The Legacy of Anne Frank

by The Legacy of Anne Frank (retail) (epub)

  The eight petrified people were told to gather a few items for their journey and were led downstairs through the building and out into the busy Amsterdam street. Blinking their eyes in the sunlight, the eight newly-captured Jews were pushed into a police van. Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman were taken too, as helping Jews was a crime punishable by death. The van headed off towards the Gestapo headquarters in the south of the city. As it crossed the city streets, eight pairs of eyes, who had been for so long isolated from a normal street life, were pinned to the windows. Would this be the last they would see of this beautiful city they had all come to love? For seven of those eight it would.

  After they were taken to the Gestapo headquarters in the south of the city, the petrified group of eight were loaded onto a regular passenger train with its doors bolted shut to prevent escape. The train steamed its way out of the city to Westerbork, the transit camp located in the north-eastern part of the Netherlands. There they would be awaiting certain deportation to the death camps they had so feared. In Westerbork they were assigned to Block 67, the ‘punishment block’ for prisoners who had tried to evade arrest by hiding.

  Rootje de Winter, another inmate from Amsterdam, recalled that Anne had seemed almost happy while she laboured in Westerbork’s industrial area doing the dirty job of dismantling aeroplane batteries. Anne was relishing the company of people other than those she had spent the past two years with, although she did choose to spend time in Peter van Pels’s company.

  The Allies were still battling their way through northern Europe, could they soon get to the Netherlands? On 3 September, the Allied armies reached Brussels, and it seemed that the liberation of the Netherlands could be imminent. But after failed airborne landings near Arnhem, the Allied advance came to a halt at the mighty river Rhine, and there it stagnated through the winter. On the very day the Allied forces had reached Brussels, the Frank family’s names were announced for the feared deportation to Poland. By early morning on 3 September, a long line of cattle trucks stood in the centre of the camp, ready to transport over 1,000 people to Auschwitz. Unknown to the inmates, the train had sidled in to the camp during the night, and there it was ‘waiting motionless like a masked executioner concealing his bared axe’, according to one unnamed witness. The Frank family climbed together into the stinking, blisteringly hot cattle truck packed tight with other terrified Dutch Jews who were painfully aware that they were about to experience their very last journey. At 11.00 a.m. the whistle blew and the trucks started to move.

  As the Franks’ co-travellers started to die along the route from exhaustion, hunger and thirst, their bodies thrown out of the truck at each stop, did anyone on board, apart from the innocent small children, have any hope they would be kept alive once they had got to the dreaded destination? Several museums around the world have displayed empty cattle trucks in order to show the barbarity of that journey, but none could convey the pervading fear, the stench, the cries of hunger, thirst and despair of the real people who were huddled inside. Interviews with Holocaust survivors have often centred round their memories of the journey rather than their experiences once in the camp, so traumatic were those terrible days of travelling.

  The train finally steamed in to the railway ramp of Auschwitz. Amid the shouted orders of the uniformed guards, the screams of mothers being separated from their children, and the barking of the fearsome dogs, Otto Frank was marched off in a different direction from his wife and daughters, he to the men’s area of camp Auschwitz I and the women 3km away to Auschwitz-Birkenau. No longer could Otto Frank be a protective husband and father. The Frank family had been sent to their doom on the very last transport that left the Netherlands for Auschwitz. Had their arrest occurred just a few weeks later, they may all have survived.

  During their time in Barrack 29 of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Anne became close again to her mother and they were inseparable. Their day-to-day struggle to survive was not the place for petty differences or squabbles. After one month in Auschwitz, despite surviving selections for the gas chambers by the feared Dr Josef Mengele, the Frank girls were in a bad condition. By the end of October, they both had scabies, a condition caused by lice burying under their skin. Edith was doing all she could to protect her daughters, trying to get any extra food to keep them going.

  On 30 October there was a selection for transportation of some of the women to be taken out of Auschwitz-Birkenau to an unknown destination. Edith was selected to stay in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her two daughters were called forward to be assessed by Mengele. With a quick nod and a flick of his finger, Mengele parted Edith Frank from her two girls forever. Again the two teenage girls boarded a train, along with 632 women. It was a freezing and tough journey, this time taking four days. The train crossed the Polish border and took Anne and Margot back to the land of their birth, Germany. Perhaps they thought that the cultured homeland of generations of the Frank family would be their ultimate salvation.

  But their destination was Bergen-Belsen, a camp that would become synonymous with death by slow starvation and the world’s first recorded encounter with walking skeletons. Once a former German army barracks and then a prisoner of war camp, by 1944 it was being used to contain sick Jewish inmates from other camps, with a plan that they may eventually be ‘exchanged’. The camp was already in a severe state of neglect by the time the Frank girls arrived, with little sanitation, medicines, care or food supplies. Their survival prospects were extremely poor. Anne and Margot were first assigned to a tent and then to a barrack where they slept together on a wooden bunk by an open door, where the icy wind whipped in and around their bodies. The winter of 1944/45 was particular vicious and the girls’ health had not been good when they had arrived due to the effects of scabies. Somehow they got through the worst of the winter months, but meanwhile getting ever thinner and weaker.

  In February a miracle occurred. Anne met her old playmate from Amsterdam, Hannah Goslar, who had already been in Bergen-Belsen for a year, detained in the relatively more privileged block for ‘exchange prisoners’. Hannah’s father had been a German government minister prior to 1933, and the family were in possession of passports for Palestine. Hannah’s living conditions were marginally better than those of the wretched ordinary prisoners, who included Anne and Margot.

  One day in February 1945, Hannah happened to encounter Auguste van Pels. She was dumbfounded when she heard from Mrs van Pels that her close friend Anne had been in the very same camp throughout the winter. It had been widely believed around their group in Amsterdam that when the Franks suddenly disappeared from the Merwedeplein in July 1942, they had fled to the safety of neutral Switzerland, even though Hannah had worried that the family may have been arrested at the Swiss border. Mrs van Pels promised to bring Anne to Hannah. Some minutes later, there was Anne standing immediately on the other side of the barbed wire fence. This was no longer the vivacious, chatty and fun-loving Anne Frank, as Hannah later recalled the furtive whispered conversation between the two teenage prisoners. Despite being dark, the girls were aware that a German guard was watching them from the nearby watchtower, and even in the darkness Hannah was shocked to make out Anne looking desperately thin and with a shaven head. As they knew they only had a few moments, Anne briefly described to Hannah about her two years of hiding and the family’s arrest. The two girls both wept in pitiful sorrow as Hannah told Anne that her mother and sister had died and her father was sick. Anne then told her that Margot too was very sick, her mother was probably dead and that her father, at age 56, had undoubtedly been gassed at Auschwitz. So much had happened to the two girls, who just six years earlier had lined up in their prettiest party dresses and hair bows to mark Anne’s tenth birthday.

  Looking back on that conversation, the adult Hannah Goslar has expressed sadness that Anne had really believed she had no parents. In fact, unbeknown to the girl suffering on that barren and remote German heath, Otto Frank had already been liberated from Auschwitz and was slowly making his way back across Europ
e to Amsterdam. If Anne and Margot had been aware of this, maybe just maybe, it would have given them the fortitude to hold on to life for just a few more weeks.

  Hannah and Anne arranged to meet again the following evening. Hannah was able to use her menial camp privileges to gather together a small parcel of food for Anne. She threw the parcel over the fence to the waiting Anne, but before Anne could reach the parcel it was voraciously grabbed by a starving woman. Anne was distraught. Hannah promised to try again a few days later. This time Anne was able to catch the small bundle of vital items.

  Hannah never saw her friend Anne again. Hannah’s father then died and she was in mourning for several days according to the observant Jewish tradition. Yet another outbreak of the deadly disease typhus was fast spreading through the camp. This was difficult for a person to survive without medication, let alone without the sustenance of food. When Hannah returned to the fence to search for Anne, the whole area on the other side, previously thronged with women prisoners, was empty. Hannah herself then succumbed to typhus, but managed to make it through to the camp’s liberation, where as a 16-year-old orphan she found herself responsible for her small sister.

  There were, however, two sisters from Amsterdam who were with the Frank girls after Hannah’s last meeting with Anne. They were Jannie and Lientje Brilleslijper, who had been arrested and sent to Westerbork camp on the same train as the Frank family. Jannie, who was married to a non-Jew and had two small children but was nonetheless active in the Resistance, had been able to evade arrest until the summer of 1944. She and her sister had been on the same deportation from Westerbork to Auschwitz as the Frank family. Then they were selected for Bergen-Belsen along with Anne and Margot, where they found themselves in the same barrack.

  After his return to Amsterdam in the summer of 1945, Otto Frank came to visit the sisters during his desperate search for news of his missing daughters. Sitting together in the calm and safety of a sun-filled sitting room, Lientje quietly described to him in harrowing detail the final days of his daughters.

  Jannie and I were assigned to another barrack. We asked Anne and Margot to come with us but Margot had terrible diarrhoea and had to stay in the old barrack because of the risk of stomach typhus. Anne took care of her as well as she could. We visited them during the next few weeks and now and then we were able to bring them something to eat. When the snow had melted, we came to visit them again but they weren’t in the barrack anymore, we found them in the sick house. We told them they mustn’t stay there because whenever you give up hope the end was near. Anne said, ‘Here we can both lie on one bunk, we are together and it’s peaceful.’ Margot could only whisper. She had fallen out of the bunk and was barely conscious with high fever. Anne had a fever too, but she was friendly and sweet. She said, ‘Margot will sleep well and when she wakes up I won’t need to get up again.’ A few days later we found their bunks empty. We knew what that meant. We found them behind the barrack, wrapped their thin bodies in a blanket, and carried them to a mass grave. That was all we could do for them.

  A total of 107,000 Jews had been deported from the Netherlands to concentration camps. Only 5,000 of these people had managed to survive. Otto Frank, the Brilleslijper sisters, Hannah Goslar and her little sister were among that small number. Edith Frank had died of starvation, illness and despair in Auschwitz on 6 January, no doubt desperately worrying about her girls until her last breath. Hermann van Pels had been gassed in Auschwitz in the autumn of 1944, having seriously injured his thumb, making him unfit for work. The athletic Fritz Pfeffer had died of illness, deprivation and exhaustion in Neuengamme camp in Germany in December 1944. After a brutal death march from Auschwitz to Austria, 18-year-old Peter van Pels died in Mauthausen, one of the most notorious of all the camps, just a few days before its liberation. Auguste van Pels was viciously thrown under a train by Nazi guards on the last transport to Theresienstadt. She died on the spot.

  On 18 July 1945, the deaths of Margot and Anne were confirmed. There on a list at the Amsterdam office of the Red Cross Otto Frank saw in black and white the names Margot Betti Frank and Annelies Marie Frank, each name followed with a cross indicating their fate. Miep Gies was present when a letter from the Red Cross also arrived at the Prinsengracht offices with additional confirmation.

  As the almost skeletal Anne lay on the freezing wooden bunk with her fifteen years of life ebbing away, one wonders if she gave more than a passing thought to the little red-checked notebook and the stories she had left behind in Amsterdam, callously thrown on the floor of the hiding place by the arresting officers.

  What would she make of the million and a half people each year who wait patiently in line by an Amsterdam canal to be in the very rooms where she wrote her diary, to touch the same walls she brushed against, to gaze upwards to the dusty attic where she went to escape the adults? What would she make of the fact that millions of people around the world have come to know her through movies, plays, documentaries? And the fact that in every continent of this planet she has changed lives irrevocably?

  Chapter 2

  Otto Frank

  ‘The task that Anne entrusted to me continually gives me new strength to strive for reconciliation and for human rights all over the world.’

  Otto Frank

  One cannot tell the story of Anne Frank’s legacy without that of her father Otto Frank. It is his post-war vision of a better future that has brought about all the worldwide interest in, and educational work about, his younger daughter. It is Otto’s vision that inspired me, my co-founders of the Anne Frank Trust UK, my colleagues at the Anne Frank House and all our international partners and associates.

  In the Anne Frank Trust’s early days, I received several calls from teachers who told me they had been motivated to go into the vocation of teaching by seeing a 1976 interview with Otto Frank on the BBC’s popular children’s programme Blue Peter. The show’s presenter Lesley Judd had held the original copy of Anne’s red and white checked diary, while the white-haired and balding Mr Frank, looking like anyone’s kindly grandfather, spoke in a soft Continental accent about the hatred that had killed his daughters. Lesley addressed Mr Frank in a gentle and almost reverential tone as she stroked the pages of Anne’s diary. Years later, the show’s producer Lewis Bronze told me that the interview with Otto Frank was far and away the most requested item to be repeated of that year.

  I have often referred to Otto as the polar opposite of Adolf Hitler, two men born three weeks apart in the same year, in the same region of Europe, and who both fought on the German side in the First World War. Both were individuals who were able to influence the hearts and minds of millions. One went on to wreak death and destruction throughout the continent of Europe, the other went on to encourage millions to create a better world so that other children would not have to suffer as his own two beloved daughters had at the hands of the former.

  Otto Frank was born in the city of Frankfurt am Main in Germany on 12 May 1889 to Michael and Alice Frank. He had two brothers, Robert and Herbert, and a younger sister Helene, who became known as Leni. Germany had not long been a nation, its regions having become unified in 1871, just sixteen years before Otto’s birth.

  The Frank family had emerged from the Frankfurt Jewish ghetto, the Judengasse (‘Jews’ Alley’) in the late eighteenth century; Otto Frank’s great-grandfather Elkan Juda Cahn had still lived in the ghetto as a young man. By the late nineteenth century, Otto’s father (and Anne’s grandfather) Michael Frank was so assimilated into Frankfurt life that he did not simply work in a bank, he actually owned one – the Michael Frank Bank, which specialized in security exchanges and foreign currency.

  In 1908, Otto went to study economics at Heidelberg University where he became friendly with an American student called Nathan Straus. This friendship resulted in Otto being invited to New York and being given a work placement at the Straus family’s department store, the same Macy’s which we still see in all major shopping streets and malls throughout America
. Otto’s happy time in New York was cut short in September 1909 when his father Michael Frank died suddenly and without warning at the relatively young age of 57. Otto returned to Frankfurt to help run the family bank.

  This he did until the First World War broke out in August 1914. Otto Frank fought as a patriotic German, on the opposite side to his French cousins Oscar and Georges Frank, who were both killed. After his part in the fearsome battles of the Somme and Cambrai, Otto was promoted to the rank of lieutenant and was awarded the Iron Cross. At the end of the war, fatigued and battle weary, he did not return directly home to his anxiously awaiting family. Instead he took a lengthy detour, to act in what he believed to be the honourable way and return a horse he had borrowed as a soldier from a farmer. Back in civilian life, he resumed his role running the Frank family bank until its collapse in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the dire economic situation in Germany.

  Otto married Edith Hollander in September 1925. Edith was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist from Aachen, whose family roots, as one would suspect from their name, went back to Holland. Although Otto Frank was not to be considered a wealthy man by the mid-1920s, the Frank family was still highly regarded in Frankfurt. The main concern of Edith’s family was that her new husband, although suitably Jewish, was not at all religious. After honeymooning in San Remo on the Italian Mediterranean coast, Edith and Otto lived in Frankfurt where their first daughter Margot Betti was born on 16 February 1926. Three years later, on 12 June 1929, along came Annelies Marie, whose name was soon shortened by the family to Anne.