Anne Frank

Anne Frank has become one of the most familiar faces of the Holocaust: many people have read her diary or seen the play or one of the films made about her. The Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam has put a travelling exhibition together that has visited more than 50 countries and has been seen by millions. It is no exaggeration to say that her face with the sad shy smile is one of the icons of this century, a present-day Mona Lisa.

This is not the place to wonder about the reasons for her lasting popularity, nor will we try to answer the question of why she has been given this seminal role. Certainly not because she typically represents the more than one-and-a-half million Jewish children who were murdered in the Holocaust. She does not, nor can she, represent the suffering of so many other children in the ghettos of Warsaw or Lodz, or the children who died at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen or the police battalions.

We felt, on the other hand, that amidst the bewildering array of facts and events it would be helpful to follow a thread, to see how the decrees and orders of the German authorities interfered with one individual life. Sources about the life of Anne Frank, apart from her own diary, are many and varied.

Otto Frank could not have foreseen all the implications of Hitler's antiJewish measures, but he sensed no good could come from the new government when - in the summer of 1933 - the city of Frankfurt decided that from then on Jewish children had to go to separate schools. When the opportunity arose to leave Frankfurt and to set up a Dutch branch of his chemical firm, Opekta, he did not hesitate long. He went to Amsterdam, and once he had settled there he wrote to his wife suggesting she should join him in the New Year. So Edith came with the oldest of the two girls, Margot, and Anne followed at the beginning of 1934. Otto had found comfortable accommodation on the second floor of a new housing estate in the south of Amsterdam, Merwedeplein 37. There Anne and Margot grew up like two ordinary Dutch schoolgirls, soon speaking Dutch fluently. Anne attended the VIth Amsterdam Montessori school in the Niersstraat, close to her home.

The Merwedeplein and surrounding streets became a centre of activities for Jewish refugees from Germany. that was nice for Anne and Margot, even nicer for Edith, who never learned to speak Dutch properly. Anne's two best friends were also daughters of refugees, Hannah Goslar and (Su) Sanne Ledermann. Only Hannah Goslar survived the war.

Anne was a quick learner at school, popular with teachers and other children alike, albeit that the former did sometimes become exasperated with her excessive talking. Hannah Goslar remembers how her mother used to say: 'God knows everything, but Anne Frankknows everything better.' Summing up the period between 1933 to 1940, one may say that the Frank girls had adapted well to their Dutch environment and that the future looked promising for both of them. All that would soon change.

Anne Frank, about the same age as Esther van Vriesland, writes in her diary on 30 June 1942 that a friend of hers used to say: I am scared to do anything these days, because I am afraid it might be forbidden. When the German armies occupied Holland, Anne Frank was one month away from her eleventh birthday. After the family moved to Amsterdam, the life of Anne and her sister Margot had become like the life of so many other Dutch children of that same age. We know that Anne was a very lively child, attractive, not pretty - like her sister Margot - and that she had many friends.

Anne liked to be the centre of attention. Her childhood friend Hannah Goslar, herself a refugee from Berlin, tells how at school Anne would always be surrounded by friends. Later, while in hiding, Anne would look back upon those years with a mixture of nostalgia and amazement.