WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The handwritten “diary” consists of an autograph-type album (in which the first entries were made), two exercise books (for later entries), and individual sheets of paper (on which the diary was being revised). The album is small, square, clothbound, and unlined; the exercise books have lined pages; and the loose sheets are colored and have no lines.
I feel as if I’m going to burst, and I know that it would get better with crying, but I can’t. I’m restless, I go from one room to the other, breathe through the crack of a closed window, feel my heart beating, as if it is saying, “Can’t you satisfy my longings at last?”
—Anne Frank, February 12, 1944*
The “Jewish Problem” had plagued the perverted leadership of the Nazi Party since their terrifying rise to power in the early 1930s. At first the Nazis liquidated Jewish businesses, segregated Jewish students, mandated Jews wear yellow stars on their arms, burned synagogues, and attacked Jews on the street. But then their violent hatred led them to their “Final Solution,” the systematic extermination of the Jews, which they tried to achieve as efficiently as possible. The Nazis were scrupulous not only in rounding up Jews and collecting their valuables, but also in suppressing rebellions and destroying evidence of their own heinous acts. Yet there lives on the voice of one girl who was a victim of the genocide, whose poignant words would so deeply touch others, who would bear witness for all future generations to the living hell created by the Nazis.
Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now?
—Anne Frank, April 11, 1944
As conditions began to heat up in Hitler’s Germany, a banker from Frankfurt, Otto Frank, took heed. Realizing that the very lives of Jews would soon be at stake, he, like other Jews, fled with his family. In December 1933 Otto Frank, his wife, Edith, and their daughter Margot settled in Amsterdam. Their youngest daughter, Anne, who was four, joined them there three months later.
Despite the persecution of Jews in other parts of Europe, the Franks lived a rather happy and peaceful life in Amsterdam. But Hitler continued to expand his empire, and by mid-May 1940 the Germans had conquered the Netherlands.
A diary entry: "This is a photo of how I wish to be forever. Then I might still have a chance to go to Holywood. At present, unfortunately, most of the time I look different. Anne Frank, 10 Oct. 1942, Sunday."
In his new country Otto Frank was a pectin manufacturer and trader. His business prospered, moving to different facilities until it finally settled at 263 Prinsengracht, a five-story building in Amsterdam. When the Germans took over, he had to transfer ownership of his business, but he was still very much admired by some of his employees.
When the Germans started deporting Jews, Frank devised a plan in which it would seem as though he had abandoned his business and fled with his family, but in reality they would hide in an annex, consisting of four rooms on two floors and an attic mainly used for the storage of food. On a warm July morning in 1942, a German Security Service call-up notice for Margot was delivered at the Franks’ home; thousands of Jews, including many teenagers by themselves, were being summoned to report for emigration to concentration camps. This was a sign for Otto Frank that the time had come for him and his family to go into hiding. They “disappeared” into the annex of 263 Prinsengracht, their temporary haven of safety, where an intense drama would unfold over the next couple of years.
Four more protagonists were added to the annex: Friedrich Pfeffer, a dentist; and Mr. and Mrs. Hermann van Pels and their son, Peter. The staircase leading to the annex was blocked by a bookcase that concealed a door that had hooks to lock it. Food obtained from phony ration cards was provided daily for the residents. The four employees in the building, including Miep Gies and her husband, looked after the occupants of the annex with devotion.
“Prison” may be a more apt way of describing the lives of the occupants, because they truly felt like captives in their limited surroundings. For over two years they lived in forced proximity, not able to make a sound in the daytime, only able to break out of their hutch on evenings and on weekends. For all this time they could not venture outdoors in the daytime and feel the sun warm their faces. Instead, they had to be quiet, contain their moods and emotions, and get along as well as they could, all under the looming threat that at any moment the merciless Nazis could storm their confines and send them to someplace even worse.
Again and again I ask myself, would it not have been better for us all if we had not gone into hiding, and if we were dead now and not going through all this misery, especially as we should be sparing the others. But we all recoil from these thoughts too, for we still love life, we haven’t forgotten the voice of nature, we still hope, hope about everything. I hope something will happen soon now, shooting if need be—nothing can crush us more than this restlessness. Let the end come, even if it is hard; then at least we shall know whether we are finally going to win through or go under.
—Anne Frank, May 26,1944
For her thirteenth birthday on June 12, 1942, Anne Frank had been given an autograph album, which she used as a diary. Anne was a pretty girl, with black hair, a tender smile, and expressive eyes. Although she had not shone above her classmates in school, she was intelligent and had an eye for detail, and a simple but thorough and warm way of expressing herself. She wanted to become a writer or a journalist.
During her time in the annex, Anne blossomed from a girl into a young woman. In her diary she recorded not only the difficulties of being sequestered for so long with people of different personalities and how they lived under the pall of terror, but the painful transition of a girl on the verge of womanhood. She wrote of her conflicts with her mother, of her physical awakening, of her love for Peter. She addressed her entries to a fictional girl named “Kitty.”
Adolescence is a period of confusion, of self-doubt. In her diaries Anne sought refuge and comfort from the hardships of her life and bared her soul, using code names for the other occupants as well as herself. She wrote in Dutch and filled nearly three journals. In March 1944 she heard the Dutch minister of education, art, and science in a radio broadcast from London say that descendants of the nation would best understand its struggle for freedom through ordinary documents such as letters and diaries. Excited by the prospect of making her contribution and proving herself as a journalist, Anne began revising her diary.
June 6, 1944, was D-Day; the Allies launched a massive attack on the Germans. At last, liberation seemed imminent! Despite their long and arduous confinement, the hidden Dutch occupants of 263 Prinsengracht were optimistic that they would soon resume normal lives. In her diary Anne wrote about the “Great commotion in the ‘Secret Annex.’ Would the long-awaited liberation that has been talked of so much, but which seems too wonderful, too much like a fairy tale, ever come true?”
Unfortunately, not for her and the others. Sometime after ten o’clock on the morning of August 4, 1944, a number of armed officers of the German Security Service came to arrest the Jews. Someone—perhaps a person they knew—had betrayed the inmates of the attic. The police ordered the bookcase moved and ascended the stairs. In the rooms above they found their bounty: eight Jews. The officers ravaged the room, confiscating valuables but ignoring Anne’s papers, which fell to the floor along with books and magazines. The Jews were told to gather some personal items. Anne did so but left her diaries behind. In the early afternoon a truck came to take the prisoners away. A few days later they were transferred to Westerbork, a Jewish transit camp, or waiting room for the death camps in the east.
With more than a thousand other men, women, and children, the Franks were transported by train to Auschwitz. Like other families, they were split up. Edith and Otto stayed on at Auschwitz; less than two months later Margot and Anne were sent on to Bergen-Belsen. All except Otto would perish: Edith succumbed in Auschwitz; Margot and Anne were swept away by typhus. Anne’s corpse was put into
a mass unmarked grave, and to this day her burial spot is unknown. The other occupants of the annex fared equally tragically in the camps. Dr. Pfeffer died in Neuengamme, Mr. and Mrs. van Pels in Auschwitz, and young Peter in Mauthausen.
After the war Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam and lived for a few years with Miep Gies and her husband. About two months after his arrival, Otto Frank received news of the Frank girls’ deaths. Miep Gies then presented to Otto his daughter Anne’s papers. She had gathered them off the floor after the Nazis had left with their prey and had hoped to return them to Anne one day.
When the smoke of World War II cleared, the world learned about Hitler’s concentration camps and the incomprehensible crimes committed by the Nazis. Living eyewitnesses to the reign of terror were few; six million Jews died. One such victim was Anne Frank. In her diary, which her father brought to publishers’ attention, she conveys the plight of the Jews better perhaps than other, more direct accounts of the Holocaust. Her spirit persists, and her faith in the good of humanity will continue to reverberate in our hearts.
On April 4, 1944, about a year before she died at the age of fifteen, Anne Frank wrote, “I want to go on living, even after death!” With her heartrending diary, a work that evokes so splendidly both the courage and pathos of war, she has indeed achieved immortality.
LOCATION: Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (The autograph album, Anne Frank’s first diary, is exhibited every so often at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.)
Footnote
*Diary entries in this chapter from Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Copyright 1952 by Otto H. Frank. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
THE ENOLA GAY
DATE: 1945
WHAT IT IS: The aircraft that dropped the most devastating bomb ever unleashed upon a warring nation.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: It is a four-engine, multi-seat Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber that measures 99 feet long and has a 141-foot wingspan. It has a pressurized crew compartment while at altitude and is made entirely of metal.
On August 6, 1945, the atomic age was graphically introduced to the world when the release mechanism within a single aircraft some thirty-one thousand feet above ground was activated, and a container packed with uranium fission material that could produce the equivalent of a twenty-thousand-ton TNT explosion fell toward Earth. The instrument of this historic apocalypse was the Enola Gay.
By July 1945 the United States had devised a weapon of unprecedented explosive power: the atomic bomb. At this point in World War II, Germany had already surrendered, but fighting continued with Japan, and both sides were suffering heavy casualties. The Potsdam Proclamation was broadcast on July 26, calling for the “unconditional surrender of all Japanese forces,” with the alternative being “prompt and utter destruction.” Two days later Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki answered that Japan would disregard the proclamation. After Japan continued to show no signs of capitulating, plans were set in motion to drop the bomb.
The Glenn L. Martin Company of Omaha, Nebraska, was one of three manufacturers selected by the U.S. government to build B-29s during World War II, when about four thousand of these bombers were built. Of the Martin-built airplanes, twenty were selected to be reconfigured under a special project named Silverplate for anticipated deployment in the Pacific—namely, dropping the atomic bomb. All twenty of these planes, of which the Enola Gay was one, were delivered to a nearby air force modification center, where the gun turrets were removed in order to improve performance of the airplane, leaving only the twenty-millimeter tailgun, and the bomb bay was reconfigured for single-point suspension. All twenty of the Silverplate planes had the capability of dropping an atomic bomb; since the atomic age was new and the destructive power of the bomb wasn’t known with certainty, this quantity of bombers ensured that atomic warfare could be continued if necessary.
While the modifications were being made, no one knew which of the twenty planes would be used—assuming the atomic bomb was produced successfully—if it was deemed necessary to drop the bomb. Nor did anyone know which among them would drop another atomic bomb (based on plutonium fission) on Nagasaki a few days later. The lot of aircraft was delivered to the U.S. Army Air Forces on May 18, 1945, and was accepted for service less than a month later.
The Enola Gay lands at Tinian, Mariana Islands, on August6, 1945, after having dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Shortly afterward, one of the planes was selected to carry out the historic Hiroshima mission—should it be given a green light. The man designated to fly the plane was Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., a decorated bomber pilot. Tibbets named the aircraft after his mother, calling it the Enola Gay.
In mid-June 1945 the Enola Gay was ferried to the 393rd Heavy Bombardment Squadron at the air force base at Wendover, Utah, and two weeks later, after intensive training of its crew, it departed for Tinian, part of the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean. Regular bombing missions began early in July with the dropping of twenty conventional-type five-hundred-pound bombs that had been loaded into the Enola Gay, which then raided Marcus Island with several other planes. A total of four more training missions followed.
Two types of atomic bombs were used by the B-29s: “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.” These descriptive names were based on the bombs’ shape and method of detonation. The Fat Man was an implosion-type bomb, meaning that the detonation was set off so that it worked inwardly rather than outwardly to compress for fusion to yield an atomic explosion. The Little Boy had a gun-type mechanism that fired a detonator into the implosion substance to cause the explosion. (A Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay, and a Fat Man was discharged on Nagasaki by the Bockscar [United States Air Force Museum, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio].)
For the Enola Gay’s four practice runs, Fat Man-shaped practice bombs called “pumpkins” were used that would simulate the same fall trajectory as the real weapon. Two of these missions were flown against protruding rocks in the Pacific Ocean; two others were dropped upon pinpoint objects in target areas in Japan. Four caricatures of Fat Man are painted in black on the nose of the aircraft to mark these practice missions. Symbolizing the actual drop is a fifth and identical caricature painted in red. A Little Boy figure painted red would be more appropriate, but no one knows why this wasn’t the figure used.
In July 1945 the components of the first atomic bomb to be used for warfare began their journey to Tinian, the point of assembly. From the secret research lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, came the inner cannon that the USS Indianapolis would transport out of San Francisco. Other parts were sent by air.
Early on the morning of August 6, a crew of twelve men took off in the Enola Gay from the air base at Tinian on one of the most important and dangerous Allied missions of World War II. In the belly of the plane was a bomb weighing more than nine thousand pounds. Should the plane crash on takeoff—a not-uncommon occurrence for bombers at the time—or be attacked in the air, it could mean instant death for all on board. Besides the pilot, the thirty-year-old Colonel Tibbets, there was copilot Robert W. Lewis, weapons officer William Parsons, proximity fuse specialist Morris Jeppson, radar officer Jacob Beser, flight engineer Wyatt Duzenbery, bombardier Thomas W. Ferebee, radio operator Richard Nelson, tail gunner George R. Caron, radio operator Joseph A. Stiborik, flight engineer Robert Shumard, and navigator Theodore van Kirk.
At 8:15 A.M. the Enola Gay unleashed its lethal cargo into the skies above Hiroshima. As its crew donned special goggles to protect them from the blinding flash below, the Enola Gay banked steeply to the right to avoid being over the point of detonation. In the ensuing explosion and conflagration, 80,000 to 150,000 people died, either immediately or from subsequent radiation poisoning. No other single strike of a weapon ever took more lives, caused greater destruction, or had grimmer repercussions. Many survivors would suffer permanently from the radiation, an
d even their unborn would become casualties.
The plane returned to Tinian and three months later was flown to Roswell Air Force Base in New Mexico. By that time the plane had acquired considerable notoriety, but it wasn’t retired yet. In April 1946 the plane was flown by Tibbets to Kwajalein, one of the Marshall Islands, where it served as a standby airplane in Operation Crossroads, in which further tests of atomic weapons were conducted.
The following July, the plane was flown back to the United States, and on August 30, 1946, it was placed in storage at the Davis-Monthan Army Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. Three years later the Enola Gay became part of the collection of the Smithsonian Institution and its National Air and Space Museum. It was ceremoniously flown on July 3, 1949, by Tibbets to the Smithsonian’s gathering facility for museum aircraft in Park Ridge, Illinois, where it joined a myriad of other warplanes.
In December 1984 the National Air and Space Museum began restoration on the Enola Gay. One of the obstacles to the project was rebuilding the original release device, which no longer exists. The few photographs and drawings of the original were still classified, so the Smithsonian had to get them declassified in order to reconstruct it.
Over the years, much debate over whether the atomic bombing of Japan was necessary has ensued, especially around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings, in 1995. Two events planned for that year precipitated a heated international public reaction: the Smithsonian Institution’s forthcoming exhibit on World War II and the atomic bomb (U.S. military veterans protested its initial sympathetic position to the Japanese), and the U.S. Postal Service’s plan to issue a commemorative stamp picturing an atomic mushroom cloud, with the caption “Atomic bombs hasten war’s end, August 1945.” Essentially, the controversy pitted those who believe the atomic bomb was necessary to bring a quick end to the war against those who believe that atomic warfare was not justified.
Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain Page 33