Short History Of... - Anne Frank

Episode Date: June 1, 2025

Anne Frank is one of the world’s most famous writers, yet she didn’t live long enough to see her work published. At the age of thirteen, Anne was a normal teenager, who poured her heart into a diary. But what made her diary different, was that she created within its pages a snapshot of the darkest events of World War Two, detailing the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands that forced her family to hide in a secret annex. But what do we know about the real life of this bubbly young girl? How did her precious diary survive the war? And what about the people who protected - and betrayed her? This is a Short History Of Anne Frank.  A Noiser Production, written by Jo Furniss. With thanks to Karen Bartlett, a journalist and author of The Diary That Changed the World. Get every episode of Short History Of a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is the 12th of June, 1942. A girl and her father walk along the canal side in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Otto Frank is taking his daughter shopping to celebrate her 13th birthday. As they approach a corner, two German soldiers high-step past, and Otto grabs the girl's arm to make her slow down to avoid them. Red-faced, in uniforms emblazoned with a swastika, they march up to another pedestrian, grabbing her shopping bag so that she drops her rations. One soldier kicks an apple into the canal before they stride off. Otto rushes over to help the shaken woman. Like them, she is forced to wear a Star of David badge to signal that she is a Jew.

While they gather her shopping, a newspaper seller shouts the headlines. While they gather her shopping, a newspaper seller shouts the headlines. Every day, more restrictions are announced by the Nazi occupiers of the Dutch city. Today they learn that Jews are forbidden from riding bicycles, playing sports, and using non-Jewish grocery shops. That explains why the soldiers attacked this woman, hoping for an excuse to arrest her. Once the woman is back on her way, Otto directs his daughter to one of the few shops they are permitted to visit. They enter a Jewish bookstore and he tells her to choose a gift. and he tells her to choose a gift.

Moving between half-empty shelves, the teenager spots an autograph book. It has a red and white checkered cover and an ornate block. She clicks it open and finds blank pages inside. It's perfect. She can use it for her writing. She takes it to the shopkeeper, who rings up the price on the till. After Otto pays, he hovers by the doors for a moment, checking for Gestapo officers, before deciding that the coast is clear and setting off towards home. On the way, they pass signs that say, Jews forbidden. The girl tries not to look at the ones that say ghetto, with their frightening image of

a skull and crossbones. But the pair make it home, and she rushes upstairs to her room with her present. The girl now settles herself at her desk overlooking the canal. Below, the soldiers are back, hassling one of her Jewish neighbors. But she is distracted by the journal. She picks up a fountain pen and, finding a scrap of paper, practices her signature to get it right before marking the new book. She writes it over and over again. Anne Frank.

Then she turns to the diary. Unsure how to begin, she decides to speak to an imaginary reader. She'll call her Kitty. It is like having a new friend, and soon she finds she has covered a page. Outside the window, the guards have gone, and she didn't even notice. The diary is a refuge from the world outside. Already imagining the possibility of a reader other than herself,

she writes about her uncertainty that anyone else would find her meditations of interest. What she can't know, what she will never know, is that her words will one day be read by millions around the globe, standing as testimony of an atrocity that appalled the world. Anne Frank is one of the world's most famous writers. And yet she did not live long enough to see her work published. At the age of 13, Anne was a normal teenager. She poured out her heart into a diary, writing about school, friends, boys and girls that she liked, petty arguments with her mother. What made her diary different though, is that she also created within its pages

a snapshot of the darkest events of World War II. She wrote an account of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands that forced her family to hide in a secret annex above her father's workplace, leading eventually to her death in a concentration camp. But what do we know about the real life of this bubbly young girl who shared the same tragic end as six million Jews at the hands of the Nazi regime? How did her precious diary survive the war?

And what about the people who protected and betrayed her? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Network, this is a short history of Anne Frank. Before he even dreams of a daughter, Otto Frank is busy living a varied and ambitious life. After attending university in Heidelberg, Otto travels to America to take an internship at the famous Macy's department store in New York around 1909. But he returns to Germany just before World War I and is conscripted to the Western Front. After the war, he works for the family bank and establishes his own company to trade in spices. He's in his mid-thirties by the time he meets Edith Hollander.

Eleven years his junior, she is quiet, with a keen intelligence, and he falls quickly in love. They waste no time in getting married and are soon blessed with children. First Margot, then Annalise Marie, known to those who love her as Anne. They have a comfortable lifestyle as liberal Jews living in a multi-faith district of Frankfurt. But 1929, the year of Anne's birth, is also the year that the world is plunged into a financial crisis. Otto fears that the ramifications will be professional, political and personal. Karen Bartlett is a journalist and the author of The Diary That Changed the World.

The Franks are a very well-to-do upper-class German Jewish family. They had lots of big parties, they had lots of food, they went horse riding. They had a really good time and enjoyed their money and their status. But certainly by 1929, things were changing. Their businesses were struggling. Obviously, you were heading into the Wall Street crash and the Depression. Wall Street crash and the depression. Germany is badly affected by America's financial collapse. Forced to take out bank loans to pay reparations to the allies after the First World War,

by the late 20s, the German government owes tens of billions of dollars to American banks. When Wall Street refuses any new loans and calls in existing ones, the German economy fails. Its industries and many businesses shut down. During the winter of 1929-30, half a million Germans lose their jobs. By the time a radical politician called Adolf Hitler comes to power in 1933, one in three are unemployed. His party offers an extreme solution to the crisis. A plan to unite Germany under a Volksgemeinschaft, or national community.

Its goal is summed up by the Nazi slogan, ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuhrer. One empire, one people, one leader. But this national community does not include all Germans. Jews, like the Frank family, are not considered by Nazi ideology to have German blood and are therefore excluded. ideology to have German blood and are therefore excluded. Anti-Semitism has a long history in Germany, as it does elsewhere. But against this backdrop of economic woes, many non-Jewish people are looking for someone to blame, and Hitler gives it to them. The extremist ideology gathers pace.

And soon, although Otto fought for Germany in the First World War, he concludes there is no future for his family in their homeland. The Franks were really not very interested in being Jewish before they were sort of forced to be by the rise of the Nazis. They socialized with northern Jewish families and they didn't really take part in any sort of religious practices or ceremonies. The Franks are very aware of what's happening politically. They don't know quite what to make of it at the beginning, just like many Germans, but Otto has already experienced in his life anti-Semitism in Germany. So he

knows it's present in German society. He experienced it at school and university. And they talk about what's happening. They get together with other Jewish families and, you know, they discuss the situation, the things that they're hearing, how alarming it is. At that stage, you know, they don't decide to leave the country. They don't know quite what to do with it, but they know that it's a problem and a real threat to them. So they're under no illusions about how serious the situation is. Otto looks to the Netherlands for sanctuary. He has already spent time in Amsterdam, establishing a business selling pectin, an ingredient needed to make jam. It is a step down from running his family bank, but the business is doing well enough for him to consider a permanent move.

On March 10, 1933, Edith and the two girls have their passport photos taken in a booth in the Tietz department store in Frankfurt. taken in a booth in the Teitz department store in Frankfurt. Three days later, the Nazis raise a swastika flag over the town hall in the city. It is time to go. It was a huge, huge step for them to leave Germany and move to the Netherlands. They chose the Netherlands as many people did because it had been somewhere where Jewish people thought that they were going to be safe. and it was also somewhere that had been neutral in World War I and they expected that it would be neutral in World War II as well. But I mean Otto, you know, went from being part of a family that was at the top of high society in Germany to moving to the Netherlands and essentially becoming a kind of door-to-door salesman.

Titanic Ship of Dreams. The new podcast from the award-winning Noiza Network. Join me, Paul McGann, as we explore life and death on Titanic. I'll delve into my own family story following my great-uncle Jimmy as he tries to escape the engine room. We'll hear the harrowing tales of the victims and the testimonies of the lucky survivors. I saw that ship sink and I saw that ship breaking off. Titanic ship of dreams listen wherever you get your podcasts. Anne and Margo find the move easier than their parents. A responsible older sister, Margo is studious and serious.

And as she moves through school, she plans to become a doctor. Her little sister attends a Montessori kindergarten, where she is popular and lively, sometimes too lively. One childhood friend later recalls that Anne earned herself the nickname Mrs. Quack-Quack, because she was always talking. As well as learning little English, the sisters begin to pick up Dutch and start to feel at home in their adopted city. Edith and Otto can only hope they are safe here, along with thousands of other Jewish families who flee

the Nazis when they start to inter-Jews in Germany. But then, on the 1st of September 1939, Germany invades Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declare war, signaling the start of what will become World War II. The Netherlands does not declare war, relying on its neutrality as it has done for a century. After all, staying well out of it served the nation well during the First World War, when the conflict that raged across much of Europe left them unscathed. The problem is, the Nazis need a route to Paris that bypasses the French line of defence. And they also want to prevent

the British from getting any kind of foothold on the continent. So it is that on May the 10th 1940 the unthinkable happens. Early in the morning aircraft from the German Luftwaffe pass over the Netherlands as though they're en route to London. But once they are over the North Sea, they circle back. The first the Dutch know of the German invasion of the Netherlands is when bombs and paratroopers start to fall. On the ground, German troops also attack from the south.

The Dutch army holds out for several days, but morale falls when it is reported that the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina has left for England. Thousands of people, especially Jewish families, try to do the same. Within five days, the Dutch surrender and a Nazi general is installed by Hitler to oversee its administration in the Netherlands. The Frank family and hundreds of thousands of other Dutch Jews are once again exposed to the Nazis. The Nazis invasion of the Netherlands was just an absolute catastrophe for the Dutch people, but you know especially for all of the Jewish people who had fled to the Netherlands. I mean it was almost unbelievable. There was just absolute panic and pandemonium in the Netherlands, and Jewish people

immediately tried to escape. They fled for the ports. They tried to get on boats. A lot of people sadly took their own lives because they understood just how terrible the consequences of being occupied by the Nazis was going to be. From early 1941, the Nazis in the Netherlands start to remove the rights and liberties of

Jewish residents. On April 10, Jews learn they are not allowed to leave Amsterdam. Five days later, they have to hand in any radios. In May, Jewish journalists are banned from reporting, while doctors, lawyers and midwives can only work with other Jews. Later that month, Jewish people are banned from some streets and canals in the city, while other districts are designated ghettos or Jewish areas. In October 1941, Jews are forbidden to leave the country. Soon they are not allowed to drive,

be on the street after dark, or use telephones. Within months, the Franks are living like prisoners. The Nazis were marching about on the streets and the big swastika was hanging everywhere, so there was no kind of illusions that life was normal. But the restrictions on streets and the big swastika was hanging everywhere. So there was no kind of illusions that life was normal, but the restrictions on people and the sort of discrimination against the Jewish people started immediately, but kind of then built up like a sort of drum beat over a period of time. Of course, just like all other Jewish people in the Netherlands, it affected the Franks immediately and in every area of their lives. Otto could no longer be the owner of his business, so he had to find a way of transferring it theoretically to somebody else while also making sure that he could still profit from it in some way. Anne and Margot had to start going to Jewish schools. They could no longer go to the park.

They could no longer go to the swimming pool They could no longer go to the swimming pool. All those sort of smaller discriminations of, you know, not being able to go to the cinema, not being able to go to an ice cream parlor. And they're basically affecting every single thing that you might want to do. Otto and Edith tried to make life normal for their daughters. In June 1942, Anne turns 13. Otto and Edith try to make life normal for their daughters. In June 1942, Anne turns 13. It is a significant landmark for any young person.

She is especially close to her father, and he takes her shopping for a present, doing the best he can in their locked down city. They make their way during daylight hours when they are allowed out of the house to one of the few shops they are permitted to visit. Anne buys a notebook with a lock. Like many teenage girls, she wants a secret place to share her private thoughts. Her early entries include gossip about her schoolmates and her disappointment that she does not have a best friend.

Desperate for someone to confide in, she addresses her writings to an imaginary girl called Kitty. She later notes that without writing a diary, she would suffocate on her feelings. But as time goes on, her confidence as a writer grows. She decides that when the war is over, she would like to be an author or journalist, a career outside homemaking and child rearing. But in early July 1942, the Franks receive a strange letter. Addressed to 16-year-old Margot, it orders her to report to Nazi headquarters, from where she will be deported to Germany to work in a factory. Tearfully, Margot confides to her sister that she is afraid to travel alone to Germany to work in a factory. Tearfully, Marga confides to her sister

that she is afraid to travel alone to Germany. And she has good reason to be scared, because the young people who heed the Nazi work order are not taken to factories. They are sent to concentration camps. Otto and Edith know they have to act now to save their eldest daughter, but they are banned from leaving the country.

Relatively recently we found that there's a lot of documents about his application to go to the US. I mean, really, he must have had high hopes that he could go there. He'd lived there as a young man. He had very good connections with high-profile families and businesses, but he couldn't get his visa application. They tried all sorts of countries. He tried all sorts of methods to get out, but none were successful, which is a story that we hear so often with families who are trying to get out of the Netherlands.

And I think his efforts to get back to America, which he must have had, there's so many hopes of being successful for him, it seemed particularly tragic really that he wasn't able to do that. In the absence of a route out, the family must fall on the mercy of those closer to home. It is the 6th of July, 1942. Anne walks into the kitchen of their home with Mucha, the cat, purring in her arms. Perhaps sensing the tension in the room, the animal wriggles free and jumps away. Anne's father is holding the letter addressed to Margot, while Edith clutches her weeping

daughter to her side. Otto tells Margot that she isn't going to the Nazis, but they have work to do. He explains his plan, and the girls thunder up the steep wooden steps to their room to get ready. It almost feels like a game to Anne as she opens and closes drawers, picking out favorite items of clothing. She takes off the outfit she is wearing and starts again, putting on several pieces of underwear, then a blouse over another shirt, then a pullover, and yet another cardigan.

Behind her, on a narrow bed, Margo hurriedly packs a suitcase before Otto appears at the door and reminds them that they cannot take too much. Jews are not allowed to travel, so it has to look as if they're going for a normal walk to the shops. Sigh, Margo shuts the empty suitcase and slides it under the bed. Now Anne finds her satchel and opens the buckles. Her arms feel tight and stiff inside the many layers of clothing. But she has to pack her precious belongings. She puts in her diary, hair curlers, and school books.

She thinks about taking her collection of marbles until one drops and bounces across the floor. Watching it roll, her father says they will have to stay very quiet where they are going. So reluctantly, she leaves the marbles. The cat reappears and she lets him rub his face against her hand to say goodbye. Then she goes downstairs with her satchel and follows her family onto the streets, trying to look normal. Soon, they reach Otto's warehouse on a street called Prinzengracht.

They go inside, and at the back of the premises, Anne squeezes behind a bookcase where she finds a set of steep wooden steps. Climbing up, she can hardly believe the secret world that exists up there. This is what her father has been planning undetected for months. A hidden annex of rooms. Some of their furniture is already here, plus supplies. Anne starts to tear open the cardboard boxes. She finds her collection of Movie Star postcards, which she now uses to decorate the walls. Then she hears the door to the outside world slam and the key turn in the lock.

Anne takes a last glimpse out of the window. But then, knowing they cannot risk being seen, she tugs the curtains across, shutting out the world. Otto had been preparing for this for a while. He'd already decided that what would become the annex in the attic of his commercial building would be where they would go into hiding. It took a long time for him to get supplies in there and to start to end it up as a place where they could live. But he hadn't really decided on the time for when that should happen. But this letter was just the catalyst. They took very few belongings and they left their apartment without speaking to anybody. And they went straight

to the attic, the annex. And that was when they went into hiding. And I think for me, one of the most poignant parts of the story is that Anne was desperately upset about leaving her cat behind because they couldn't tell anyone what was happening, they couldn't arrange for anyone to look after the cat. They just had to kind of open the door and let it out. The family understand how serious it would have been if Margot had gone to Germany. They listen to illegal radio broadcasts transmitted by Dutch resistance and Queen Wilhelmina from England.

They know about concentration camps. They know that people who have been deported do not return. The best option, really the only option, is to hide even if it means living in extremely difficult conditions. Very, very few Jewish people in the Netherlands had the resources or the ability to go into hiding. Most of them were deported and murdered. Anne's story has been taken up as a narrative for all the Jewish people in the Netherlands or all sort of Jewish people facing the Nazis, but actually was very, very unusual for anyone to be able to do what the Franks were able to do. I'm sure many people have actually been to the Anne Frank house and been up to the annex.

And you know, you're always struck by what a cramped, uncomfortable experience it is. You know, you have to go behind the bookcase and up this very steep ladder. You're in the attic of what was then a commercial building or warehouse in an office. And it's very small, it's uncomfortable. They've managed to get quite basic furniture in there and sort of turn it into a series of different rooms. But you know, it's completely different to kind of, you know, living in an apartment or living a normal life. Obviously, they could never go out. They could never really do normal things in daytime hours because there were still people

who were working for the business in the building and they were terrified that people were going to hear them. And, you know, they were sort of confined together in that very small space for years. The Franks rely on four people who work for Otto in the warehouse below to shield and support them. One helper is Otto's assistant, a woman called Miep Gies. Although the warehouse and factory keep running as normal, partly to keep up appearances that it is a regular place of work, not a hideout. They don't trust all of the staff. This means the Franks must keep absolutely quiet during working hours.

One raised voice, one flushed toilet, one dropped plate could give them away. The four who help the family are also taking an enormous risk. The Franks need food, but with the Dutch being subject to wartime rationing, Meep and the others have to be careful not to reveal that they are feeding extra people. A few weeks into the isolation, Anne's cloistered life opens up a little with the arrival of a second German-Jewish family in the annex, the Van Pels, who worked for Otto, and whose son, Peter, is two years older than Anne. At first, the boy is withdrawn.

He keeps to his room and takes no interest in the many activities the others do to stave off boredom. But Anne needs a friend. Slowly, she brings him out of his shell and he starts to study to keep up with the smart Frank girls. Anne and Peter fall for one another, sometimes cuddling and kissing when they find a moment of privacy. Peter's interesting, isn't he? Because he's in the diary, he has become the kind of the romantic lead, you know, the sort of the person that she sort of projects all of her sort of romantic feelings onto. And, you know, there's so much kind of human emotion going on in those small spaces,

you know, there's her tension with her parents, there's her romantic feelings for Peter, there's her sort of teenage growing sense of her own sexuality, which she writes about in the diary. There's her enormous irritation with having to share a room with another Jewish man who comes who's a dentist. I mean, the poor guy, he gets a terrible rap in the diary and Otto was aware of that afterwards. His family were quite upset about how he was portrayed in the diary. But from her point of view, you know, she's a young girl, and she has to stay in a very small bedroom with this very grumpy, who she thinks looks very grumpy guy, and that's pretty terrible for her.

As the weeks turn to months and then years, life in the annex grows frustratingly cramped and boring. Everyone struggles with the constant jeopardy, the fear of being found. As people go about their business outside and cannot even see the birds. She famously writes that she feels like a songbird whose wings have been ripped off. She is a truly great writer in that she taps into that humanity, which is what makes all writing kind of appeal to other people really, and she can do it. I think she has a remarkably clear grasp on what's going on.

They know about D-Day and they're tracking on a map the progress of the allied forces across Europe thinking surely it can't be long now until we're going to be safe. The family are optimistic. In July 1944 Anne writes that despite all the evidence to the contrary she still believes that people are intrinsically good. But she has been in the secret annex for 761 days over two years when without warning everything changes. over two years when without warning everything changes. The comment about goodness is one of the most famous quotes from Anne Frank's diary, an expression of enduring hope and resilience, but it is also a snapshot of a moment in time. Would Anne have written that sentiment if she had known it would be one of her last messages? Did she still believe in goodness once she had witnessed the very worst of humanity?

That we will never know, because on the 1st of August 1944 she pens her final diary entry. After that, we do not hear her voice again. Despite many, many theories and investigations, nobody actually knows who betrayed the family. There's been a real focus by people, certainly in the last few years, into trying to sort of reveal who was the person who betrayed them, how did they come to be arrested. And in a sense, I kind of feel like that focus on who was the criminal takes away from the bigger part of the story. You know, the most, the more important part of the story is what happened to them and the fact that it happened to all the other hundreds of thousands of Jewish people in

the Netherlands, you know, in the summer of 1944, the Gestapo arrive. It is the 4th of August, 1944. A warm and sunny Friday. A normal working day at the Prinzengracht warehouse, a tall narrow premises with high sash windows that overlook a canal. The secretary, Miep Geiss, is in the office when she hears a commotion at the entrance. The footsteps thunder up the wooden stairs and a short man bursts into her office pointing a pistol. office pointing a pistol. He is SS Hauptschauffeur Karl Josef Silberbauer and he's in charge of the Gestapo guards who are right now swarming around the warehouse and offices. Silberbauer marches past Miep to the manager's office where he finds Victor Kugler, another

of Otto's former employees and one of the four who know about the annex. Victor agrees to show the German around. The Gestapo are conducting a search, demanding crates and sacks to be opened, their contents revealed. The noise level rises as workers comply. Miep Geiss tries not to show her panic as they ransack the offices. Silbabao heads towards the back of the building. In a storeroom, he manhandles bottles of ingredients, not caring when they fall and smash on the floor.

Then he turns towards a landing where there are boxes and a bookcase. Victor Kugler keeps talking, explaining to Silberbauer about the uses of pectin, telling him how to make jam. But the SS officer points at the bookcase, ordering his men to push it aside. A low door is revealed, and the men shoulder barge it open. Kugler can only watch as Silberbauer mounts the steps to the secret annex. At the top stand Anne, her family, the Van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer, the dentist, all with their hands raised. In the small kitchen, Silberbauer picks up a briefcase from the table

and empties out the contents. In a small kitchen, Silberbauer picks up a briefcase from the table and empties out the contents. Papers and a small red and white checkered diary fall to the floor. Kicking them aside, he demands the family's hand over their valuables, and he gathers jewelry, cash and watches into the case to take with him. Then he orders the eight residents of the annex down the stairs for the first time in over two years. There's a sneak geese who had to go in and clear up after this terrible event and she saw Anne's diary lying sort of scattered all over the floor and thought, I'm going to pick that up because I want to think that they're going to come back and I want to give that to Anne when she returns and she kept it. And that's why we still have that remnant. I mean, Lager also had a diary, but we don't have that, unfortunately, to read.

What seems so particularly terrible is by this stage, the Allies had landed. They were in France. They were pushing across. They were really enormously close to safety, but they just couldn't make it. The Franks are taken to Vesterbork, a concentration camp in the Netherlands. The three members of the Van Pels family, including Peter and Frits Vephe, go too. Victor Kugler and another Dutch man who helped to hide the Franks are also arrested. They are sent to Nazi work camps as punishment, but Kugler manages to escape. All four of the Dutch helpers survive the war and later receive commendations for their bravery. But a month after the raid, Anne is one of a thousand Jewish people taken from the holding camp and loaded onto a train made up of cattle trucks.

It will be the last transport ever to leave Westerbork. Conditions on board are appalling and many passengers do not survive. There is no food, no water, no sanitation. It is the height of summer and the journey takes three days, with hundreds of people crammed into overcrowded wagons. Eventually the train arrives at a concentration camp in Poland. They get to Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is separated by sex. So Auschwitz is where the men go, Birkenau camps are where the women go.

And of course they get off the train onto that sort of notorious platform that we see on images. And they're immediately separated by the Nazis, they're separated men and women. And then they're separated again according to age and condition. Traditionally with people of working age who will be sent to the camp itself, who will be then living there and working for probably quite a short period of time until they die, are people who are just separated and selected immediately on the platform to go straight to their death. They were of no use, too young, too old, too sick to be abused to the Nazis, so they just get sent straight to their death. They were of no use, too young, too old, too sick

to be abused by the Nazis, so they just get sent straight to the gas chambers to be murdered. So you have that selection process on the platform, and for Otto and his family, that's the last time they see each other. He's the only male that's there, and he looks across, and he sees Anne and Margot, and that's the last time that he sees his children. While Otto is taken to Auschwitz, the sisters and Edith go to Birkenau, the women's side of the camp. Anne, by now, is a few months past her 15th birthday. All children below that age are sent directly from the train station to be murdered in the gas chambers.

Only those fit to work enter the camps. Of the 1,019 people on the train from Vesterbroek, 570 are gassed as soon as they arrive. Inside Birkenau, there are so many Jewish people from Amsterdam that Anne meets friends and acquaintances. The few who survived the ordeal later give eyewitness accounts of how the Franks fared. At first, they are optimistic that the end of the war will come soon. But later, they fall ill.

They are starving, filthy, sleeping out in the open. Edith, Anne, and Margo rely on one another and grow closer than ever before. Despite the harsh words that Anne says about her mother in her diary, at the end they are devoted, loving, inseparable. In October 1944, Anne and Margot are made to transfer to another concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen. But Edith is too weak to make the journey and stays behind at Birkenau where she dies in January 1945, a few days short of her 45th birthday. What seems particularly tragic about the story

of the Frank family is that it was at the very end of the war. I mean, the reason that Anne and Margot were moved to Bergen-Belsen was that the Nazis knew that the Soviet army was approaching and was very likely to liberate those concentration camps. And they were sort of perversely determined to, rather than let those remaining people be liberated, to take those who could still walk and were well enough to concentration camps further in Germany. Not long after they arrive at Bergen-Belsen, Margot dies of disease, and passes away maybe as little as a day later. As well as the starvation and exhaustion, an epidemic of typhus decimates

the prisoners. The exact date of Anne's death isn't known, but it is believed to be around March 1945. British forces arrived to liberate Bergen-Belsen in April. She was so ill. I mean, many people did die even after liberation because they were just so ill and had been so starved and were so unwell. So there's no guarantee that if she'd survived until the Allied soldiers arrived that she would have lived, but they were tantalizingly close to liberation. to liberation. Of the eight people who hid in the secret annex, only Otto Frank survives the war. He is freed when Soviet troops liberate Auschwitz in January 1945. After a long and difficult journey amid the chaos and shattered infrastructure of post-war

Europe, Otto returns to Amsterdam. He has nowhere else to go. He is stateless. But the reception in the Netherlands is not warm. In contrast to when the Jewish people had arrived in the 1930s and they had been largely allowed to integrate and to have been had been welcomed to some extent. When they returned, they quite often felt that Dutch people were very unwelcoming. They didn't understand why they had come back. The Dutch had felt like they'd been through their own hardships in the war. They'd had what they called the hunger winter, where they'd almost all starved to death. And now they're saying, and now you've come back again, and we have to house you and find a place for you,

and we're not sure we want to. But though Otto's business and home is gone, his loyal Dutch friend, Miep Gees, takes him in. By now, he knows that his beloved wife has died. So he dedicates himself to finding news about his missing daughters. Like many of the Jewish survivors who did come back, they had to try various routes. They tried through the Red Cross, they put adverts in local newspapers, they pinned things

up on boards at the central station where people were coming back from the camps and, you know, being disembarking. Eventually, several months later, he just marks in his own diary, which is a little red notebook, just two crosses to say that he's heard news about Anne and Margot. He was incredibly badly affected when he heard that Edith had died and then for Anne and Margot too, I mean, it's just unbelievable, really. He went into a kind of incredibly deep depression. You know, he wondered how he could go on. And at that point, Meep Geese gave him Anne's diary.

She'd been waiting. She thought she could give it back to Anne. And then she hesitated and wondered if it was the right thing to do to give it to Otto, but she gave it to him and you know from that moment on really I think that became his life boy almost to hold on to you know his one remaining thing from his children. Remarkably Otto finds that Anne wrote not one but two diaries. The first is the original red and white chequered notebook. The second is a novel in diary form called The Secret Annex. Anne had been on a mission to record her experiences, having heard illegal radio broadcasts from

the Dutch government in exile, urging its people to keep hold of documents that might later help prove the atrocities of Nazi occupation. Inspired, Anne had started editing her own writing. In particular, she updated her youngest entries. It is revealing that she edited out these sometimes vicious comments about her mother. She also removed references to being in love with Peter. Still, aged only 15, Anne had an eye to publication, and the ambition and skill to be a professional writer. There were so many aspects to her. She was so multifaceted. She was so talented. You

know, what could she have done? What would she have been? She was bursting to fulfill her potential basically, and she didn't have that opportunity. When he opens the original diary, Otto discovers a side to his daughter that he never knew as her father. A teenager's angst and rage, her attraction to boys and a curiosity about the body of a female friend too. The state of her parents' marriage, private thoughts that Anne perhaps intended to share only with her imaginary confidant Kitty. But Otto recognizes the power of Anne's story and sees in her novel version, The Secret Annex, that she did want to share her writing

with the wider world. So, though the decision to reveal his family's private life appalls many of his friends, he now embarks upon the long journey to publication. It's almost the book that didn't get published at all. The company that publishes the first edition in Dutch agreed to take it on because at that stage it was very hard to get paper to publish and they wanted to publish another book. And in order to publish this other book that they wanted to publish, they took on the diary because it had this kind of political significance and then they could get the paper to publish the book that they really wanted to publish. So little did anybody know what was going to happen.

The diary is first published in Dutch with the same title that Anne used Het Acte His or The Secret Annex. The book has little impact but Otto persists and gets an English language version in 1952, which is called Anne Frank, the diary of a young girl. When the book comes out in America, interest and momentum starts to build. It is adapted for the stage in 1955 and a few years later as a Hollywood movie. The book is translated into 70 languages. The annex where the family hid becomes a museum.

Anne Frank is hailed as an inspiration for oppressed people everywhere. Publication of the diary is perhaps a way for Otto to keep his daughter's memory alive, to let it endure as a testimony of the Nazi project, its occupation of the Netherlands and its death camps. But at the same time, the act of going public means that Otto loses Anne Frank to a public who consume her words and her image, turning a girl into a global icon. He's absolutely dedicated to the diary. And along the way, he undergoes the most amazing kind of controversies and horrors connected to the diary. You know, he has to fight two enormous court cases in Germany with Holocaust deniers who claim that the diary isn't authentic. He engages in this horrible, intense feud with an Israeli writer who's based in America who believes that he was kind of cheated out of the opportunity to write the play in the screenplay. That leads to another court case which eventually this man threatens to shoot Otto.

Otto has a complete nervous collapse. I mean, you know, his life is not easy once he's published the diary. In fact, it's like opening a Pandora's box of problems for him. Anne Frank describes herself as a little bundle of contradictions. Her legacy is equally complex. Today, her diary introduces millions of schoolchildren around the world to the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust.

Through the youthful candor of her writing, she reminds us that she was an ordinary girl, but one ultimately given an extraordinary burden. Her legacy is still so fought over and contested, and there are still so many kind of deep disputes between people about what does the diary of Anne Frank and Anne really mean. There are people who feel very strongly that the commercialization of the diary

and the sense that people identify with her as just a young girl, and it could be any of us, has taken away from the fact that people identify with her as just a young girl, and it could be any of us, has taken away from the fact that she was Jewish, and that people do not remember the fact that this happened to her because she was a Jewish girl and that it was the Jews who were almost uniquely persecuted by the Nazis and murdered in the Holocaust. But there are also people who feel that if she's going to kind of continue to have a legacy, it is because people in different countries in different circumstances are going to relate to her on their own terms and read the diary

and see something of themselves in her. And that is really why her story has been so enduring. Next time on Short History of, bring you a short history of the first emperor of China. Everything we know about the first emperor should be taken slightly with a pinch of salt. You have no idea since there are no other sources how true it was. The only thing you can be sure of is that there was a great wall, there was unification, he had huge palaces, he did have an enormously rich capital. And we know where all this took place and there's been good

archaeology to back up that. But some of the more leery details of how he came to power are to be doubted. There makes wonderful television, but it may not be as true as the Chinese Head to www.noiza.com forward slash subscriptions for more information. Miller Lite The light beer brewed for people who love the taste of beer and the perfect pairing for your game time. When Miller Lite set out to brew a light beer, they had to choose great taste or 90 calories per can. They chose both because they knew the best part of beer is the beer. Your game time tastes like Miller time. Learn more at MillerLite.ca.

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