What effect did World War II have on Anne Frank and other Jewish families?
The Holocaust was a very serious and sad time in our world’s history. The people who started this mass genocide are a group called “The Nazi’s” the founder of the Nazi party was a young man named Adolf Hitler.
Hitler’s goal was to take over all of Germany territory and exterminate all of the Jew’s across Europe. In January of 1933 Hitler and his party took over Germany and started killing off Jew’s, Homosexuals, Christians and Gypsies.
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany established about 20,000 camps to imprison its many millions of Jews, Gypsies, and Homosexuals. The camps were used to exterminate these people from Europe. In the camps they used physical labor and they also used gas chamber.
When a prisoner was going to the gas chamber to die they were actually told they were going to a shower. But later to find out they were going to their death. The most know camps are Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. The Nazi’s also ran the ghettos.
They were often enclosed cities that separated all the Jewish community’s from other Jewish community’s. Many families were separated in these horrible deaths camps and ghettos. But we know of two brave families that risked there lives to save them.
Those families were The Frank’s and The Van Daans. When Anne and her family went in to hiding in the annex behind a book case in her fathers store they hid there for 2 years, July 6th, 1942 to August 4th, 1944. Meip a trusty worker and friend of The Franks supplied them with food and drink for those 2 years putting her own life at risk.
While Anne and the rest were in hiding Anne had gotten a diary for her 11th birthday that she kept dear to her heart. She named her diary Kitty, and Kitty became her best friend through out the years in hiding. When the families were ratted out by one of the workers down stairs (they suspect) Meip took Anne’s diary and kept it hoping that one day she would be able to return it to her. But, that would never happen.
Anne and her sister Margot were sent to a women’s concentration camp called Bergen-Belsen. There she died of Typhus, along with her sister. They were separated from there mother and father. Their mother died in Auschwitz of starvation. And her father was sent to Auschwitz but was transported to other camps.
When the camps were liberated by the British in 1945, Otto her father was released and went home to find out that his family had died but that Meip had kept Anne’s diary for a member of the family. Later when Otto read Anne’s diary he decided to publish it and it became one of the world’s best seller. When he first released it her took out some things because they were crude. But then later he decided to publish the original copy of her diary. Anne Frank and her bravery and courage will always be remembered in the worlds hearts.