Date: 23/11/2022 Shift: 2:30 PM – 5:30 PM Q. No: 227

For over 70 years, Anne Frank’s Diary – an unfiltered chronicle of hiding in occupied Amsterdam – has served as an introduction to the horrors of World War II.
Beginning in 1942, Anne Frank wrote from a concealed portion of her father’s business that she called the Secret Annex, where she lived with seven other Jews. They were confined for over two years, until 4 August 1944, when Anne and the members of the Annex were arrested by the Dutch Secret Police. The group members were sent to Nazi concentration camps across Poland and Germany. At Bergen-Belsen camp, Anne Frank died of typhus in 1945. Otto Frank, Anne’s father, was the sole survivor. This story would have remained untold if not for Miep Gies, who collected Anne’s diary from the Annex and delivered it to Otto after the war.
Many think of Anne Frank’s story as starting on 6 July 1942, when she went into hiding after her sister received a call-up notice to a labour camp in Germany. However, by the time she was 13, Anne’s life had been upended by Nazism for almost a decade. Anne Frank was born on 12 June 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, but her German life was cut short with the rise of Hitler’s regime in 1933. Pressed by anti-Semitic policies, the Frank family relocated to Amsterdam by February 1934.
Anne Frank attended a Montessori school with a mixed peer group until Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940. Kicked out of public school for being Jewish, Anne was made to attend the all-Jewish Lyceum school. Anti-Semitic policies leached into Dutch life: Jews couldn’t take public transportation, sit on park benches, or be out in public after 8 p.m. An edict issued in May 1942 forced all Jewish people over six to wear a yellow Star of David.
Recognising that what happened in Germany could happen in the Netherlands, Edith and Otto Frank gradually moved their belongings from their home at 37 Merwedeplein to Otto Frank’s business at 263 Prinsengracht, preparing to hide.
After World War II, Otto Frank took his daughter Anne’s salvaged diary and prepared it for publication.
Anne Frank had originally chosen the pseudonym Anne Aulis and later Anne Robin for herself in her diary. Her sister Margot was called Betty, her mother Edith was named Nora, and her father Otto was referred to as Frederik. Historians will never be certain why Anne Frank chose these pseudonyms for herself and the other Annex inhabitants, but it’s most likely that she was trying to protect the identities of the Jewish families hiding illegally during the Nazi occupation.