Anne Frank

Authors Avatar
Anne Frank was born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany. Her father, Otto Frank, was a respected businessman and a solid member of the city's Jewish community--he could trace his family in the city's archives all the way back to the seventeenth century. Anne and her older sister Margot grew up in a small, close-knit enclave of parents, relatives, and nurses.

By 1933, however, Otto Frank feared the spread of Nazi persecution, which was already making itself felt. (Germany's president appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany in January 1933; he was ruling the country by decree by April.) He moved directly to Holland, where he started a food products business. Holland had a long history of sheltering refugees. Mrs. Frank and the two girls first moved to Aachen, near the Belgian border, while Otto got settled. By the spring of 1934, the entire family reunited in Amsterdam. While Hitler consolidated his power and events in Germany continued to boil, Anne Frank went to the Montessori School and enjoyed childhood friendships and (to her delight) the attention of boys.
Join now!


War was declared in September 1939. Hitler's Germany had a series of emphatic victories in Poland, Denmark and Norway--and then moved to crush Holland in April 1940. The German occupying forces in Holland behaved much the way they did in other occupied countries: they restricted the flow of information from Dutch citizens, imprisoned Dutch leaders, and enacted their infamous anti-Jewish decrees. For Anne, life went on mostly as before, except that she had to leave the Montessori School and attend a segregated Jewish school. But her parents, recognizing that Hitler would eventually send Dutch Jews to concentration camps ...

This is a preview of the whole essay