Friday Facts: Anne Frank

Annelies Marie “Anne” Frank (12 June, 1929 – 12 March, 1945) was a Dutch diarist who was became famous when her father published her diary posthumously after World War II. Anne’s journals became a renowned biographical work detailing her most inner thoughts hiding from the Nazis.

1. Anne Frank spent two years hiding in a dark, damp abandoned part of a building which her father’s business partners owned.
2. The diary was actually an autograph album.
3. The Frank family was captured in August, 1944 when a secret police officer from Germany, accompanied by four Dutch Nazi officers, broke into the building where they were hiding after following an anonymous tip. Everyone was arrested and Anne was sent to Camp Westerbork and then Auschwitz with her sister and mother. Otto Frank never saw his family again.
   To this day no one knows who betrayed the family.
4. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from typhus about three days after her sister died. It is believed her mother died of starvation earlier.
   Anne Frank was 15 years old.
   The camp was liberated by British troops a few weeks later.
5. Miep Gies, a Dutch citizen which helped hide the Franks collected all the papers after the police left so she could return them to the family one day. Miep Gies said that if she would have known what was in the diary she would have destroyed it, because it revealed, by name, all of those who helped hide the Franks.
6. When Otto Frank published his daughter’s diary, it was titled Het Achterhuis (The Back House).
7. Anne Frank’s Diary was published in 67 languages and is considered one of the best first-hand experiences of the war from a unique Jewish perspective.
8. The diary is the form of letters Anne wrote to “Kitty”, “Pop,” “Phien,” “Emmy,” “Marianne,” “Jetty,” “Loutje,” “Conny,” and “Jackie.” Scholars believe these are names from Anne’s favorite books written by Cissy van Marxveldt.
9. An Alabama school tried to ban the diary in 1983 because “it was a real downer”.
10. Idiots claim that the diary is a forgery, however experts analyzed the handwriting, ink, paper, glue and even binding methods and could not find a remote possibility that this is true. Below is the only existing film footage of Anne Frank watching a neighbor’s wedding (22 July, 1941).

Zohar – Man of la Book