world. These protectors had placed themselves at great personal risk because they could have been arrested and jailed for helping Jews. All of these people worked at the business that had belonged to Otto Frank.

Anne Frank`s diary

Anne's famous diary captured two years of hiding in the attic above the store, but it ended on August 4, 1944, when their hiding place was betrayed by a Dutch collaborator. All those who lived there were arrested by the Nazis and deported to concentration camps.

As the Gestapo men searched the annex for valuables such as money, the briefcase in which Anne kept her writings was opened and the papers were scattered on the floor. Little did these men realise the eventual value of these materials. However, the two women, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, had known of Anne's intense feelings about these papers and gathered them up for safe keeping.

Anne's precious diary was among the many personal effects left behind by the family. Anne, and the seven others who shared the cramped Secret Annex with her, were all deported to Westerbork camp.

A few weeks later, as the Allies began retaking Holland, the inhabitants of the camp were moved to Auschwitz and later to other camps. At the gates of Auschwitz, Otto Frank was separated from his family for the last time.

In January, 1945, the German guards left the camp to the advancing Russian army. Most of the prisoners, including Peter Van Pels, were herded along with the troops, but Otto Frank was in the camp infirmary and was left behind. Otto Frank tried to convince Peter to hide in the infirmary, but he was afraid. Peter was never heard from again.

Otto Frank, barely alive, was discovered by the Russian army that liberated Auschwitz. Upon recovering, he began to search for his family, as shown in the letters that have only recently been discovered and have never before been seen or heard by the public. En route home to Amsterdam, he learned of his wife's death, but it was not until some time after returning home that he discovered the facts of Margot and Anne's death.

Otto Frank was the only one of the original 8 residents of the secret annex to survive. Van Pels died in the Auschwitz gas chambers and Pfeffer died at the Neuengamme camp in Germany.

Anne ultimately ended up in Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany, after being evacuated from Auschwitz in October, 1944. As starvation. cold and disease swept through the camp's population, Margot, Anne's sister, developed typhus and died. A few days later, Anne herself, in April, 1945, succumbed to the disease a few weeks before the camp was liberated by the British. She was 15 years old.

The horrors of Auschwitz

In Newsweek Magazine, July 21, 1997 a holocaust survivor, Irma Menkel, tells the story of Anne Frank and her death in Bergen-Belsen "I saw Anne Frank Die":

"One of the children in my barracks toward the end of the war was Anne Frank, whose diary became famous after her death. Typhus was a terrible problem, especially for the children. Of 500 in my barracks, maybe 100 got it, and most of them died. Many others starved to death. When Anne Frank got sick with typhus, I remember telling her she could stay in the barracks. I have a dim memory of Anne Frank speaking about her father. She was a nice, fine person.

She would say to me, "Irma, I am very sick." I said, "No, you are not sick." She wanted to be reassured that she wasn't. When she slipped into a coma, I took her in my arms. She didn't know that she was dying. She didn't know that she was so sick. You never know. At Bergen-Belsen, you did not have feelings anymore ..."

Holocaust

After the war, when it was clear Anne had not survived, the diary was returned to Otto Frank, and he was persuaded to publish it. Fifty years later, it is still an international best-seller.

Millions of copies have been sold, and Anne Frank’s name is known around the world. The narrow canal side house where she hid is a museum that is visited by more than 600,000 people a year. With the profits from the sale of the diaries, Otto Frank set up a charitable foundation, which helped pay for the medical expenses of Christians who had helped Jews during the war.

As long as he was alive, Otto Frank ran the foundation, and sought to control his daughters’ image. Though she never lived to see her 16th birthday, Anne Frank's innermost thoughts scribbled on scraps of paper challenge us, and shame us, a full fifty years after her death. Her life serves as eulogy to the millions of children who perished in World War II.

But she did not leave her legacy as an ode to the past - rather as a beacon of hope to the future ...

Oscar Schindler

She never met him but somewhere else there was Oscar Schindler, one remarkable man who outwitted Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to save more Jews from the gas chambers than most of the heroic rescuers during WWII ...

At the point when his ambitions have been realised and he could walk away from the war a rich man while "his Jews" die in Plazow and Auschwitz, Oscar Schindler desperately spends every penny he has bribing and paying off Nazi officials to protect and save his Jews.

Later accounts have revealed that Schindler spent something like 4 million German marks keeping his Jews out of the death camps - an enormous sum of money for those times.

Oscar Schindler used all means at his disposal to ensure the safety of his Schindler-Jews, even Emilie Schindler`s jewels were sold, to bribe, to buy food, clothes, and medicine. He set up a secret sanatorium in the factory with medical equipment purchased on the black market. Here Emilie Schindler looked after the sick.

With his life as the stakes, he employed all his powers of persuasion, he bribed uninhibitedly, fought, begged to save his Jews from the gas chambers ...

In those years, millions of Jews died in camps like Treblinka, Majdanek, Sorbibor, Chelmno, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen - but Schindler`s Jews miraculously survived.

Oscar Schindler toiled through the rough waters of the confusions of war. But he was one of only a handful who surfaced from the chaos, and generations will remember him for what he did.