The Story of an Inspiring Girl: Anne Frank

Known for her published diary, entitled The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank was a girl that inspired many. Born in 1929, she was raised in Germany as a follower of Judaism. She had a sister named Margot, and the two bonded regularly. As Anne was getting older, a dictator named Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. The group he created was called the Nazis group, and their beliefs were bold. Even before Hitler gained power, Jews were discriminated against, mostly for religious beliefs. Historians concluded that Hitler had come in contact with these ideas in his youth and in his later years shared them with the public. He constantly persecuted Jews, seeing them as unfit to live with him and his followers. The Holocaust, or murder of thousands of people (Jews mostly), occurred under his rule.

As Germany was being led by a dictator, things were dangerous for many people. This would become the start of World War II and the Holocaust. Jewish people like Anne had limited freedom. The Anti-Semitic Legislation was passed in the year 1933. The Holocaust Encyclopedia stated that “During the first six years of Hitler’s dictatorship, government at every level—Reich, state, and municipal—adopted hundreds of laws,

decrees, directives, guidelines, and regulations that increasingly restricted the civil and human rights of the Jews in Germany.”

In July 1942, Anne’s sister Margot received a letter that called her up to a concentration camp. Rather than allowing her to respond to the call, Anne, Margot, and her parents Otto and Edith went into hiding in an attic apartment below her father’s workplace. Shortly after going into hiding, they were joined by Otto’s business partner and his family. To put the Nazis off, they made up a story of the Frank family seeking refuge in Switzerland. Life in the Secret Annex (as Anne referred to as her hiding place) was tense. They lived in fear of being discovered. That fear sprouted to reality, The year 1944 was the year the Frank family and their friends were discovered by the Gestapo (A secret state police). It is believed that an anonymous tipster revealed their location to the Gestapo, the tipster currently not identified.

In a concentration camp, Anne and her sister Margot died shortly afterward from typhus fever. Their mother perished from starvation in January 1945. Otto’s business partner, Hermann van Pels, was sentenced to death in the gas chambers. Otto Frank was the only surviving family member and soon left the camp.

Otto Frank worked endlessly to get his daughter’s diary published, and in the end, he did. One of the quotes I loved from Anne was, I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

Anne Frank was a girl of courage and ambition who explored the injustice of Hitler’s regime in her diary. Her words live on and she will always

be remembered in our hearts as well as everyone that died during this dreadful time simply because of their identity...