We have all heard about the young, Dutch, Jewish girl, Anne Frank. (She was actually born in Germany, but moved with her family to the Netherlands when she was about five because of the escalating anti-Semitism in Hitler’s Germany)
And, of course, the diary she kept for two years while hiding out in de “achterhuis“—hidden rooms in her father’s office building in Amsterdam—has become the subject of many books, movies, plays and documentaries.
The diary itself was translated into numerous languages and has become one of the world’s most widely read books. When the diary was published in the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote the introduction to the diary describing it as “one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read.” More about the diary in a moment, but Anne Frank became, as the Dutch newspaper De Handelsblad puts it, “the voice and face of the Jewish genocide in the Netherlands and around the world.”
After Anne’s family, another family and their dentist friend, Mr. Fritz Pfeffer, were discovered and arrested by the Gestapo they were sent to concentration camps.
Before eventually ending up at the infamous Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where it is believed that Anne Frank died of typhus in the spring of 1945, she was first sent to the work/transit camp at Westerbork in the Netherlands.
De Handelsblad reported yesterday that the shack (the “barrack“) where Anne Frank and her sister were put to work at Westerbork, removing carbon from old batteries, burned down Friday night and that “the fire was probably started deliberately.”
The “barrack No. 57” had been sold and relocated to the Dutch town of Veendam in 1957, but the Westerbork Holocaust Memorial Center announced plans just last month to bring back the barrack to Westerbork as a memorial to Anne Frank.
Back to the diary of Anne Frank.
Also last month, on June 11, De Handelsblad reported that:
All the original diaries and writings of Anne Frank will be on display in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam from now on, The Dutch Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences and the ministry of education announced on Thursday.
The material will return to the place where it was written, Anne Frank’s safehouse on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.
The deal in which the NIOD permanently loans the writings to the museum comes one day before Anne Frank’s 80th birthday. Education minister Ronald Plasterk told reporters: “Anne Frank is world famous, and it is wonderful that the Dutch nation and visitors from all over the globe can now see the original versions of her complete work. I hope and expect that this will further increase interest in her history and in our history. The Netherlands underestimates the international reputation of Anne Frank. In South Korea, she is better known than the Netherlands itself.”
Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, the family’s only survivor of the Holocaust, left the diaries to the NIOD.
Along with the famous red-checked diary, there will also be on display the second and third diaries, the Tales from the Secret Annexe (Verhaaltjesboek) and the Favorite Quotes Notebook (Mooie Zinnenboek). “Forty of the several hundred, brittle, loose sheets of paper on which Anne rewrote her diary will alternately be on display.”
It was in this very same column, on June 11, that de Handelsblad also reported that “the memorial centre of the transit camp Westerbork announced that it will re-instate the shed in which Anne and her sister Margot worked after they were captured in 1944 and before they were deported to Bergen-Belsen.”
Sadly, that is not to be now…
Thought you might like to know.
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.