The search engine giant has shared a slide show of German-Dutch diarist Anne Frank on its search page on June 25, 2022, featuring real excerpts from her diary, which describes what she and her friends and family experienced in hiding for over two years.
Anne Frank and her family spent two years hiding in a secret apartment behind her father’s former office in Amsterdam. The Franks and four other Jews who were hiding with them were discovered by authorities on August 4, 1944. The only member of the Frank family who survived the Holocaust was Anne’s father, Otto, who later worked diligently to get his daughter’s diary published.
Google Doodle art director Thoka Maer created the doodles. The German illustrator has talked about her sense of responsibility to preserve the memory of the Holocaust as a major factor in the illustration process.
Who was Anne Frank?
Anne Frank was a German girl and Jewish victim of the Holocaust who is famous for keeping a diary of her experiences. Anne and her family went into hiding for two years to avoid Nazi persecution. Her documentation of this time is now published in “The Diary of a Young Girl”. She was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her parents were Otto and Edith Frank. For the first 5 years of her life, Anne lived with her parents and older sister, Margot, in an apartment on the outskirts of Frankfurt.
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Otto Frank fled to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where he had business connections. The rest of the Frank family soon followed, with Anne being the last of the family to arrive in February 1934 after staying with her grandparents in Aachen.
Franks went into Hiding After Jews’ Persecution
As persecutions of the Jews increased in July 1942, the Franks went into hiding in concealed rooms behind a bookcase (a place referred to as the ‘Annex’ in Anne’s diary) in the building where Otto worked. Until the family’s arrest by the Gestapo (Nazi secret police) on August 4, 1944, Anne kept a diary she had received as a birthday present, and chronicled her family’s life in hiding.
What was Anne’s Greatest wish?
The diary is also full of her inner life as a teenager, and she vividly describes all the routine, little battles that adolescents have to go through. It has become an important document in understanding what life under the Nazi Party was like. Otto, the only surviving member of his family in the Holocaust, returned to Amsterdam to find that Anne’s diary had been saved by his secretary, Miep Gies. He decided to fulfill Anne’s greatest wish to become a writer and published her diary in 1947.
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It was translated from its original Dutch and first published in English in 1952 as “The Diary of a Young Girl”. Since then, it has been translated into more than 70 languages. Over the time, the diary has become one of the world’s best-selling books, and continues to serve as the inspiration for several plays and films.
Anne’s Life story in Brief
Anne Frank was born in the German city of Frankfurt am Main in 1929. Anne’s sister Margot was three years elder to her. That time unemployment was high and poverty was severe in Germany, and it was the period in which Adolf Hitler and his party were gaining more and more supporters. Hitler hated the Jews and blamed them for the problems in the country. He took advantage of the rampant antisemitic sentiments in Germany. The hatred of Jews and the poor economic situation made Anne’s parents, Otto and Edith Frank, decided to move to Amsterdam. There, Otto founded a company that traded in pectin, a gelling agent for making jam.
It was the time when jewish were restricted everywhere
Anne felt right at home in the Netherlands. She learned the language, made new friends and went to a Dutch school near her home. Her father worked hard to get his business off the ground, but it was not easy. Otto also tried to set up a company in England, but the plan fell through. Things looked up when he started selling herbs and spices in addition to the pectin. On September 1, 1939, when Anne was 10 years old, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and so the Second World War began. Not long after, on 10 May 1940, the Nazis also invaded the Netherlands. Five days later, the Dutch army surrendered.
Slowly but surely, the Nazis introduced more and more laws and regulations that made the lives of Jews more difficult. For instance, Jews could no longer visit parks, cinemas, or non-Jewish shops. The rules meant to be followed, more and more places became off-limits to Anne and other Jewish families. Her father lost his company, since Jews were no longer allowed to run their own businesses. All Jewish children, including Anne, had to go to separate Jewish schools.
The Nazis took things further
Anne has to go into hiding in the Secret Annex. The Nazis took things further, one step at the time. Jews had to start wearing a Star of David on their clothes and there were rumours that all Jews would have to leave the Netherlands. When Margot received a call-up to report for a so-called ‘labour camp’ in Nazi Germany on 5 July 1942, her parents were suspicious. They did not believe the call-up was about work and decided to go into hiding on the next day in order to escape persecution. In the spring of 1942, Anne’s father had started furnishing a hiding place in the annex of his business premises at Prinsengracht 263. He received help from his former colleagues. Before long, they were joined by four more people. The hiding place was cramped. Anne had to keep very quiet and was often afraid.
Why did Anne keep a Diary?
On her thirteenth birthday, just before they went into hiding, Anne was presented with a diary. During the two years in hiding, Anne wrote about events in the Secret Annex, but also about her feelings and thoughts. In addition, she wrote short stories, started on a novel and copied passages from the books she read in her Book of Beautiful Sentences. Writing helped her pass the time. When the Minister of Education of the Dutch government in England made an appeal on Radio Orange to hold on to war, Anne was inspired to rewrite her individual diaries into one running story, titled Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex).
Anne Started Rewriting her Diary
But before she was done, she and the other people in hiding were discovered and arrested by police officers on 4 August, 1944. The police also arrested two of the helpers. To this day, nobody knows the reason for the police raid.
What happened to Anne Frank’s Diary?
Despite the raid, part of Anne’s writing was preserved: two other helpers took the documents before the Secret Annex was emptied by order of the Nazis. Via the offices of the Sicherheitsdienst (the German security police), a prison in Amsterdam, and the Westerbork transit camp, the people from the Secret Annex were put on transport to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. The train journey took three days, during which Anne and over a thousand others were packed closely together in cattle wagons.
How did Anne die?
There was little food and water and only a barrel for a toilet. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Nazi doctors checked to see who would and who would not be able to do heavy forced labour. And around 350 people from Anne’s transport were immediately taken to the gas chambers and murdered. Anne, Margot and their mother were sent to the labour camp for women. Otto ended up in a camp for men. Anne dies from exhaustion in Bergen-BelsenIn early November 1944, before her death she was put on transport again. She was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with Margot. Their parents stayed behind in Auschwitz. The conditions in Bergen-Belsen were horrible too.
There was a lack of food, it was cold, wet and there were contagious diseases. Anne and Margot contracted typhus. In February 1945 they both died owing to its effects, Margot first, Anne shortly afterwards. Anne’s father Otto was the only one of the people from the Secret Annex to survive the war. He was liberated from Auschwitz by the Russians and during his long journey back to the Netherlands he learned that his wife Edith had died. Once in the Netherlands, he heard that Anne and Margot were no longer alive either.
How did Anne Frank become Famous?
Anne’s writing made a deep impression on Otto. He read that Anne had wanted to become a writer or a journalist and that she had intended to publish her stories about life in the Secret Annex. His Friends convinced Otto to publish the diary and in June 1947, 3,000 copies of Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex) were printed. And that was not all: the book was later translated into around 70 languages and adapted for stage and screen. People all over the world were introduced to Anne’s story and in 1960 the hiding place became a museum: the Anne Frank House. Until his death in 1980, Otto remained closely involved with the Anne Frank House and the museum: he hoped that readers of the diary would become aware of the dangers of discrimination, racism, and hatred for Jews.
Why is Google showing Anne Frank’s Doodle?
Google Doodle on Saturday, 25 June 2022, has observed the 75th anniversary of one of world’s most renowned personal accounts of horrors of Holocaust, written by Jewish German-Dutch diarist Anne Frank. A Google Doodle is a special, temporary alteration of the logo on Google’s homepage intended to commemorate holidays, events, achievements, and notable historical figures of particular countries.
Google Doodle and 10 Facts about Anne Frank
1. “Anne” was just a nickname
Anne Frank’s full name was Annelies Marie Frank.
2. The Frank family were originally German
Anne’s father, Otto, was a German businessman who served in the German army during World War One. In the face of the Nazis’ rising anti-Semitism, Otto moved his family to Amsterdam in the autumn of 1933. There, he ran a company that sold spices and pectin for use in the manufacture of jam. When the family went into hiding in 1942, Otto transferred control of the business, named Opekta, to two of his Dutch colleagues.
3. Anne’s diary was a 13th birthday present. Anne received the diary for which she became famous on 12 June 1942, just a few weeks before her family went into hiding. Her father had taken her to pick out the red, checked autograph book on 11 June and she began writing in it on 14 June.
4. She celebrated two birthdays while living in hiding.
Anne’s 14th and 15th birthdays were spent in the annex but she was still given presents by other residents of the hiding place and their helpers on the outside world. Among these presents were several books, including a book on Greek and Roman mythology that Anne received for her 14th birthday, as well as a poem written by her father, part of which she copied out in her diary.
5. Anne wrote two versions of her diary:
The first version (A) began in the autograph book that she received for her 13th birthday and spilled over into at least two notebooks. However, since the last entry in the autograph book is dated 5 December 1942 and the first entry in the first of these notebooks is dated 22 December 1943, it is assumed that other volumes were lost. Anne rewrote her diary in 1944 after hearing a call on the radio for people to save their war-time diaries in order to help document the suffering of the Nazi occupation once war was over. In this second version, known as B, Anne omits parts of A, while also adding new sections. This second version includes entries for the period between 5 December 1942 and 22 December 1943.
6. She called her diary “Kitty”
As a result, much – though not all – of version A of Anne’s diary is written in the form of letters to this “Kitty”. When rewriting her diary, Anne standardised the entires by addressing all of them to Kitty.
There has been some debate over whether Kitty was inspired by a real person. Anne did have a pre-war friend called Kitty but some, including the real-life Kitty herself, don’t believe that she was the inspiration for the diary.
7. The residents of the annex were arrested on 4 August 1944. It has been commonly thought that someone called the German Security Police to notify them that Jews were living on the Opekta premises. However, the identity of this caller has never been confirmed and a new theory suggests that the Nazis may in fact have discovered the annex by accident while investigating reports of ration-coupon fraud and illegal employment at Opekta. Following their arrest, the residents of the annex were first taken to Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands and then on to the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. At this point the men and women were separated. Initially, Anne was housed along with her mother, Edith, and her sister, Margot, with all three forced to carry out hard labour. A few months later, however, the two girls were taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
8. Anne died in early 1945
Anne Frank died at the age of 16. The exact date of Anne’s death is not known but it is thought she died in either February or March of that year. Both Anne and Margot are believed to have contracted typhus at Bergen-Belsen and died around the same time, just a few weeks before the camp was liberated.
9. Anne’s father was the only resident of the annex to survive the Holocaust. Otto is also the only known survivor of the Frank family. He was held at Auschwitz until its liberation in January 1945 and afterwards returned to Amsterdam, learning of his wife’s death en route. He learned of his daughters’ deaths in July 1945 after meeting a woman who had been at Bergen-Belsen with them.
10. Her diary was first published on 25 June 1947
Following the arrest of the annex’s residents, Anne’s diary was retrieved by Miep Gies, a trusted friend of the Frank family who had helped them during their time in hiding. Gies kept the diary in a desk drawer and gave it to Otto in July 1945 following confirmation of Anne’s death. In keeping with Anne’s wishes, Otto sought to have the diary published and a first edition combining versions A and B was published in the Netherlands on 25 June 1947 under the title “The Secret Annex”. Diary Letters from June 14, 1942 to August 1, 1944. Seventy years later, the diary has been translated into as many as 70 languages and more than 30 million copies have been published.
Why did Anne and other Jewish had to suffer Hitler’s Cruelty?
As we all say that we are children of One God but unfortunately, we never apply it in our real life. Kaal Brahm, the lord of these 21 universes, has made us all enemies of each other by implicating us in religion, caste and color discrimination etc. Hitler’s cruel mentality was responsible for what was done to Anne and the other Jews because he considered Jews to be dirty and small.
In today’s time people consider science more than God. But everyone should know about spiritual knowledge along with other works of our life so that we can stop fighting among ourselves in the name of religion and castes and don’t consider others small. It is only by knowing spiritual knowledge we will know that we are children of one God and we are brothers and sisters.
Sant Rampal Ji Maharaj is Uniting Us
Sant Rampal Ji Maharaj is the only Saint in the whole world who is imparting true devotion on the basis of scriptures of all religions. With true spiritual knowledge, the world would come to know that Sant Rampal Ji Maharaj is establishing the era of peace and true knowledge so that we stop fighting over caste issues and religion. It is a humble request to all that please watch the auspicious discourses of Sant Rampal Ji and do read the Sacred Book Way of Living written by Sant Rampal Ji Maharaj and ensure your welfare and complete salvation.
