Review of The Diary of Anne Frank

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1.. Introduction

The Diary of Anne Frank might be the most famous personal account of the Holocaust. This was written in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, between 1942 and 1944. Anne was born in 1929. Anne’s father, Otto, had come from a wealthy background, but his family’s fortune was lost after World War I. The Franks, a Jewish family, moved to the Netherlands in 1933 in order to escape Nazi persecution.

Anne received a diary on her thirteenth birthday and expressed hope that it would become her one trusted confidant. She immediately began filling her diary with details of her life. Less than one month after she began documenting, Anne and her family were suddenly forced into hiding.

The Franks were relatively prepared, since they had been sending furniture and provisions to a secret annex in Otto’s office building in anticipation of the Gestapo.

While they were in hiding, the Franks used a radio to keep up with news from the war, and Anne frequently wrote in her diary about events that caught her attention.

The Gestapo finally arrested Anne and her family on August 4, 1944. Two secretaries who worked in the building found the books containing Anne’s diary entries strewed over the floor of the annex. The secretaries handed over the diaries to Miep Gies, an assistant in Otto’s office. Miep held the diary, unread, in a desk drawer. When the war ended in 1945, Miep delivered the diary to Otto Frank, who had survived the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anne died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March of 1945.

Otto Frank knew of his daughter’s wish to become a published writer. He reviewed the diary and selected passages, keeping in mind constraints on length and appropriateness ...

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...he Franks and the van Daans are fortunate enough to have made advance plans to go into hiding should the need arise, but they still know they are not completely safe from the Nazis. Their security depends on a good amount of luck and hope. Their fear grows each time the doorbell rings, there is a knock on their door, or they hear that there is a break-in at the office building. They hear reports from the outside world about their friends who are arrested and about non-Jews who are suffering from a lack of food. Anne knows that her family’s situation is precarious, and she spends much of her time trying to distract herself from this frightening reality. However, each scare does color her diary entries. She knows what would happen to her and her family if they were discovered, and this fear that permeates life in the annex likewise permeates the tone of Anne’s diary.

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