Assignment #1

If I had the ability to transport myself to any time in history, it would defiantly have to be during the hiding of Anne Frank. If Anne had never written a diary, today we wouldn’t know what had happen to her and her family during the Holocaust. Anne Frank has become a symbol for the lost promise of the children who dies in the Holocaust.

Born in the city of Frankfurt am Main in Weimar Germany, she lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. By nationality, she was officially considered a German until 1941, when she lost her nationality owing to the anti-Semitic policies of Nazi Germany. In her diary she wrote about her experiences in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War 2.
The Frank family moved from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933, the same year as the Nazis gained power in Germany. By the beginning of 1940 they were trapped in Amsterdam due to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in the hidden rooms of her father, Otto Frank's, office building. After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps.
 
On 3 September 1944, the group was deported on what would be the last transport from Westerbork to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and arrived after a three-day journey. In the chaos that marked the unloading of the trains, the men were forcibly separated from the women and children, and Otto Frank was wrenched from his family. Of the 1,019 passengers, 549—including all children younger than fifteen—were sent directly to the gas chambers. Frank had turned fifteen three months earlier and was one of the youngest people to be spared from her transport. She was soon made aware that most people were gassed upon arrival, and never learned that the entire group from the Achterhuis had survived this selection. She reasoned that her father, in his mid-fifties and not particularly robust, had been killed immediately after they were separated.

With the other females not selected for immediate death, Frank was forced to strip naked to be disinfected, had her head shaved and was tattooed with an identifying number on her arm. By day, the women were used as slave labor and Frank was forced to haul rocks and dig rolls of sod; by night, they were crammed into overcrowded barracks. Some witnesses later testified Frank became withdrawn and tearful when she saw children being led to the gas chambers, others reported that more often she displayed strength and courage, and her gregarious and confident nature allowed her to obtain extra bread rations for her mother, sister and herself. Disease was rampant and before long, Frank's skin became badly infected by scabies. The Frank sisters were moved into an infirmary, which was in a state of constant darkness, and infested with rats and mice. Edith Frank stopped eating, saving every morsel of food for her daughters and passing her rations to them, through a hole she made at the bottom of the infirmary wall. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were eventually transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where they both died of typhus in March 1945. Anne Frank did not get to live for 16^th birthday due to typhus which had killed approximately 17,000 prisoners.

The story of Anne Frank shows how Jews were treated during the Holocaust, forced to wear yellow stars as an identity, which was all done on the saying of Hitler in order to get rid of all the Jews. Without the help of Anne Frank we would have never found out what Anne had gone through.