‘Dearest Kitty’
The Life of Anne Frank
An anonymous tip from Dutch informers led to the Gestapo breaking through a secret bookcase and finding Mr. Otto Frank, Mrs. Edith Frank, their daughters Margot and Anne, the Van Pelts family and Pfeffer. Nazis stormed through and arrested them on August 4th 1944. They left on the last train that went to Auschwitz Concentration Camp in South West Poland. Anne was only fifteen years old.
Some ten thousand Jews had served in the German Army, Otto had joined the ranks of the artillery. The Great War ended for Germany in total defeat. Then in 1933, an angry soldier was appointed Chancellor and quickly, within a year, Hitler consolidated all power within his grasp. He enforced strict anti-Jewish laws such as; making Jews wear the Star of David on their clothes and only allowing Jews to shop in Jewish shops.
On the 12th of June 1929 Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In 1933, in response to Hitler's anti-Jewish ruling, Mr. Frank opened a branch of his company, Opteka, in Amsterdam and began planning to bring his family there. In the early 1930’s an increased number of Jews fled Germany and settled in the Netherlands. The Dutch coalition government had no real policy on refugees in the early 1930’s so German Jews fled to the Netherlands. By 1930 there were some what one hundred and thirteen thousand Jews living in Holland. The Jewish population were attracted to the Amsterdam-Zuid districts. The Frank family rented a concrete, run down apartment at thirty-seven Marwedplein which to this day know as the River Quarter. Their new flat was spacious; there was a large upstairs room which the Franks rented out to lodgers, for extra money to support Margot and Anne for school. The building they were in and the surrounding buildings were streamlined and uniformed and five storeys high. The Franks were instantly at ease in the contrast surroundings of Frankfurt and Amsterdam.
