Anne frank hide out1/30/2024 Investigators began taking a fresh look at the case in 2016, hoping to provide new answers. It is believed that an anonymous tip helped guide the Nazis to the secret annex, yet despite decades of investigations, the identity of the informant has never been proven. The diary Frank kept during her confinement is now considered one of the most important accounts of the Holocaust, but the circumstances of her arrest have always been cloaked in mystery. Among those captured was Anne Frank, a 15-year-old schoolgirl who had spent over two years living in the cramped safehouse with her parents and older sister. His column runs Tuesdays.On August 4, 1944, police in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam raided a warehouse and arrested eight Jews who were hiding in an annex disguised behind a bookcase. Upon our return, she gave it to our 10-year-old granddaughter, Emma.Įmma will give an oral report about Anne Frank to her fifth-grade class. Hedy bought a book in the museum’s gift shop. Sunlight could be seen streaming through a tiny attic window. From that small room a ladder extended to the attic. In the annex, we viewed the two small bedrooms adjoined by a bathroom and toilet on the lower floor, and above a larger open room and a small room next to it. Hedy and I entered the house, walked past the bookcase and viewed the rooms inhabited for more than two years by the Franks and their guests. The world comes to Anne Frank’s door daily. Those waiting with us could be heard softly uttering respectful remarks in more than a dozen different languages. Three weeks ago, Hedy and I stood in line for an hour in a biting wind to visit the Anne Frank House. Pfeffer (some names were replaced by pseudonyms in Anne’s diary). We knew the characters well: Anne and Otto, her mother Edith, her older sister Margot, Mr. Our family became enmeshed in the Frank family tragedy. Jenn’s siblings knew every line of the play. The production ran four weekends, and I attended almost every performance, along with Hedy and our two younger daughters. Shortly thereafter, I read the diary in school.Ī couple of decades ago my 16-year-old daughter, Jenn, portrayed Anne in a community production of the play. I viewed the film, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play constructed from that diary. My introduction to Anne’s compelling story occurred in 1959 when I was 14. “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” has since been published in 67 languages. It was compiled into a book and published in Dutch in 1947. Anne died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen at the age of 15, as the allies stormed Germany in the final bloody weeks of combat.Īfter the war, Anne’s diary was discovered in the house. Tragically, the Frank family and the four others were betrayed to the Nazis by an anonymous source late in the war. The eight people hid in the 500-square-foot annex from July 1942 until August 1944.Īnne wrote in her diary: “Not being able to go outside upsets me more than I can say, and I’m terrified our hiding place will be discovered and that we’ll be shot.” Anne in her diary called it the “Secret Annex,” and it was accessible only by going through a passage behind a bookcase. Otto, his wife, two daughters and four other Jewish friends hid in the annex above Otto’s office for 25 months. It consists of a front house and a less conspicuous back annex. Ultimately, the building became the family’s refuge. Built in 1635, the unremarkable canal house was the place where Anne Frank’s father, Otto, ran two businesses during the war. Hedy and I visited the structure known today as the Anne Frank House. In 1944, it offered, at best, uncertain hope. The world inside the bookcase wasn’t C.S. They’d endeavored to use the four-story house and its attic - standing in the shadow of the bell tower of Amsterdam’s ancient Westerkerk (West Church) - to survive the Holocaust. I sensed the vulnerability of the people who’d lived there. Once inside, we were transported nearly seven decades into the past. It’s a place I’ve known about most of my life, but experiencing it first-hand was revealing. Three weeks ago Hedy and I took a train into Amsterdam’s main station, then walked 20 minutes to Prinsengracht 263, a nondescript address next to a canal in the Dutch capital.Įntering the building, we slipped behind a bookcase and into a secret world.
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