Pod Insights Short History Of... Anne Frank About this episode Anne Frank is one of the world’s most famous writers, yet she didn’t live long enough to see her work published. At the age of thirteen, Anne was a normal teenager, who poured her heart into a diary. But what made her diary different, was that she created within its pages a snapshot of the darkest events of World War Two, detailing the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands that forced her family to hide in a secret annex.
But what do we know about the real life of this bubbly young girl? How did her precious diary survive the war? And what about the people who protected - and betrayed her?
This is a Short History Of Anne Frank.
A Noiser Production, written by Jo Furniss. With thanks to Karen Bartlett, a journalist and author of The Diary That Changed the World.
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Transcript 0:06 Speaker 00 It is the 12th of June 1942.
0:10 Speaker 00 A girl and her father walk along the canal side in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
0:16 Speaker 00 Otto Frank is taking his daughter shopping to celebrate her 13th birthday.
0:23 Speaker 00 As they approach a corner, two German soldiers high-step past. And Otto grabs the girl's arm to make her slow down to avoid them.
0:33 Speaker 00 Red-faced, in uniforms emblazoned with a swastika, they march up to another pedestrian, grabbing her shopping bag so that she drops her rations.
0:43 Speaker 00 One soldier kicks an apple into the canal before they stride off.
0:50 Speaker 00 Otto rushes over to help the shaken woman. Like them, she is forced to wear a Star of David badge to signal that she is a Jew.
1:00 Speaker 00 While they gather her shopping, a newspaper seller shouts the headlines. Every day, more restrictions are announced by the Nazi occupiers of the Dutch city.
1:13 Speaker 00 Today, they learn that Jews are forbidden from riding bicycles, playing sports, and using non-Jewish grocery shops. That explains why the soldiers attacked this woman, hoping for an excuse to arrest her.
1:28 Speaker 00 Once the woman is back on her way, Otto directs his daughter to one of the few shops they are permitted to visit.
1:37 Speaker 00 They enter a Jewish bookstore, and he tells her to choose a gift.
1:47 Speaker 00 Moving between half-empty shelves, the teenager spots an autograph book. It has a red and white checkered cover and an ornate lock.
1:57 Speaker 00 She clicks it open and finds blank pages inside. It's perfect. She can use it for her writing.
2:05 Speaker 00 She takes it to the shopkeeper, who rings up the price on the till.
2:11 Speaker 00 After Otto pays, he hovers by the doors for a moment, checking for Gestapo officers, before deciding that the coast is clear and setting off towards home.
2:23 Speaker 00 On the way, they pass signs that say "Jews forbidden." The girl tries not to look at the ones that say "ghetto", with their frightening image of a scar and crossbones. But the pair make it home, and she rushes upstairs to her room with her present.
2:41 Speaker 00 The girl now settles herself at her desk overlooking the canal. Below, the soldiers are back, hassling one of her Jewish neighbors. But she is distracted by the journal. She picks up a fountain pen, and, finding a scrap of paper, practices her signature to get it right before marking the new book. She writes it over and over again. Anne Frank.
3:07 Speaker 00 Then, she turns to the diary. Unsure how to begin, she decides to speak to an imaginary reader. She'll call her Kitty. It is like having a new friend, and soon she finds she has covered a page.
3:22 Speaker 00 Outside the window, the guards have gone, and she didn't even notice. The diary is a refuge from the world outside.
3:32 Speaker 00 Already imagining the possibility of a reader other than herself, she writes about her uncertainty that anyone else would find her meditations of interest.
3:42 Speaker 00 What she can't know, what she will never know, is that her words will one day be read by millions around the globe, standing as testimony of an atrocity that appalled the world.
4:05 Speaker 00 Anne Frank is one of the world's most famous writers, and yet she did not live long enough to see her work published. At the age of 13, Anne was a normal teenager. She poured out her heart into a diary, writing about school, friends, boys and girls that she liked, petty arguments with her mother.
4:26 Speaker 00 What made her diary different, though, is that she also created within its pages a snapshot of the darkest events of World War II.
4:34 Speaker 00 She wrote an account of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands that forced her family to hide in a secret annex above her father's workplace, leading eventually to her death in a concentration camp.
4:50 Speaker 00 But what do we know about the real life of this bubbly young girl who shared the same tragic end as six million Jews at the hands of the Nazi regime? How did her precious diary survive the war? And what about the people who protected and betrayed her? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Network, this is A Short History of Anne Frank.
5:21 Speaker 00 Before he even dreams of a daughter, Otto Frank is busy living a varied and ambitious life. After attending university in Heidelberg, Otto travels to America to take an internship at the famous Macy's Department Store in New York around 1909. But he returns to Germany just before World War I and is conscripted to the Western Front.
5:45 Speaker 00 After the war, he works for the family bank and establishes his own company to trade in spices. He's in his mid-30s by the time he meets Edith Hollander. Eleven years his junior, she is quiet with a keen intelligence, and he falls quickly in love. They waste no time in getting married and are soon blessed with children. First Margot, then Annalise-Marie, known to those who love her as Anne. They have a comfortable lifestyle as liberal Jews living in a multi-faith district of Frankfurt. But 1929, the year of Anne's birth, is also the year that the world is plunged into a financial crisis.
6:26 Speaker 00 Otto fears that the ramifications will be professional, political, and personal.
6:33 Speaker 00 Karen Bartlett is a journalist and the author of The Diary That Changed the World.
6:39 Speaker 01 The Franks are a very well-to-do, upper-class, German-Jewish family. They had lots of big parties, they had lots of food, they went horse-riding, they had a really good time and enjoyed their money and their status. But certainly by 1929, things were changing. Their businesses were struggling. Obviously, you were heading into the Wall Street Crash and the Depression.
7:07 Speaker 00 Deutschland ist sehr schlimm von der Amerikanischen Finanzschlusskrise betroffen. Einschränkt, um Banklohnungen zu leisten, um Reparationskredite für die Alliierten zu zahlen, nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Ende der 20er Jahre erhielt das deutsche Regime Tausende Milliarden Dollar den amerikanischen Banken. Wenn Wall Street keine neuen Bankkredite mehr leistet und bereits vorhandene kredite fordert, fällt die deutsche Wirtschaft auf. Seine Industrie und viele Geschäfte sind geschlossen.
7:34 Speaker 00 Während der Winter 1929 bis 1930 verlieren eine halbe Million Deutsche ihre Arbeitsplätze. Als ein radikales Politiker, Adolf Hitler, 33 Jahre alt ist, ist ein in drei unbeschäftigt. Sein Partei bietet eine extreme Lösung zur Krise: Ein Plan, Deutschland unter einer Volksgemeinschaft, oder Nationalcommunity. Sein Ziel ist mit dem Nazislogan zusammengefasst: Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer. Ein Empire, ein Volk, ein Leiter.
8:11 Speaker 00 Aber diese Nationalcommunity beinhaltet nicht alle Deutschen. Juden, wie die Frankfamilie, werden der Nazideologie nicht als Deutschen getestet. Deshalb sind sie ausgeschlossen.
8:25 Speaker 00 Antisemitismus hat eine lange Geschichte in Deutschland, wie es auch in anderen Ländern. Aber gegen diesen Hintergrund von wirtschaftlichen Schaden suchen viele non-Jüdische Menschen jemanden zu schuldig. Und Hitler gibt es ihnen.
8:44 Speaker 00 Die extremistische Ideologie schiebt sich. Und bald, obwohl Otto Deutschland in den Ersten Weltkrieg für Deutschland kämpfte, er erklart, dass seine Familie in ihrem Heimatland kein Zukunft hat.
8:58 Speaker 01 The Franks were really not very interested in being Jewish before they were sort of forced to be by the rise of the Nazis. They socialised with non-Jewish families and they didn't really take part in any sort of religious practices or ceremonies. The Franks are very aware of what's happening politically. They don't know quite what to make of it at the beginning, just like many Germans, but Otto has already experienced in his life antisemitism in Germany, so he knows its presence in German society, he experienced it at school and university. And they talk about what's happening. They get together with other Jewish families and, you know, they discuss the situation, the things that they're hearing, how alarming it is.
9:41 Speaker 01 At that stage, you know, they don't decide to leave the country, they don't know quite what to do of it, but they know that it's a problem and a real threat to them. So they're under no illusions about how serious the situation is.
9:56 Speaker 00 Otto looks to the Netherlands for sanctuary. He has already spent time in Amsterdam, establishing a business selling pectin, an ingredient needed to make jam. It is a step down from running his family back, but the business is doing well enough for him to consider a permanent move.
10:15 Speaker 00 On March the 10th, 1933, Edith and the two girls have their passport photos taken in a booth in the Tietz department store in Frankfurt. Three days later, the Nazis raise a swastika flag over the town hall in the city. It is time to go.
10:34 Speaker 01 It was a huge, huge step for them to leave Germany and move to the Netherlands. They chose the Netherlands, as many people did, because it had been somewhere where Jewish people thought that they were going to be safe, and it was also somewhere that had been neutral in World War One, and they expected that it would be neutral in World War Two as well. But, I mean, Otto, you know, went from being part of a family that was at the top of high society in Germany to moving to the Netherlands and essentially becoming a kind of door-to-door salesman.
11:13 Speaker 00 Anne and Margot find the move easier than their parents. A responsible older sister, Margot, is studious and serious, and as she moves through school, she plans to become a doctor. Her little sister attends a Montessori kindergarten, where she is popular and lively. Sometimes too lively. One childhood friend later recalls that Anne earned herself a nickname, Mrs. Quack Quack, because she was always talking.
11:39 Speaker 00 As well as learning little English, the sisters begin to pick up Dutch and start to feel at home in their adopted city. Edith and Otto can only hope they are safe here, along with thousands of other Jewish families who flee the Nazis when they start to inter-Jews in Germany.
11:59 Speaker 00 But then, on the 1st of September 1939, Germany invades Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declare war, signaling the start of what will become World War II.
12:13 Speaker 00 The Netherlands does not declare war, relying on its neutrality, as it has done for a century. After all, staying well out of it served the nation well during the First World War, when the conflict that raged across much of Europe left them unscathed. The problem is, the Nazis need a route to Paris that bypasses the French Line of Defense, and they also want to prevent the British from getting any kind of foothold on the continent. So it is that on May the 10th, 1940, the unthinkable happens.
12:49 Speaker 00 Early in the morning, aircraft from the German Luftwaffe pass over the Netherlands as though they are en route to London. But once they are over the North Sea, they circle back.
13:00 Speaker 00 The first the Dutch know of the German invasion of the Netherlands is when bombs and paratroopers start to fall.
13:08 Speaker 00 On the ground, German troops also attack from the south. The Dutch army holds out for several days, but morale falls when it is reported that the Dutch Queen, Vilhelmina, has left for England.
13:22 Speaker 00 Thousands of people, especially Jewish families, tried to do the same.
13:27 Speaker 00 Within five days, the Dutch surrender, and a Nazi general is installed by Hitler to oversee its administration in the Netherlands.
13:36 Speaker 00 The Frank family, and hundreds of thousands of other Dutch Jews, are once again exposed to the Nazis.
13:44 Speaker 01 The Nazis' invasion of the Netherlands was just an absolute catastrophe for the Dutch people, but, you know, especially for all of the Jewish people who had fled to the Netherlands. I mean, it was almost unbelievable. There was just absolute panic and pandemonium in the Netherlands, and Jewish people immediately tried to escape. You know, they fled for the ports, they tried to get on boats. A lot of people sadly took their own lives because they understood just how terrible the consequences of being occupied by the Nazis was going to be.
14:15 Speaker 00 From early 1941, the Nazis in the Netherlands start to remove the rights and liberties of Jewish residents. On April the 10th, Jews learn they are not allowed to leave Amsterdam. Five days later, they have to hand in any radios.
14:31 Speaker 00 In May, Jewish journalists are banned from reporting, while doctors, lawyers, and midwives can only work with other Jews. Later that month, Jewish people are banned from some streets and canals in the city, while other districts are designated ghettos or Jewish areas.
14:50 Speaker 00 In October 1941, Jews are forbidden to leave the country. Soon, they are not allowed to drive, be on the street after dark, or use telephones.
15:00 Speaker 00 Within months, the Franks are living like prisoners.
15:08 Speaker 01 The Nazis were marching about on the streets, and the big swastika was hanging everywhere. So there was no kind of illusions that life was normal. But the restrictions on people and the sort of discrimination against the Jewish people started immediately, but kind of then built up like a sort of drumbeat over a period of time. Of course, just like all other Jewish people in the Netherlands, it affected the Franks immediately and in every area of their life. Otto could no longer be the owner of his business, so he had to sort of find a way of transferring it theoretically to somebody else, while also making sure that he could still profit from it in some way. Anne and Margot had to start going to Jewish schools. They could no longer go to the park.
15:52 Speaker 01 They could no longer go to the swimming pool. All those sort of smaller discriminations of, you know, not being able to go to the cinema, not being able to go to an ice cream parlor. And they're basically affecting every single thing that you might want to do.
16:11 Speaker 00 Otto and Edith try to make life normal for their daughters. In June 1942, Anne turns 13. It is a significant landmark for any young person. She is especially close to her father, and he takes her shopping for a present, doing the best he can in their locked-down city.
16:30 Speaker 00 They make their way during daylight hours, when they are allowed out of the house, to one of the few shops they are permitted to visit. Anne buys a notebook with a lock. Like many teenage girls, she wants a secret place to share her private thoughts. Her early entries include gossip about her schoolmates and her disappointment that she does not have a best friend. Desperate for someone to confide in, she addresses her writings to an imaginary girl called Kitty. She later notes that, without writing a diary, she would suffocate on her feelings.
17:07 Speaker 00 But as time goes on, her confidence as a writer grows. She decides that when the war is over, she would like to be an author or journalist, a career outside homemaking and child-rearing. But in early July 1942, the Franks receive a strange letter. Addressed to 16-year-old Margot, it orders her to report to Nazi headquarters, from where she will be deported to Germany to work in a factory.
17:34 Speaker 00 Tearfully, Margot confides to her sister that she is afraid to travel alone to Germany. And she has good reason to be scared, because the young people who heed the Nazi work order are not taken to factories. They are sent to concentration camps.
17:51 Speaker 00 Otto and Edith know they have to act now to save their eldest daughter, but they are banned from leaving the country.
17:59 Speaker 01 Relatively recently, we found that there's a lot of documents about his application to go to the US. I mean, really, he must have had high hopes that he could go there. And he'd lived there as a young man. He had very good connections with high-profile families there and businesses, but he couldn't get his visa application. They tried all sorts of countries. He tried all sorts of methods to get out, but none were successful, which is a story that we hear so often with families who are trying to get out of the Netherlands. And I think his efforts to get back to America, which he must have had, there's so many hopes of being successful for, it seemed particularly tragic, really, that he wasn't able to do that.
18:41 Speaker 00 In the absence of a route out, the family must fall on the mercy of those closer to home.
18:58 Speaker 00 It is the 6th of July, 1942. Anne walks into the kitchen of their home with Muccia, the cat, purring in her arms. Perhaps sensing the tension in the room, the animal wriggles free and jumps away.
19:14 Speaker 00 Anne's father is holding the letter addressed to Margot, while Edith clutches her weeping daughter to her side.
19:22 Speaker 00 Otto tells Margot that she isn't going to the Nazis, but they have work to do. He explains his plan, and the girls thunder up the steep wooden steps to their room to get ready.
19:35 Speaker 00 It almost feels like a game to Anne, as she opens and closes drawers, picking out favorite items of clothing. She takes off the outfit she is wearing and starts again, putting on several pieces of underwear, then a blouse over another shirt, then a pullover, and yet another cardigan.
19:52 Speaker 00 Behind her, on a narrow bed, Margot hurriedly packs a suitcase. Before Otto appears at the door and reminds them that they cannot take too much. Jews are not allowed to travel, so it has to look as if they're going for a normal walk to the shops.
20:07 Speaker 00 Sigh, Margot shuts the empty suitcase and slides it under the bed.
20:13 Speaker 00 Now Anne finds her satchel and opens the buckles. Her arms feel tight and stiff inside the many layers of clothing. But she has to pack her precious belongings. She puts in her diary, hair curlers, and schoolbooks. She thinks about taking her collection of marbles, until one drops and bounces across the floor.
20:36 Speaker 00 Watching it roll, her father says they will have to stay very quiet where they are going. So reluctantly, she leaves the marbles.
20:49 Speaker 00 The cat reappears, and she lets him rub his face against her hand to say goodbye. Then she goes downstairs with her satchel and follows her family onto the streets, trying to look normal.
21:05 Speaker 00 Soon they reach Otto's warehouse on a street called Princetonkrat. They go inside, and at the back of the premises, Anne squeezes behind a bookcase where she finds a set of steep wooden steps. Climbing up, she can hardly believe the secret world that exists up there. This is what her father has been planning undetected for months. A hidden annex of rooms. Some of their furniture is already here, plus supplies. Anne starts to tear open the cardboard boxes.
21:39 Speaker 00 She finds her collection of movie star postcards, which she now uses to decorate the walls.
21:45 Speaker 00 Then, she hears the door to the outside world slam, and the key turn in the lock.
21:52 Speaker 00 Anne takes a last glimpse out of the window, but then, knowing they cannot risk being seen, she tugs the curtains across, shutting out the world.
22:08 Speaker 01 Otto had been preparing for this for a while. He'd already decided that what would become the annex in the attic of his commercial building would be where they would go into hiding. It took a long time for him to just get supplies in there and to start to end it up as a place where they could live. But he hadn't really decided on the time for when that should happen. But this letter was just the catalyst. They took very few belongings and they left their apartment without speaking to anybody. And they went straight to the attic, the annex. And that was when they went into hiding. And I think for me, one of the most poignant parts of the story is that Anne was desperately upset about leaving her cat behind.
22:52 Speaker 01 Because they couldn't tell anyone what was happening, they couldn't arrange for anyone to look after the cat. They just had to kind of open the door and let it out.
23:02 Speaker 00 The family understand how serious it would have been if Margot had gone to Germany. They listen to illegal radio broadcasts transmitted by Dutch Resistance and Queen Vilhelmina from England. They know about concentration camps. They know that people who have been deported do not return.
23:19 Speaker 00 The best option, really, the only option, is to hide, even if it means living in extremely difficult conditions.
23:27 Speaker 01 Very, very few Jewish people in the Netherlands had the resources or the ability to go into hiding. Most of them were deported and murdered.
23:38 Speaker 01 Anne's story has been taken up as a narrative for all Jewish people in the Netherlands or all sort of Jewish people facing the Nazis. But actually, it was very, very unusual for anyone to be able to do what the Franks were able to do.
23:53 Speaker 01 I'm sure many people have actually been to the Anne Frank House and been up to the annex. And, you know, you're always struck by what a cramped, uncomfortable experience it is. You know, you have to go behind the bookcase and up this very steep ladder. You're in the attic of a, what was then a commercial building, a warehouse and an office. And it's very small, it's uncomfortable. They've managed to get quite basic furniture in there and sort of turn it into a series of different rooms. But, you know, it's completely different to kind of, you know, living in an apartment or living a normal life. Obviously, they could never go out. They could never really do normal things in daytime hours
24:35 Speaker 01 because there were still people who were working for the business in the building and they were terrified that people were going to hear them. And, you know, they were sort of confined together in that very small space for years.
24:54 Speaker 00 The Franks rely on four people who work for Otto in the warehouse below to shield and support them. One helper is Otto's assistant, a woman called Meep Gees. Although the warehouse and factory keep running as normal, partly to keep up appearances that it is a regular place of work, not a hideout, they don't trust all of the staff. This means the Franks must keep absolutely quiet during working hours. One raised voice, one flushed toilet, one dropped plate could give them away.
25:31 Speaker 00 The four who help the family are also taking an enormous risk. The Franks need food, but with the Dutch being subject to wartime rationing, Meep and the others have to be careful not to reveal that they are feeding extra people.
25:46 Speaker 00 A few weeks into the isolation, Anne's cloistered life opens up a little with the arrival of a second German Jewish family in the annex, the Van Pels, who worked for Otto, and whose son Peter is two years older than Anne.
26:01 Speaker 00 At first, the boy is withdrawn. He keeps to his room and takes no interest in the many activities the others do to stave off boredom. But Anne needs a friend.
26:14 Speaker 00 Slowly, she brings him out of his shell and he starts to study to keep up with the smart Frank girls. Anne and Peter fall for one another. Sometimes cuddling and kissing when they find a moment of privacy.
26:30 Speaker 01 Peter's interesting, isn't he? Because he's in the diary has become the kind of the romantic lead, you know, the sort of the person that she sort of projects all of her sort of romantic feelings onto. And, you know, there's so much kind of human emotion going on in those small spaces. You know, there's her tension with her parents. There's her romantic feelings for Peter. There's her sort of teenage growing sense of her own sexuality, which she writes about in the diary. There's her enormous irritation with having to share a room with another Jewish man who comes who's a dentist. I mean, the poor guy, he gets a terrible rap in the diary and Otto was aware of that afterwards. And people were, his family were quite upset about how he was portrayed in the diary. But
27:13 Speaker 01 from her point of view, you know, she's a young girl in Chester to stay in a very small bedroom with this very grumpy, who she thinks looks very grumpy guy. And that's pretty terrible for her.
27:27 Speaker 00 As the weeks turn to months and then years, life in the annex grows frustratingly cramped and boring. Everyone struggles with the constant jeopardy, the fear of being found. As people go about their business outside, Anne cannot even see the birds. She famously writes that she feels like a songbird whose wings have been ripped off.
27:50 Speaker 01 She is a truly great writer in that she taps into that humanity, which is what makes all writing kind of appeal to other people, really. And she can do it. I think she has a remarkably clear grasp on what's going on. They know about D-Day and they're tracking on a map. The progress of the Allied forces across Europe, thinking surely it can't be long now until we're going to be safe.
28:15 Speaker 00 The family are optimistic. In July, 1944, Anne writes that despite all the evidence to the contrary, she still believes that people are intrinsically good. But she has been in the secret annex for 761 days over two years, when without warning, everything changes.
28:38 Speaker 00 The comment about goodness is one of the most famous quotes from Anne Frank's diary, an expression of enduring hope and resilience, but it is also a snapshot of a moment in time. Would Anne have written that sentiment if she had known it would be one of her last messages? Did she still believe in goodness once she had witnessed the very worst of humanity? That we will never know, because on the 1st of August 1944, she pens her final diary entry. After that, we do not hear her voice again.
29:13 Speaker 01 Despite many, many theories and investigations, nobody actually knows who betrayed the family. It's been a real focus by people, certainly in the last few years, into trying to sort of reveal who was the person who betrayed them, how did they come to be arrested? And in a sense, I kind of feel like that focus on who was the criminal takes away from the bigger part of the story. You know, the more important part of the story is what happened to them, and the fact that it happened to all the other hundreds of thousands of Jewish people in the Netherlands, you know, so few of them survived.
29:55 Speaker 00 Whatever the circumstances of their betrayal, in the summer of 1944, the Gestapo arrive.
30:05 Speaker 00 It is the 4th of August 1944, a warm and sunny Friday, a normal working day at the Prinsenkracht warehouse, at tall, narrow premises with high-sash windows that overlook a canal. The secretary, Meep Gees, is in the office when she hears a commotion at the entrance.
30:26 Speaker 00 The footsteps thunder up the wooden stairs, and a short man bursts into her office, pointing a pistol.
30:33 Speaker 00 He is SS Hauptchefürer Karl Josef Silberbauer, and he's in charge of the Gestapo guards, who are right now swarming around the warehouse and offices.
30:45 Speaker 00 Silber Bauer marches past Meep to the manager's office, where he finds Viktor Kugler, another of Otto's former employees and one of the four who know about the annex. Viktor agrees to show the German around. The Gestapo are conducting a search, demanding crates and sacks to be opened, their contents revealed. The noise level rises as workers comply. Meep Geis tries not to show her panic as they ransack the offices.
31:19 Speaker 00 Silber Bauer heads towards the back of the building. In a storeroom, he manhandles bottles of ingredients, not caring when they fall and smash on the floor. Then he turns towards a landing, where there are boxes and a bookcase. Viktor Kugler keeps talking, explaining to Silber Bauer about the uses of pectin, telling him how to make jam. But the SS officer points at the bookcase, ordering his men to push it aside.
31:48 Speaker 00 A low door is revealed, and the men shoulder-barge it open. Kugler can only watch as Silber Bauer mounts the steps to the secret annex.
31:59 Speaker 00 At the top stand Anne, her family, the Van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer, the dentist, all with their hands raised.
32:09 Speaker 00 In the small kitchen, Silber Bauer picks up a briefcase from the table and empties out the contents. Papers and a small, red-and-white checkered diary fall to the floor.
32:21 Speaker 00 Kicking them aside, he demands the family's hand over their valuables, and he gathers jewelry, cash, and watches into the case to take with him. Then he orders the eight residents of the annex down the stairs for the first time in over two years.
32:39 Speaker 01 It was Meep Gees who had to go in and clear up after this terrible event. And she saw Anne's diary lying scattered all over the floor and thought, "I'm going to pick that up because I want to think that they're going to come back and I want to give that to Anne when she returns." And she kept it. And that's why we still have that remnant. I mean, Lager also had a diary, but we don't have that unfortunately to read. What seemed so particularly terrible is by this stage, the Allies had landed. They were in France, they were pushing across. They were really enormously close to safety, but they just couldn't make it.
33:28 Speaker 00 The Franks are taken to Vestabok, a concentration camp in the Netherlands. The three members of the Van Pels family, including Peter and Fritz Pfeffer, go too. Viktor Kugler and another Dutch man who helped to hide the Franks are also arrested. They are sent to Nazi work camps as punishment, but Kugler manages to escape. All four of the Dutch helpers survive the war and later receive commendations for their bravery.
33:57 Speaker 00 But a month after the raid, Anne is one of a thousand Jewish people taken from the holding camp and loaded onto a train made up of cattle trucks. It will be the last transport ever to leave Vestabok.
34:11 Speaker 00 Conditions on board are appalling, and many passengers do not survive. There is no food, no water, no sanitation. It is the height of summer, and the journey takes three days, with hundreds of people crammed into overcrowded wagons. Eventually, the train arrives at a concentration camp in Poland.
34:34 Speaker 01 They get to Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is separated by sex. So Auschwitz is where the men go, Birkenau camps are where the women go. And of course, they get off the train onto that sort of notorious platform that we see on images. And they're immediately separated by the Nazis. They're separated, men and women. And then they're separated again according to age and condition. Traditionally, with people of working age who will be sent to the camp itself, who will be then living there and working for probably quite a short period of time until they die. And people who are just separated, selected immediately on the platform to go straight to their death. Who are of no use, too young, too old, too sick to be of use to the Nazis.
35:16 Speaker 01 So they just get sent straight to the gas chambers to be murdered. So you have that selection process on the platform. And for Otto and his family, that's the last time they see each other. He's the only male that's there and he looks across and he sees Anne and Margot. And that's the last time that he sees his children.
35:43 Speaker 00 While Otto is taken to Auschwitz, the sisters and Edith go to Birkenau, the women's side of the camp. Anne, by now, is a few months past her 15th birthday. All children below that age are sent directly from the train station to be murdered in the gas chambers. Only those fit to work enter the camps. Of the 1,019 people on the train from Vestabok, 570 are gassed as soon as they arrive.
36:13 Speaker 00 Inside Birkenau, there are so many Jewish people from Amsterdam that Anne meets friends and acquaintances. The few who survived the ordeal later give eyewitness accounts of how the Franks fared. At first, they're optimistic that the end of the war will come soon. But later, they fall ill. They are starving, filthy, sleeping out in the open. Edith, Anne, and Margot rely on one another and grow closer than ever before. Despite the harsh words that Anne says about her mother in her diary, at the end, they are devoted, loving, inseparable.
36:55 Speaker 00 In October 1944, Anne and Margot are made to transfer to another concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen. But Edith is too weak to make the journey, and stays behind at Birkenau, where she dies in January 1945, a few days short of her 45th birthday.
37:14 Speaker 01 What seems particularly tragic about the story of the Frank family is that it was at the very end of the war. I mean, the reason that Anne and Margot were moved to Bergen-Belsen was that the Nazis knew that the Soviet Army was approaching and was very likely to liberate those concentration camps, and they were sort of perversely determined to, rather than let those remaining people be liberated, to take those who could still walk and were well enough to concentration camps further in Germany.
37:43 Speaker 00 Not long after they arrive at Bergen-Belsen, Margot dies of disease. Anne passes away maybe as little as a day later.
37:52 Speaker 00 As well as the starvation and exhaustion, an epidemic of typhus decimates the prisoners.
38:02 Speaker 00 The exact date of Anne's death isn't known, but it is believed to be around March 1945.
38:09 Speaker 00 British forces arrive to liberate Bergen-Belsen in April.
38:13 Speaker 01 She was so ill, I mean, many people did die even after liberation because they were just so ill and had been so starved and were so unwell. So there's no guarantee that if she'd survived until the Allied soldiers arrived that she would have lived, but they were tantalizingly close to liberation.
38:34 Speaker 00 Of the eight people who hid in the secret annex, only Otto Frank survives the war. He is freed when Soviet troops liberate Auschwitz in January 1945. After a long and difficult journey amid the chaos and shattered infrastructure of post-war Europe, Otto returns to Amsterdam. He has nowhere else to go. He is stateless. But the reception in the Netherlands is not warm.
39:05 Speaker 01 In contrast to when the Jewish people had arrived in the 1930s and they had been largely allowed to integrate and had been sort of welcomed to some extent, when they returned, they quite often felt that Dutch people were very unwelcoming. They didn't understand why they'd come back, that Dutch had felt like they'd been through their own hardships in the war, they'd had what they called the hunger winter, where they'd almost all starved to death. And now they're saying, and now you've come back again, and we have to house you and find a place for you, and we're not sure we want to.
39:43 Speaker 00 But though Otto's business and home is gone, his loyal Dutch friend, Mip Gees, takes him in. By now, he knows that his beloved wife has died, so he dedicates himself to finding news about his missing daughters.
40:00 Speaker 01 Like many of the Jewish survivors who did come back, they had to try various routes. They tried through the Red Cross, they put adverts in local newspapers, they pinned things up, you know, on boards at the central station where people were coming back from the camps and, you know, being disembarking. Eventually, several months later, he just marks in his own diary, which is a little red notebook, just two crosses to say that he's heard news about Anne and Margot. He was incredibly badly affected when he heard that Edith had died and then for Anne and Margot too. I mean, it's just unbelievable, really. He went into a kind of incredibly deep depression, you know, he wondered how
40:42 Speaker 01 he could go on. And at that point, Mip Gees gave him Anne's diary. She'd been waiting, she thought she could give it back to Anne. And then she hesitated and wondered if it was the right thing to do to give it to Otto, but she gave it to him. And, you know, from that moment on, really, I think that became his life boy, almost, to hold on to, you know, his one remaining thing from his children.
41:09 Speaker 00 Remarkably, Otto finds that Anne wrote not one, but two diaries. The first is the original red-and-white Chequered Notebook. The second is a novel in diary form called The Secret Annex.
41:25 Speaker 00 Anne had been on a mission to record her experiences, having heard illegal radio broadcasts from the Dutch government in exile, urging its people to keep hold of documents that might later help prove the atrocities of Nazi occupation.
41:39 Speaker 00 Inspired, Anne had started editing her own writing. In particular, she updated her youngest entries. It is revealing that she edited out these sometimes vicious comments about her mother. She also removed references to being in love with Peter. Still, aged only fifteen, Anne had an eye to publication, and the ambition and skill to be a professional writer.
42:04 Speaker 01 There were so many aspects to her. She was so multifaceted. She was so talented. You know, what could she have done? What would she have been? She was bursting to fulfill her potential, basically, and she didn't have that opportunity.
42:22 Speaker 00 When he opens the original diary, Otto discovers a side to his daughter that he never knew as her father: a teenager's angst and rage, her attraction to boys, and a curiosity about the body of a female friend, too. The state of her parents' marriage. Private thoughts that Anne perhaps intended to share only with her imaginary confidante Kitty.
42:47 Speaker 00 But Otto recognizes the power of Anne's story, and sees in her novel version, The Secret Annex, that she did want to share her writing with the wider world. So, though the decision to reveal his family's private life appalls many of his friends, he now embarks upon the long journey to publication.
43:08 Speaker 01 It's almost the book that didn't get published at all. The company that publishes the first edition in Dutch agreed to take it on because at that stage it was very hard to get paper to publish and they wanted to publish another book. And in order to publish this other book that they wanted to publish, they took on the diary because it had this kind of political significance and then they could get the paper to publish the book that they really wanted to publish. So little did anybody know what was going to happen.
43:44 Speaker 00 The diary is first published in Dutch with the same title that Anne used, Het Achterhis, or The Secret Annex. The book has little impact, but Otto persists and gets an English language version in 1952, which is called Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.
44:06 Speaker 00 When the book comes out in America, interest and momentum starts to build. It is adapted for the stage in 1955 and a few years later as a Hollywood movie. The book is translated into 70 languages. The annex where the family hid becomes a museum. Anne Frank is hailed as an inspiration for oppressed people everywhere.
44:30 Speaker 00 Publication of the diary is perhaps a way for Otto to keep his daughter's memory alive, to let it endure as a testimony of the Nazi project, its occupation of the Netherlands and its death camps. But at the same time, the act of going public means that Otto loses Anne Frank to a public who consume her words and her image, turning a girl into a global icon.
44:54 Speaker 01 He's absolutely dedicated to the diary. And along the way, he undergoes the most amazing kind of controversies and horrors connected to the diary. You know, he has to fight two enormous court cases in Germany with Holocaust deniers who claim that the diary isn't authentic. He engages in this horrible, intense feud with an Israeli writer who's based in America, who believes that he was kind of cheated out of the opportunity to write the play in the screenplay. That leads to another court case, which eventually this man threatens to shoot Otto. Otto has a complete nervous collapse. I mean, you know, his life is not easy once he's published the diary.
45:38 Speaker 01 In fact, it's like opening a Pandora's box of problems for him.
45:48 Speaker 00 Anne Frank describes herself as a little bundle of contradictions. Her legacy is equally complex. Today, her diary introduces millions of schoolchildren around the world to the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust.
46:04 Speaker 00 Through the youthful candor of her writing, she reminds us that she was an ordinary girl, but one ultimately given an extraordinary burden.
46:15 Speaker 01 Her legacy is still so fought over and contested. And there are still so many kind of deep disputes between people about what does the diary of Anne Frank and Anne really mean? There are people who feel very strongly that the commercialization of the diary and the sense that people identify with her as just a young girl, and it could be any of us, has taken away from the fact that she was Jewish and that people do not remember the fact that this happened to her because she was a Jewish girl and that it was the Jews who were almost uniquely persecuted by the Nazis and murdered in the Holocaust. But there are also people who feel that if she's going to kind of continue to have a legacy, it is because people in different countries and different circumstances are going to
46:57 Speaker 01 relate to her on their own terms and read the diary and see something of themselves in her. And that is really why her story has been so enduring.
47:14 Speaker 00 Next time on Short History, we'll bring you a short history of the first emperor of China.
47:21 Speaker 02 Everything we know about the first emperor should be taken slightly with a pinch of salt. We have no idea, since there are no other sources, how true it was. The only thing you can be sure of is that there was a Great Wall, there was unification. He had huge palaces. He did have an enormously rich capital. And we know where all this took place, and there's been good archaeology to back up that. But some of the more lurid details of how he came to power are to be doubted. It makes wonderful television, but it may not be as true as the Chinese like to believe.
48:01 Speaker 00 That's next time.
48:09 Speaker 00 If you can't wait a week until the next episode, you can listen to it right away by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Head to www-noiser.com/subscriptions for more information.
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