We've all heard about Ana, a girl of Jewish descent who lived hidden from the Nazis during World War II for almost two and a half years. A girl for whom controversies have been created that discuss whether she and her diary really existed, or were only a story. Personally, I think that Ana and her diary really existed, and it is worth knowing who she was, her story and the highlights of her stay in what she called the secret annex.
Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main (Hesse, Germany), and was the second daughter of Otto Heinrich Frank and his wife, Edith Hollander, being Margot the first daughter of the marriage. Together with your family. He was appointed to assist in his expansion to the Netherlands from his company. Frank had considered moving his family there after the election of Adolf Hitler in the rise of Nazism, so he accepted the post and moved alone to Amsterdam to find a house for his family and later went the whole family.
Ana wanted a diary for her 13th birthday, and her parents fulfilled her wish, gave her a diary that would become her best friend, excited Ana begins to write about her everyday days at school and with her friends, without knowing that later this would be the book that would capture the atrocious moments of history seen from the innocent eyes of a girl.
And then she starts writing about her friends, boys who call her attention, outings with her classmates, her aspirations and how she sees herself, something normal in a girl's diary, but Ana's peculiarity is her crude way of writing what he feels and happens in his life. Ana begins to explain how Jews are treated; they have certain times to go out, they can only walk or ride a bicycle to be transported, they are denigrated and discriminated against by making them wear a yellow star in their outfits to be able to classify them among others, little by little they are assigned to schools just for Jews, they close their businesses , they take away their property, and so, continues to write about the growing Jewish oppression, until Ana's sister, Margot, receives a letter of order for her deportation to a labor camp then Otto Frank, Ana's father decides to take your family to live as clandestine, prepare a hiding place in the back of your company; It consists of an annex of three floors, which is protected by a library that hides and makes inaccessible your entrance.
And just like that, they announce to Ana one day before the departure to the annex, the plan to hide from the Nazis, since if they were found they would take them to extermination camps, and if they were in stable physical condition; to concentration camps where they would be forced to go through very debilitating and abusive forced labor in which it was very likely that over time they died of disease or malnutrition. Ana makes her bags and can barely sleep at night to leave early in the morning. secret annex on foot, where previously his father had little by little stored some of his belongings, objects of basic needs and food.
The secret annex did not have many luxuries, nor so little could be there at ease, the tenants had to keep quiet, especially in the morning when workers were in the company, had to eat and go to the bathroom at certain times to not do much noise, take a bath once a week; generally on Sundays and, obviously, not lean out of any window. The family did not live alone, along with them was the marriage of the Van Pels, known in his diary as the Van Daan, and his son Peter, and later the dentist Fritz Pfeffer, known in the diary as Dussel. Workers who are friends of Mr. Frank helped the families with the supplies and did the orders that they sent them.
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Ana expresses herself in her diary as if she were scrubbing a friend of the soul, referring to her as "Dear Kitty ..." in each letter, explaining her stay, and the problems she had with her family and the Van Daan, they underestimated her many times as a child without realizing the potential she possessed, writing about her feelings, beliefs and ambitions, topics that she did not talk about with others. When feeling more secure about her writing, at the same time that she grew and matured, she wrote about more abstract subjects, like her beliefs in God, or about how she defined human nature. She spent her days reading and doing correspondence courses, she was passionate about writing, in fact she wanted to be a writer, so she decided to join her diary to the set of documents that would be published in the post-war period.
All the tenants lived in constant torture, often heard detonations that did not allow them to sleep at night, limited themselves to eating potatoes, soups and vegetables, but nevertheless they lived with the hope of leaving that stage of their lives They told of their greatest desires when the war ended and they could leave; taking a long hot bath, going out for coffee, going to the center, to the movies, among others, Ana simply wanted so many things that she was unable to list them. After a long time Ana starts a relationship with Peter, at first she did not like him, but over time it became her love, with whom she could talk, spend her days in that confinement and to whom she gives her first kiss.
Each day was undoubtedly more decadent than the previous one, but all in a certain way were adapting to living in anonymity, until the horror and its greatest fear entered the secret annex, the morning of August 4, 1944 the Grüne Polizei ( or Gestapo) assaulted the hiding place and on September 2 made their last transfer from Westerbork to the Auschwitz concentration camp, Along with the other women not selected for immediate death, Ana was forced to remain naked to disinfect her, shaved her head and they tattooed an identification number on his arm, he was separated from his father, and he thought he had died but in fact he was the only one who survived that hell.
On October 28, the selection began to relocate the women in Bergen-Belsen. More than 8,000 women, including Anne Frank, Margot Frank and Auguste van Pels, were moved, but Edith Frank remained behind. Once in the new concentration camp Ana gets with two friends, Hanneli Goslar; called Lies in the diary and Nanette Blitz, who survived the war and told that despite the great illness that Ana was going through, she was very worried about Margot, who was in a worse state, since she was very weak, Margot dies for the hit accidentally falling off his bunk, this was a deep pain for Ana, and a few days later she also died of typhus, perhaps a few more days would have been enough to survive, in a few weeks after the field would be released by British troops, the 15 April 1945.
His father's reaction was surprising, as he did not expect his young daughter to be so profound, and since Ana wanted to be a writer, Otto corrected his diary and adapted it to the public by cutting personal parts about his relationship with his wife Edith in order to deliver it. to the historian Anne Romein, who tried to publish it, without success. She then passed it on to her husband Jan Romein, who wrote an article about the book with the title "Kinderstem" ("The Voice of a Girl") in the newspaper Het Parool on April 3, 1946. He wrote that the newspaper « slowly expressed in the voice of a girl, shows all the hatreds of fascism, better than all the evidence of the Nuremberg trials together. His article attracted the attention of the editors and the Journal was published in the Netherlands in 1947 by the publisher Contact, of Amsterdam, under the title Het Achterhuis (The house behind). It was reprinted in 1950. In April 1955, the first translation of the newspaper in Spanish appeared under the title The Back Rooms, and the legacy of Anne Frank begins.
The moving story told by this girl has been translated into more than 70 languages, I would say that everyone should read since it is one of those books that mark us, to think of being able to read it, we will never fully comrpender the strong feelings that happened those who lived in the era of the Second World War, and like Ana, there must be many more who had stories worthy of admiration.
