Term Paper on "Hero in History Anne Frank"

Term Paper 6 pages (1680 words) Sources: 6

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Anne Frank

Had she lived, Anne Frank would have celebrated her eighty-first birthday in the summer of 2010. One can speculate endlessly on the woman she might have become. Perhaps, like Elie Wiesel, she would have made it her mission to educate the world about the Holocaust. Perhaps she would have lived, as did most survivors, in relative anonymity. She may have become a wife and mother, or pursued another path. Perhaps she would have done all three. One would hope that she would have continued to write, for she clearly had a gift for expressing her thoughts and feelings on paper. We can never know. What we do know about Anne Frank, however, is that nothing in her childhood prepared her for a life in hiding or a life, and ultimately death, in a concentration camp. She made up her mind, when hiding in the Annex, that she would "lead a different life from other girls and, later on, different from ordinary housewives." She may have imagined herself many things, but she probably never thought of herself as a hero. Yet she became a hero to many because of her cheerful and courageous spirit in the face of unspeakable horror.

Anneliese Marie Frank was bon in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 12, 1929, to Otto and Edith Frank. The Franks already had another daughter, three-year-old Margot. Life was good for the Franks for the first few years of Anne's life, but by 1933, the rise of the Nazi party made Germany an unsafe place for Jews to live. The Frank family made plans to emigrate to the Netherlands, where a relative of Otto's was going to give him the opportunity to start a company (www.annefrank.org).

In May 1934, Anne was enrolled in Montessori kindergarten in Amsterdam. Her father wrote, "It was good for Anne to attend a Montessori school, where every pupil is treated as an individual" (www.annefrank.org). Perhaps he was just considering the school more favorably than the public school that Margot had attended in Germany. It is more likely that he recognized the 5-year-old Anne was gifted and that her young spirit could soar in such a school.

As 1940 drew near, Jews faced more and more restrictions. Anne had to go to a special Jewish school and activities she had once enjoyed with her many friends, such as going to the movies or the swimming pool, were off limits. Anne wrote: "After May 1940, the good times were few and far between…Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees" (www.annefrank.org).

In the summer of 1942, Margot received orders to report to a labor camp in Germany. Just a few weeks before, Anne had written in her diary as any carefree thirteen-year-old might. She wrote about her classmates, confessed that several boys at school had crushes on her, and did not fret about her first report from the Jewish Lyceum, which showed that she had failed algebra. Her parents, at least in Anne's view, were not worried about her grades: "As long as I am healthy and happy and don't talk back too much, they're satisfied" (www.annefrank.org). Things changed quickly for Anne and her family, however. When Margot received orders, Edith and Otto Frank were determined to protect her, and the family went into hiding.

Otto Frank's company was located in the middle of the block on a street called Prinsengracht. Other small companies and factories were located on the street, so the smoke that arose from the chimney on the weekends would not have seemed unusual and it would not have aroused suspicion. At the back of the building was an apartment that Anne called "The Secret Annex" (Frank, 2010). A bookcase was built on hinges to hide the entrance. It was there that Anne hid with her family, a family of three named van Pels, and, eventually, a dentist named Pfeiffer. As an apartment, it might have been spacious enough for a small family, but there were eight people who lived in the space. Because they were in hiding, they could never leave and so they spent nearly two years in close quarters. No one had any real privacy. They had to be always mindful of being quiet, especially during the day when workers filled the building and adjacent buildings. They had virtually no fresh air, daring to open a window only a crack, and only at night. It is impossible to imagine living under such circumstances.

Anne was often frustrated with the situation. She quarreled with her mother. She watched the adults, whom her father described as a "combination of characters and opinions" (www.annefrank.org), argue amidst the terrible tension in the tiny space. Anne wrote: "My mind boggles at the profanity this honorable house has had to endure in the past month… the only way to take my mind off it is to study, and I've been doing a lot of that lately" (www.annefrank.org). It was a very difficult time for everyone, and especially for a child as spirited as Anne. She took her own frustrations out in the pages of her diary, where she also endeavored, on my occasions, to put on as cheerful a face as possible. She wrote: "I have often been downcast," she wrote in her diary, "but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary I treat all the privations as amusing."

Although discovery by the Nazis was always feared, one wonders if, as the two-year anniversary of their hiding passed, the people in the Secret Annex might have felt that they would be safe after all. Unfortunately, in August 1944, the people in the Secret Annex were betrayed. The identity of that person has never been established (www.annefrank.org). Everyone in the hiding place was arrested and transported immediately to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Anne, her sister Margot, and their mother were transferred to another camp, Bergen-Belsen, where they all died of exhaustion and disease. Tragically, Anne died in March 1945, just one month before the Allies liberated the camp. It is heartbreaking to think that she came so close to freedom!

Otto Frank was the only one taken from the Secret Annex to survive the Holocaust. When he was finally free, he returned to Amsterdam and retrieved Anne's diary. A woman named Miep Gies had been a trusted employee of Mr. Frank's and had known the family was in hiding. When they were arrested in 1944, Mrs. Gies found Anne's diary and kept it, hoping that she could one day return it to its rightful owner. When she learned of Anne's death, she gave the diary to Otto, telling him "This is your daughter Anne's legacy" (www.annefrank.org).

Otto thought that Anne's story needed to be told, so in 1947, he arranged to have the diary published in the Netherlands (www.annefrank.org). He could not have imagined that one day the diary, his daughter's legacy, would sell millions of copies and be translated into more than fifty languages. A play based on the diary opened on Broadway in 1955, with a successful revival in 1997. Several film versions of the play have been made. There were a number of books written about Anne Frank and the people who helped them, including Miep Gies' book called Anne Frank Remembered. During her short life, Anne Frank dreamed of being famous and she hoped to make her mark on the world in some way.

It is so tragic that Anne had to die in order for that to happen. She was a hero in her own way. She tried, mostly with success, to live each day in captivity as fully as she could. She tried to remain hopeful that their captivity would end and that she could… READ MORE

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