Anne Frank and the Children of the Holocaust

INTRODUCTION

In September 1939, when World War II began, there were more than one and a half million Jewish children living in countries occupied, or soon to be occupied, by Hitler’s armies. By 1945, when the war ended, over a million of those children—including Anne Frank—were no longer alive.

Most of them were not killed by bombing raids or in the line of duty; they were deliberately murdered by the leaders and followers of a political party that believed they had no right to live, simply because they were Jewish. Other children whose ethnic origin, religion, or parents’ political choice meant that they had no place in a Nazi led society were also targeted.

Because the Nazis were in power for so long (1933- 1945), thousands of children never had a normal childhood. Something as simple as going to a local swimming pool with friends or kicking a soccer ball around a park during the summer evenings was strictly forbidden. Ordinary activities such as going to the movies were banned to them. After the war broke out in 1939, these same children faced an even more terrible future. Often torn away from their families, they were pushed into ghettos (sealed-off areas of towns where Jews were forced to live in extreme poverty) and slave-labor camps, where starvation and disease raged. Thousands more were killed by firing squads.

In the spring of 1942, mass deportations began, with trains rolling out from every occupied country taking Jews to the concentration camps in Eastern Europe. Children were sent with their families or alone to the camps, where hardly any of the very young survived; they were not able to work hard, and therefore the Nazis had no use for them. Most children under the age of fifteen were killed. Girls were less likely to survive than boys because they were seen as the weaker sex and could give birth. The Nazis wanted to ensure that Jewish life was destroyed, not created.

Despite all this, children often turned out to be braver and more capable than many adults. Being so young, they were able to adapt more quickly to certain situations. In the ghettos, for example, children smuggled food and sold anything they could find to raise money for their families. They also refused to give in to despair: They sang songs, made their own games and toys, and studied schoolbooks, even though all these things were forbidden. Like Anne Frank, many children kept diaries, using whatever paper was available to them. They wrote in office ledgers, on scraps of newspaper, and even—in the case of a young brother and sister in the Lodz ghetto—in the margins of an old French novel.

The diary of Anne Frank is the best known, and she has become a symbol of all the children who died during the Holocaust. In total, six million Jews were killed by the Nazis. Such a huge number is hard to imagine. But in the same way that we can learn more about Anne Frank’s world by understanding the Holocaust, by looking in detail at her short life, we begin to understand that six million means six million individuals who once had hopes and dreams for the future just like us. In this way, we realize that the Holocaust isn’t about impossible numbers; it’s about people.

ONE:

AS WE ARE JEWISH . . .

Anne Frank was born in the German city of Frankfurt-am-Main on June 12, 1929. Her grandfather was a country boy who came to Frankfurt to make his fortune. He opened his own bank business in the city and married a young woman whose ancestors had lived in Frankfurt for over four hundred years. Anne’s father, Otto, was born on May 12, 1889 (the same year as Adolf Hitler), and had a happy, privileged childhood. He and his two older brothers Robert and Herbert, and younger sister Leni, were brought up in a large house in Frankfurt’s Westend district. Their home was filled with antiques and enormous family portraits in gilt frames. At the back was a large garden; the front overlooked an elegant square.

Anne later wrote that her father had had a real little rich boy’s upbringing, parties every week, balls, festivities, beautiful girls, waltzing, dinners, a large home, etc. A photograph of a family gathering in Germany’s Black Forest in 1900 shows Otto Frank (then nine years old) in a crisp white sailor suit—the trendiest outfit for boys at that time—while Leni, Robert, and Herbert are also fashionably dressed. They all attended good schools, spoke several languages, learned how to ride, and played musical instruments. Anne loved to hear her father talk about his childhood when she was in hiding; to her it seemed like a distant fairy tale.

When Otto Frank was eighteen, he began studying economics at Heidelberg University. There he met Nathan Straus, whose family owned Macy’s department store in New York. Nathan and Otto quickly became good friends, and when Nathan went back to America, he invited Otto to join him there, working in Macy’s, which was then the world’s biggest department store. Otto eagerly accepted, juggling his time at Macy’s with another job at a New York bank. Then one day Otto received a telegram telling him that his father had died, and he returned to Germany. He found a new job with an engineering company in Dussel dorf and was still working there when World War I broke out in 1914.

Although the Franks were Jewish, they did not have much interest in their religion. Otto rarely attended synagogue and didn’t read or speak Hebrew, the ancient Jewish language. The district where the Franks lived was popular with many Jewish families and had a synagogue at its center, but Otto was brought up to take more pride in his German roots than in his religion. Not long after the war began, he and his brothers joined the German army, and his mother and sister worked in hospitals, taking care of wounded German soldiers.

Otto was by now in his twenties, a natural leader who was friendly and fair with everyone he met. He was made an officer, and then a lieutenant, and proved himself a brave soldier on the Somme and at Cambrai, two of the worst battles in history. He was certain that his country would win the war, but in 1918 Germany surrendered and Otto returned to Frankfurt.

The Franks’ bank business had lost a great deal of money during the war. Otto tried to improve the situation by opening a branch of the bank in Amsterdam, where business was better than it was in Germany. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a success, and once more he went back to Frankfurt. By now, Otto was thirty-six years old. He had been engaged when he was nineteen, but it hadn’t worked out, and now he was eager to marry and have children.

He met Edith Hollander, then twenty-five, and found that despite her shyness, she was kind and intelligent and shared his interest in art, literature, and family life. She was also a modern young woman who loved fine clothes, dancing, music, and vacations with her large circle of relatives and friends. She was one of four children; her sister Betti had died of appendicitis at the age of sixteen, but Edith was close to her two older brothers, Julius and Walter, who had also served in the German army. Like Otto’s, her childhood, in the German city of Aachen (close to the Dutch border), had been happy and secure. Her father was a successful businessman who had made a lot of money dealing in scrap metal. Edith was more religious than Otto; her family attended synagogue regularly and kept a kosher household, observing the Jewish dietary laws.

Otto and Edith married on May 12, 1925, in the synagogue in Aachen where the Hollanders were lifelong members of the congregation. After a honeymoon in Italy, the couple returned to Frankfurt, where they lived with Otto’s mother for two years.

Both Otto and Edith looked forward to being parents and were overjoyed when their first child, Margot Betti, was born on February 16, 1926. A peaceful baby who slept through the night almost from birth, with a shock of dark hair and big, wondering eyes, Margot was her mother and father’s little angel. She grew into a quiet, well-behaved child, eager to please everyone and with a sunny outlook on life. She was eighteen months old when her parents decided they needed a place of their own. They found a large apartment to rent on Marbachweg, in an unfashionable part of Frankfurt. The apartment was on two floors of a huge house, with a balcony overlooking the houses behind theirs. Margot had her own bedroom next door to her parents’ room, and there was also a room for their housekeeper, Kathi, a cheerful young woman whom Margot adored.

As the months passed and Margot became a toddler, she made friends with a girl named Hilde, who lived in one of the other apartments, and with Gertrud, a slightly older girl who lived in the house next door. Hilde and Gertrud were Catholics, and Mr. and Mrs. Frank encouraged Margot to take an interest in her friends’ religion, which she did, playing church with Hilde in her apartment and attending Hilde’s Communion party.

There were other children living on the bottom floor of the house, but neither Margot nor Hilde nor Gertrud played with them: Their father was the landlord and a keen supporter of the Nazi Party. His children never tried to make friends with Margot, Hilde, or Gertrud. They had probably been forbidden to play with Margot, for by this time a tidal wave of hatred against the Jews was sweeping through Germany and would one day engulf all of Europe.

The Franks’ landlord was just one of several thousand supporters of the growing Nazi Party. The Nazis promised a bright future for Germany and singled out Jews as the root of the country’s problems, which had begun with the end of the war in 1918. The countries that had won the war—including Britain, France, and the United States—put together the Versailles Treaty in 1919. This was basically a list of rules that Germany had to obey as punishment for starting the war. Under the treaty, Germany had to give up some of its land and pay for the damage—a colossal sum—caused by the war. The German army and navy also had to be cut back, and the entire political structure of Germany had to be altered according to the new rules. These demands deeply angered many Germans, who felt humiliated by the treaty.

All this had a disastrous effect on the German economy, causing inflation and unemployment to soar. Nonetheless, a new Germany arose called the Weimar Republic, more democratic than before, and based on an elected parliament, the Reichstag. Among those committed to rebuilding Germany were many Jews. But there was someone else, too, who wanted to make Germany great again, someone who saw the opportunity to grasp power and create a nation unlike any other in Europe.

His name was Adolf Hitler.

Born in a small Austrian town in 1889, Hitler had fought in the German army in the war and won the Iron Cross for bravery. He had always dreamed of becoming an artist, but when the war ended with Germany’s defeat, he decided to go into politics instead. When the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party) was created in 1920, Hitler immediately became a member and saw himself as future leader of the party. He hoped to lead the Nazis to victory in the German parliament and set out a program for them to follow.

Among Hitler’s policies for the party was the rule that None but members of the Nation may be citizens of the State. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the Nation. No Jew, therefore, can be a member of the Nation. He demanded that Jews who had entered Germany after 1914 should be expelled from the country, and when he addressed a crowd in a Munich beer hall in August 1920, his theme was Why We Are Against the Jews. He talked of a thorough solution to ridding Germany of its Jews.

For a while, it seemed that Hitler would fail in his political ambitions. He was jailed after trying to seize power from the existing government. Most of his time in prison was spent writing his anti-Semitic book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which expressed his deep hatred for Jews. But when he was released from prison, he quickly became leader (Führer) of the Nazi Party.

In 1929, the New York stock market crashed, causing a worldwide depression and making the economic crisis in Germany even worse. Hitler knew that people wanted someone to blame and were looking for a way out of their problems. He offered them both, holding the German government and the Jews responsible for the country’s misfortunes. He told voters that if they supported him, Germany would become the most powerful nation on earth. He said that he would ignore the terms of the Versailles Treaty and that the German people were not responsible for the high levels of unemployment and widespread poverty. Hitler pointed his finger at the Jews, calling them dishonest, money-grabbing, and dangerous. He branded them race polluters and spoke of the pure blood of non-Jewish Germans. According to Hitler, as members of the Aryan race, Germans were the most advanced people on earth.

These ideas appealed to many Germans who listened to Hitler, spellbound. They wanted to regain their pride in themselves and their country. They had grown up with the idea that Jews were different. The clothes and religious beliefs of Orthodox Jews seemed sinister to them, and many Germans associated Jews with the Communist Party, a political party whose members believed that everyone should contribute to society according to their abilities and receive according to their needs. Jealousy was also an issue: Despite everything, Jewish people had worked hard to rise to the top of several professions and had built strong communities. They had a sense of identity that many non-Jewish Germans felt they lacked. Jews were the focus of Hitler’s rage, although he also spoke out against black people, Roma and Sinti—or gypsies—the mentally and physically handicapped, and homosexuals. To an enthusiastic Germany, Hitler declared that none of these groups could ever be part of the Aryan Master Race.

It was into this terrifying world that Anne Frank was born, in 1929.

It was seven thirty in the morning, on June 12, 1929, when Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt’s city hospital. Her birth had been long and difficult, and the nurses were so tired they accidentally wrote in the hospital register that the eight-and-one-quarter-pound baby was a male child! Within a few hours of her birth, Anne had had her first photograph taken by her proud father, and was given a necklace with a Hebrew inscription on one side, and her birth date and the words Lucky Charm, Frankfurt on the other. Mrs. Frank kept baby books for both her daughters, and in the one for Anne, she wrote: Mother and Margot visit the baby sister on June 14. Margot is completely delighted. Home on June 24. At night for six weeks she cries a lot. Julius and Walter [Anne’s uncles from Aachen] arrive by car on July 6. Anne is suffering from the heat wave.

The baby’s first smile, when she was just a month old, was for her father. Anne