Anne Frank (1929 – 1945)
Annalies Marie Frank, better known to the World of Humanity as Anne Frank, was born on June 12th. 1929 and if we do not know the name of Anne Frank, we have not studied the complexities of The Holocaust in history. For far too many though, Anne is not seen as the quintessential guide to what we now recognise is The Final Solution of The Jewish Question, The Holocaust. Not everyone sees Anne in the same light, the vista of her presence obscuring the fact that she has awakened the World to what happened to 6,000,000 of her People for being Jews.
“..Monday June 5th. 1944 Dearest Kitty, New problems in the Annex.
A quarrel between Dussel and the Franks over the division of butter. Capitulation on the part of Dussel.
Close friendship between the latter and Mrs. van Daan, flirtations, kisses and friendly little smiles. Dussel is beginning to long for female companionship. The van Daans don’t see why we should bake a spice cake for Mr. Kugler’s birthday when we can’t have one ourselves. All very petty. Mood upstairs: bad. Mrs. van D. has a cold.
Dussel caught with brewer’s yeast tablets, while we’ve got none.
The Fifth Army has taken Rome. The city neither destroyed nor bombed. Great propaganda for Hitler.
Very few potatoes and vegetables. One loaf of bread was moldy. Scharminkeltje (name of new warehouse cat) can’t stand pepper. She sleeps in the cat box and does her business in the wood shavings. Impossible to keep her.
Bad weather. Continuous bombing of Pas de Calais and the west coast of France.
No one buying dollars. Gold even less interesting. The bottom of our black moneybox is in sight.
What are we going to live on next month?
Yours,
Anne M. Frank.
Even before Margot or Anne could be liberated by the approaching Russian forces, both she and Anne were removed toward Belsen. Here, and in this holding Camp where the utter chaos of death had replaced the organised structure of destruction, Belsen was also to become an antechamber to that hell which had always been Auschwitz and more certainly Birkenau.
In Belsen, Margot was the first to die, and she succumbed to the brutality of an intolerance heavily weighted against her. At sometime during the cold of February 1945, and this recollection of her death is contested and uncertain, Margot dies of the debilitating effects of typhus. Also, and while her Sister Anne died days later, their close proximity to each other, within the confines of Belsen holds them bonded together more closely and by more than their Jewish nature.
The very fact of that Jewish antecedence, which had condemned the Jews of all of Europe to destruction for them both their lives were delivered to this end. Both Anne and Margot Frank’s bodies are interred somewhere in a mass grave in Belsen, in a field where no marker can be erected to show exactly where either of them are buried.
The History of another time might pick an archaeological moment to seek them out and provide the DNA answer to where they should be finally laid to rest! Sadly, the Belsen Concentration Camp was finally liberated on April 12th. 1945 by the British Army, and far too late for Anne and Margot and the some 13,000 who had died as they lay.
