Subtitles section Play video
-
Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who became famous for the diary she wrote during the Second World War.
-
She was born in the German city of Frankfurt in 1929.
-
She had a sister, Margot, who was three years older.
-
Things were going badly in Germany.
-
Unemployment was high and many people were poor.
-
At the same time, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party were gaining supporters by promising to solve the country's problems.
-
The Nazis hated the Jews and blamed them for the problems.
-
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, hostility to the Jews increased.
-
Anne's parents, Otto and Edith, decided to flee to the Netherlands.
-
They settled in Amsterdam, here, on Merwedeplein.
-
Anne soon felt at home.
-
She went to school, learned Dutch, and made new friends.
-
Six years later, war broke out across Europe.
-
In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and in 1940, the German army occupied the Netherlands.
-
The Nazi occupiers made life increasingly difficult for Jews.
-
Jews have to wear a Jewish star, Jews have to hand in their bicycles.
-
Jews are not allowed in the tram, Jews are not allowed to ride in cars.
-
Jews must attend Jewish schools, and so on and so forth.
-
In the summer of 1942 after Anne's sister, Margot, was ordered to report for a so-called labor camp, the Frank family went into hiding behind Otto's business on the Prinsengracht.
-
They were joined there later by the Van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer.
-
The eight people in hiding were helped by loyal staff and friends of Otto's: Miep and Jan Gies, Johan Voskuijl and his daughter Bep, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman.
-
Meanwhile, the Nazis had tightened their grip, organizing raids, and arresting and deporting Jews to so-called labor camps.
-
In reality, these were concentration and death camps.
-
In her diary, Anne wrote about living in the hiding place, the war, and her thoughts and feelings.
-
I feel bad for lying in a warm bed while my dearest friends are out there somewhere, thrown or fallen to the ground.
-
And that, only because they are Jews.
-
An appeal from the Dutch government in London inspired Anne to rework her diary entries into a book.
-
Before she had finished, however, their hiding place was discovered and all eight were captured on the 4th of August, 1944.
-
They were deported to the concentration and death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
-
Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, two of the helpers, found the diaries Anne had left behind; Miep kept them in case Anne ever came back.
-
But she didn't come back.
-
In February 1945, Anne and Margot died of typhus in appalling conditions in the concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen.
-
Anne was 15.
-
Of the eight people, only Anne's father, Otto, survived the war.
-
When he read Anne's diaries after the war, they made a deep impression.
-
He discovered how much writing had meant to her.
-
No one who doesn't write can know how fine it is.
-
And if I don't have the talent to write for newspapers or books, well, then, I can always go on writing for myself.
-
Otto read how Anne had hoped to publish a book, so he carried out her wish.
-
Anne's story about life in hiding and the war is read all over the world.
-
Her diary has been translated into more than 70 languages.
-
The hiding place is now a museum, and welcomes more than a million visitors a year.