263 Prinsengracht

The Anne Frank House



We visited the Anne Frank House yesterday and I found the exhibit very touching. We were given a presentation of:

**Anne's History-she was actually German but her family fled to the Netherlands as the Nazis took power in Germany. Soon the Nazis reached the Netherlands. In February 1942, the Nazis began rounding up all the Jews in Germany and the occupied countries for evacuation to the East in what the Nazis called "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question."

**a tour of the Secret Annex-where Anne and her family hid for 25 months from the Nazis, along with the van Pels family and Dr. Friedrich (Fritz) Pfeffer, a dentist who was a friend of the Franks.

**details on the fate of the families-Hermann van Pels was murdered in the gas chamber at Auschwitz in either September or October 1944. Anne's mother died of tuberculosis (or starvation) in January 1945 at Auschwitz. Anne and her sister died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen Camp; the others all died from disease in various Nazi concentration camps to which they were transferred from Auschwitz. Otto Frank, Anne's father, was the only person to survive.

**and how the diary was discovered and published-Upon Otto Frank's return and discovery of his daughters deaths he was presented with Anne's diary from one of the people that helped them hide and who had accumulated what items the Germans didn't take after the raid. After alot of soul searching Otto Frank read his daughters diary and in the process learned more about a girl that he thought he knew completely. In her writing it was her wish to publish her writings upon her survival from hiding.