Anne Frank 2025

Summary

The History Chicks: Anne Frank 2025 – Detailed Summary

Release Date: May 14, 2025
Length: Approximately 1 hour

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1. Introduction

[00:00 – 00:52] Hosts Susan and Becky welcome listeners to "The History Chicks," introducing their deep dive into the life of Anne Frank. Susan recounts her visit to Amsterdam, exploring the attic where Anne lived and Miep Gies worked tirelessly to safeguard her. She sets the tone by quoting Anne: “What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it from happening again.”

2. Anne Frank’s Early Life and Family Background

[00:52 – 04:44] Susan and Becky detail Anne Frank's origins:

• Birth: Anneliese Marie Frank was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Hollander Frank.
• Family Business: The Franks were affluent industrial suppliers dealing in machinery, scrap metal, paper, and clothing—essentially recycling operations.
• Education and Upbringing: Edith sent Anne to the prestigious Victoria School for Girls, notable for its diversity, enrolling Jewish students despite being a Protestant institution. This decision highlights the family's progressive values.
• Parental Dynamics: Otto, a secular man from a wealthy family with international banking interests, contrasted with Edith, whose strong religious beliefs influenced their household. Their marriage, possibly more of a business arrangement than a romantic union, sets the foundation for later familial tensions.

3. Economic and Political Context in Germany Pre-WWII

[04:44 – 17:06] The podcast delves into the tumultuous landscape of Germany between the World Wars:

• Great Depression Impact: The 1929 stock market crash devastated the Frank family's international banking business, leading to economic instability.
• Rise of Anti-Semitism: Economic hardships fueled resentment towards Jews, who were scapegoated for the nation's woes. Susan explains the historical roots of anti-Semitism in Europe, emphasizing how Jews were commodified as convenient targets for blame.
• Nazi Party Ascendancy: Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party capitalized on public discontent, gaining significant political traction by blaming Jews and communists for Germany’s problems. Notable quote from Susan: “They are here to give the working man a fair chance. We are New Hope. We are here for Das Volk.” [24:01]

4. Otto Frank’s Strategy to Emigrate

[17:06 – 30:07] Facing escalating persecution, Otto Frank strategizes the family's escape:

• Job Opportunity Abroad: Otto secures a position with Opetka, a Dutch company, leveraging his international connections to move the family to Amsterdam.
• Family Dynamics: The decision to stay united, rejecting the offer to send Anne and Margot to England, underscores Otto’s commitment to family even as danger looms.
• Arrival in Amsterdam: The family relocates, settling into a community wary but initially welcoming. Anne and Margot adapt quickly, excelling in their new academic environments. [30:07]

5. Life in Amsterdam and Preparations for Hiding

[30:07 – 73:52] As Nazi influence spreads to the Netherlands:

• Increased Anti-Semitism: Despite the Netherlands’ relatively tolerant society, economic pressures and Nazi propaganda begin to erode their safety.
• Kristallnacht Aftermath: The podcast covers the devastating effects of Kristallnacht, highlighting how Jewish businesses and lives were destroyed, further endangering families like the Franks.
• Westerbork Transit Camp: Otto’s efforts to gather visas for safe countries falter as global borders tighten, leaving the family with limited options.
• Decision to Hide: Recognizing the imminent threat, Otto Frank collaborates with Miep Gies and other trusted employees to establish the Secret Annex, a concealed space within their office building designed to shelter the family and others.

6. The Secret Annex and Life in Hiding

[73:52 – 115:12] The narrative shifts to the harrowing reality of life in the Secret Annex:

• Living Conditions: The annex, a cramped 230-square-foot space, hosts eight individuals, including Anne, Margot, Otto, Edith, Peter Van Pels, and the Gies family. Strict rules govern daily life to avoid detection.
• Daily Struggles: Limited resources, constant fear of discovery, and interpersonal tensions characterize their existence. They rely on the Helpers—Miep and Jan Gies, along with other supportive Dutch neighbors—for supplies and information.
• Anne’s Diary: Amidst the bleakness, Anne begins writing in her diary, documenting her thoughts, fears, and aspirations. Notable quote from Anne: “A girl of 13 feels herself quite alone in the world... I am going to treat you like a friend.” [67:05]
• Maintaining Normalcy: Efforts to preserve a semblance of normal life, such as celebrating Anne’s 13th birthday with a projector for a movie night, provide brief respites from their dire circumstances.
• Rising Tensions: As time drags on, supplies dwindle, and the psychological strain intensifies. Anne's evolving relationship with Peter and her growing desire for personal freedom highlight her maturation amidst confinement.

7. The Fall of the Hiding Place and Deportation

[115:12 – 122:28] Tragedy strikes as the Secret Annex is uncovered:

• August 4, 1944: Based on an anonymous tip, Nazi officers raid the office building, discovering the annex. Trust breaches and intense scrutiny lead to the family's arrest.
• Westerbork and Auschwitz: The Franks are transported to Westerbork, a transit camp, before being deported to Auschwitz. Susan shares harrowing details of their train journey and the brutal selection process upon arrival.
• Separation and Suffering: Anne and Margot are sent to Bergen-Belsen, where they endure unimaginable suffering. Their mother, Edith, perishes in Auschwitz shortly before the camp's liberation.

8. Post-War Legacy and Publication of the Diary

[122:28 – 140:07] The podcast concludes with the enduring legacy of Anne Frank:

• Otto Frank’s Return: As the sole survivor, Otto returns to Amsterdam, devastated by the loss of his family. Upon discovering the preserved diaries, he resolves to honor Anne’s wish by publishing her writings.
• Publication History: The Diary of a Young Girl is published in multiple editions, with recent discoveries revealing previously hidden pages that offer deeper insights into Anne's thoughts and experiences.
• Anne’s Vision: Through her diary, Anne emerges as a voice of hope, resilience, and profound introspection, inspiring millions worldwide. Susan emphasizes Anne’s desire to write a book to preserve her experiences and legacy.
• Recommended Resources: The hosts suggest various biographies, documentaries, and literature for those seeking to further explore Anne Frank’s life and the broader context of the Holocaust.

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Notable Quotes

1. Anne Frank:
   “What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it from happening again.”
   [00:52]

2. Anne Frank:
   “A girl of 13 feels herself quite alone in the world... I am going to treat you like a friend.”
   [67:05]

3. Otto Frank:
   “There was revealed a completely different Anne to the child that I had lost. I had no idea of the depth of her thoughts and feelings.”
   [127:38]

4. Becky on Anne’s Diary:
   “It was her Kitty Wilson.”
   [105:36]

Key Insights and Discussions

• Family Dynamics: The Franks' relationships illustrate the strains and support systems within a family under extreme duress.
• Historical Context: The economic collapse and rise of Nazism in Germany provide a backdrop for understanding the Frank family's plight.
• Resilience and Hope: Despite the oppressive conditions, Anne's spirit and intellectual growth shine through her diary entries.
• Moral Courage of the Helpers: Miep Gies and others displayed remarkable bravery, risking their lives to help the Frank family and other Jews.
• Legacy of the Diary: Anne Frank's writings serve as a powerful testament to the human spirit and the atrocities of the Holocaust, continuing to educate and inspire future generations.

Conclusion

Susan and Becky wrap up the episode by reflecting on Anne Frank’s enduring legacy. They emphasize the importance of her diary as both a personal and historical document, urging listeners to engage with her writings and related resources to fully appreciate her impact on history and culture.

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Recommended Resources

• Books:

  • Anne Frank: The Biography by Melissa Muller
  • Anne Frank by Peggy J. Parks (Teen Edition)
  • Inside Anne Frank's House (Photo Book) by Anne Frank House

• Documentaries:

  • Dear Kitty: Remembering Anne Frank (Award-Winning)
  • Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution (Miniseries Documentary on Netflix)

• Websites:

  • Anne Frank House Virtual Tour
  • American Holocaust Museum

• Essays:

  • The Misuse of Anne Frank's Diary by Cynthia Ozen (New Yorker, 1997)

Final Thoughts

The episode serves as a poignant reminder of the fragility of human life and the enduring strength of hope and resilience. Through meticulous research and heartfelt discussion, Susan and Becky honor Anne Frank's memory, ensuring her story remains a vital part of historical consciousness.

Transcript

[Susan]

Hello and welcome to the show. During our coverage of Miep Geese, we presented the story of the events that were happening in the world at large, in the city of Amsterdam, and on a smaller scale within the lives, offices and homes of the helpers. Susan has in fact taken a pilgrimage to Amsterdam to visit the attic where Ann lived and Miep worked so hard to keep her safe. But since we cannot all be there in person, here is our Anne Frank episode from 2018. The story of what was happening inside the secret annex and in the hearts of the people who lived there. As Anne once wrote in her diary, what is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it from happening again. And now, without further ado, on with the show.

[Becky]

Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

[Susan]

And here's your 32nd summary. Once upon a time, though not so long ago, a young girl was given a birthday present, a notebook. And even though her own life was short and the times she lived in were turbulent, what she did with that notebook has provided inspiration for millions of people all over the world. The end. Let's talk about Anne Frank.

[Becky]

But first, let's drop her into history. In 1929, U.S. and Canada agreed to work together and divert water to help protect Niagara Falls. Acadia national park in Maine and Grand Teton national park in Wyoming were both established. Mussolini's government in Italy banned the use of foreign words by banning the letters J, K, W, X and Y. Mother Teresa began her work in India and Walter Winchell made his radio debut. The first group hospital insurance plan in the US was offered. Convicted of accepting a $1 million bribe, Albert B. Fall became the first US cabinet member to go to jail. Martin Luther King Jr Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Whitey Bulger, Barbara Walters, Grace Kelly and William Safire were born. And in 1929, Anne Frank began a very short life that would have a very long lasting impact.

[Susan]

Anneliese Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany on June 12, 1929, the second of the two daughters of Otto and Edith Hollander Frank. Mama was the youngest child in a wealthy family of industrial suppliers whose maiden, Hollander actually meant Dutchman, which I think is very ironic given her future home.

[Becky]

Her family's business was really interesting because they dealt in machinery, scrap metal, paper, clothing. They were processing plants. When I'm reading about this, I'm like, how do those all tie together?

[Susan]

Recycling. Gosh. There's some phrase that they used to say, where there's muck, there's brass, there's money in trash. And I think there is because this lady went to the best schools, the exclusive Victoria School for Girls, which was a Protestant private school which made a point of enrolling Catholic and Jewish students for diversity purposes.

[Becky]

And the fact that her Jewish parents sent her there. Now, they were practicing Jews. They had a kosher kitchen, they went to synagogue regularly, but they sent their daughter to a Protestant school, which tells you how progressive this family was.

[Susan]

And I'm sorry to say that we don't really find too much else about her childhood. There is a display on the Anne Frank website that that shows a few pictures of her at parties, at the beach. I think it was an significantly upper class lifestyle. However, she did work in the office for a few years.

[Becky]

Had to have something to do, I guess, during the day at least.

[Susan]

Well, so religion was very important to her. Unlike Papa, who really, until just at the end of the war, thought of himself as a secular person. Papa also from a very wealthy family. Mostly their money came from international banking. But another profitable enterprise was a company making throat lozenges from the healing iron oxide waters of the spa at Bod Soden. Okay. This is the family business that Otto Papa was in charge of. And the advertisements read like any snake oil medicine would read. Efficacious in Qatar of the respiratory organs, liver and stomach disorders and women's diseases. Which seems like a very high bar to clear.

[Becky]

That must have been a heck of a candy.

[Susan]

And is iron oxide not functionally rust? Oh, oh. Maybe rust is iron oxide, but all iron oxide isn't rust.

[Becky]

Ha ha.

[Susan]

That's as close as I can get to a real theory.

[Becky]

I it sounds it. I'm not science y but yeah.

[Susan]

Anyway, these were very popular. They still are. Made not by the same company. Taking the waters is still very popular, even in America. Ask me about the week I spent in the Sulfur Springs of Colorado with every Russian person in America. Maybe you can still smell me. That's all I'm saying about that. So the lozenge business, fabulous. But he's not there yet. Papa graduated as the only Jewish person in his class, in contrast to his wife, who went to a very integrated school. The good thing for Papa is he had an older brother. So therefore he had a little more freedom to be a human being. While he was growing up, he'd been able to travel widely. Spain, England, internships in banking and at Macy's, which seems weird until you realize he was BFFs with this son, the owner of Macy's. Oh, that clears that up. He lived in New York for several years. So he got an experience in the wider world. He networked with very powerful people, or at least their sons, and at parties, at social occasions, and probably could have made a very good life in the United States actually. But family, duty and of course love of your home come first. And after all those wild oats he sowed, he settled down and took up the reins of his work when World.

[Becky]

War I broke out. Of course it wasn't called World War I back then, the great one. He enlisted and served as a decorated officer in the German army. I repeat, he was a decorated officer in the German army. And in wartime he fought in France. And he was such an honest guy that when the war was over and everybody was going home, he stopped to return horses that they had, quote, borrowed for the war effort.

[Susan]

They're like, oh, I don't know. He was right behind us. What are you supposed to think when your son doesn't come home from war with everyone else? Oh my goodness. Well, all that independence had changed him a little. So flash forward to right after he got married. And he and his new wife did try for a couple of years to follow the tradition of Germany where one brings your new wife into your parents house like tradition demands. And they did try that for a couple years, but this arrangement was wearing on them. Grandma Frank was a personage, let me just say her husband had died. She took over the presidency of the bank at 45 years old with four children in the year 1909. Now I'm not sure, but I think it might be hard to live with a personage if you want to steer your own shit.

[Becky]

No, I definitely think so. And I don't know that it was a love match from the beginning for Otto and Edith. I mean, at one point he said that it was a business arrangement. There's no, there's no record of how they actually met or their courtship or anything. Just that they got married in a synagogue and honeymooned in Italy. But I wonder if that had something to do with it, you know, like added tension if you're not there, love wise and then you're living with this domineering mother in law. I can imagine it would be a pretty awkward situation.

[Susan]

Now that is actually a very controversial passage in Anne Frank's diary. A chapter that was redacted for many, many decades. All about how her parents marriage was not based on romance, but instead was based on an arrangement. An arrangement in which she thought her mother might have ended up the loser. In fact, as her father had been in love with someone else, and his affection had been thwarted. So her father redacted those chapters for many years and didn't want them out there, so they rented a house in the same town. Funny how things change. Frankfurt was disapproving of a man of 36 moving out of his mother's house. Not to mention you're leaving all these servants and the giant premises and frankly, good society to go live with teachers and government workers. Well, little Margot needs a yard.

[Becky]

That's right. She was born only nine months after they got married and they moved out to the burbs. Their new neighborhood not only had working class people, but it was Protestant and Catholic and Jewish. It was really integrated. And those were the people that they hung out with and they, you know, had their barbecues with and their kids played together. It was a very inclusive neighborhood.

[Susan]

I will say that Papa actually rented two apartments and connected them. So he's only 50% slumming.

[Becky]

Yeah, well, you hear apartment, and it was more like a duplex. They had enough room for their live in housekeeper, so that tells you how big it was.

[Susan]

Live in housekeeper. Put your back of your hand on your head. How will you manage? So this is the house that they were living in when their second daughter Ann was born. What? Good news. Yay. Followed by the extraordinarily bad news a few months after this that the New York Stock Exchange over there in the United States of America had crashed. The great crash of 1929. And what happens in New York does not stay in New York. The crisis reverberated around the world. And the family banking business, which, as you recall, focused on international financial transactions, lost 90% of its business nearly overnight. And you can guess what happens to the sale of fancy health lozenges when suddenly most of your clientele are worried about just putting food on the table.

[Becky]

Yeah, Germany wasn't in really good economic situation going into the Depression. They were already economically stretched after World War I, after the treaty of Versailles, when they got hit with so many fines. They did not have a lot of money floating around in the country to begin with. So when this happened, it made it especially bad, I guess is a good way to put it.

[Susan]

So rather than blaming oversupply and greedy, let's call it just fiscal mismanagement among the financial community and consumers in general. There began to be rumblings in Germany that the Jews were to blame for everyone's economic difficulties. The. The what? That's kind of out of left field. We're not sure where that came from, are we? Jews, huh? Jews. Okay, now we're going to direct you to some resources that cover this in more detail. Scholars of this time should know that, believe me, we're simplifying this and we want everyone to dig in for themselves. But we need to go into the Wayback Machine for just a minute to explain this odd leap of logic. Okay, overlay all of this. That maybe it's human nature to fear quote, the other people really like to be on teams and they even more like to be on the winning team. Also, in Europe since the Middle Ages, one of these others, called the Jews, had always been a convenient scapegoat for anything that had ever gone wrong. You always need someone to blame and it's painful to look at your own behavior and just looking at society. During medieval times, Jews were increasingly forbidden to practice any kind of regular occupation and were pushed into things like tax collecting. And due to the prohibition against Christians lending money with interest, Jews kind of naturally filled that hole in the market and were able to move into the banking industry. Well, being in a creditor and debtor relationship with your neighbors is always going to be a little uncomfortable and you're going to start to feel like that other class of people has great power over you. And also, you know, nobody really likes the tax collectors. Overlay on all of that. This increasing feeling that the Jews were the ones that murdered Christ. A sentiment in fact, which was not officially recalled until the 1960s. As far back as the triple digit years, kings, lords, municipalities would get to a point and then just expel the Jews, confiscate their property and distribute it. Mystical powers were attributed to them. They just became this larger than life, scary demon figure. And their association with the money professions led to the stereotype that they were greedy and avaricious and out to get you. There's really no winning. It's a vicious circle. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Those are just a few of the factors that contribute to the tension between the Jewish population and the societies in which they live. Throughout history, it seems like fast forward to World War I. Germany was trounced. I think we can say trounced. But rather than blame failed tactics or ineffective leadership, the army blamed. Would you like to guess I'm going.

[Becky]

To go with the Jewish people for.

[Susan]

Wrecking up everyone's morale by criticizing them. Okay, yeah, that's probably what happened. The press began bandying about the idea that Jews stabbed the Fatherland in the back, Even though over 100,000 of them, including, as we said before, Papa Served in the German armed forces during the war. And also they were only a small percent of the population. So don't they have great power to make us lose while simultaneously fighting on our side? I don't get it. That's not logical.

[Becky]

No.

[Susan]

Well, the world made Germany pay heavily for World War I. We talked about this and that Treaty of Versailles during our Jane Addams podcast. Many economists and analysts said the terms were too harsh. The Germans had to give away parts of their territory. They had to pay almost unimaginable reparations to the point where their economy was crippled. And they had to publicly admit that the conflict was their fault and they had ruined the world basically to stand before the world in shame. Who's responsible for this? Why are we Germans suffering like this? Oh, dear. So between World War I and World War II, a new fringe element of society, headed up by this right wing party called the National Socialist German Workers Party, for marketing purposes, pulled out that standard scapegoat again. Jews and communists, by the way, these people are not only 100% responsible for all of your troubles, but they're also actively involved in keeping the average German in economic dire straits. It's all their fault. And one charismatic speaker called Adolf Hitler could whip up a crowd like no other. Are you going to stand for this?

[Becky]

No.

[Susan]

Who do we Hate? You know, goes like that.

[Becky]

When you contradict the public Persona of Adolf Hitler with how he was in person, it always blows my mind that he got to the position that he did. I mean, he just had some innate ability to get people's attention and get them riled up because he was a mostly friendless oddball. He was a third rate street painter. He'd fallen in with this right wing German Workers Party and they thought he was such a good fit that they made him a spy and then elevated him to a mouthpiece position when they saw that skill that he had, that, you know, that speaking skill. So that just always blows my mind about Hitler.

[Susan]

They failed to take over the government officially, you know, by elections. And so they decided they were going to go ahead and try to take the government by force via a coup. This was about six years before Anne was born. So we're approaching our real story. The failed leaders were thrown in jail, including Adolf Hitler. Well, get a load of those wackos. They're crazy. The year before Anne was born, The Nazi party won 3% of the vote vote. Still not anything to worry about. Said people. 3%. Those are just crazy, disenfranchised people. They are uneducated they don't know what they're saying. And this good speaker is whipping them up for no reason. They'll go away. It's just a fashion.

[Becky]

Narrator. It wasn't just a fashion.

[Susan]

Right in the first election after Anne was born, they were up to 18% of the vote. That's six and a half million voters. They were able to put Nazi representatives in the parliament after the worldwide depression began. That was the trigger. Something was percolating. Something not good. Why'd we have to raise your taxes, Jews? Why did you lose your job? Jews took em. Why can you not rely on the government to provide relief for your family anymore? Jews? Seriously, does this make any sense?

[Becky]

No.

[Susan]

I know that scared people are easily led. And I assure you I understand when you can't feed your child. It's scary. And it seems crazy that increasingly people art hook, line and snickering this. I just am astonished.

[Becky]

Well, you shouldn't be. Because about this time, there's also. There's also an increase in media. You know, there's more ways to get a message out to more people faster. And there was very savvy media people behind Hitler creating this image. You know, putting him in pictures with dogs and babies. And he's one of us. He's just an honest, hard working, German loving nationalist who is looking out for your best interest. And that's the message that they're spreading around now.

[Susan]

Of course, Anne was too young to know about any of this. And the Franks lived in a very mixed neighborhood as far as religion went. There were Catholics and Protestants and Jews. That is about as mixed as you're going to get in 1930s Europe. I'm just saying.

[Becky]

Well, the family was so normal. Edith, you know, she kept baby books for her children and Otto was this doting father. He would come home from work so that he could play with the kids and he'd give them baths at night and tell them stories that had been handed down from his own mother. They called him Pym, which is so cute I don't know what it means. I was never able to find out why.

[Susan]

I don't know. How did I get the name Boop? It's the same exact situation where you have a nickname and it becomes your real name.

[Becky]

Wait, did you take German in school?

[Susan]

No, I only know dog German because my dad speaks to the dogs in German. But. And all of my siblings took German. I know.

[Becky]

I love your dad.

[Susan]

Well, and all of my siblings took German and we had German exchange students for seven years. But I was already at College by then. So I did not experience the German takeover of my house.

[Becky]

Oh, I was going to leave all the German words for you, but I guess maybe I shouldn't.

[Susan]

Well, and they're Dutch words, so I wouldn't be helpful at all.

[Becky]

That's. That's true.

[Susan]

So anyway, the kids are all playing together. All the neighborhood kids. They all went to school together. And just like now, I guarantee this is true for most of you. You make most of your new friends through parents of your child's friends. That happens in elementary school. I don't think it happens as much later. I'm telling you, from middle school. It is a wasteland.

[Becky]

If they're on sports teams, it's not correct. Yeah.

[Susan]

Notably, though, Anne and Margo weren't allowed to play with the landlord's own children because their landlord was a big fan the Nazis and thought that Jews had no business being citizens at all. Ann and her sister were growing up in a neighborhood full of kids running around playing. School, Regular childhood situation. Although I have to say that after Margot. Good as gold. Quiet. The personality explosion that was Anne came as a complete shock. And I think that happens to a lot of people. Your first child. I am such a good parent. Look at me and my house and blah, blah, blah. And then the second child comes and you have to lay on the ground. What have I done?

[Becky]

I know. Well, how many times have you heard parents say, if my second was my first, I'd only have one?

[Susan]

I know.

[Becky]

Yeah. Well, that was Ann. I mean, she had a little bit of a breathing problem when she was first born, but then she started crying. And she was so good at it. She kept it up for weeks on end. She wasn't sleeping. She was a really. Not the sweet child that Margo was. And that goes through their whole lives. Lives. It's really Margo, Margo, Margo, you know, poor Jan, man.

[Susan]

So Anne was forced to be the squeaky wheel because Margot was getting all the grease. That makes total sense. Well, the family moved to a smaller house in a more upper class neighborhood, maybe to move away from growing anti Semitism among the working class. Though Papa later denied this, that's what all the neighbors said in interviews, except.

[Becky]

For the son of the landlord. And he's like, oh, no, no, it wasn't the reason. Sure, okay. Guy that just stuck out at me. And it's all these people that defended, you know, people who obviously were extraordinarily anti Semitic, that I kept reading about them over and over again. And it just irritated me in the Worst way.

[Susan]

Well, when Anne was three, a scandal involving Anne's uncle and the family bank further ruined its prospects. It led to the family having to move in with grandma after all, to save money. The Franks are not alone. Almost everyone was feeling some degree of financial pinch. They had just had a bigger cushion than other people. And the rhetoric ramped up, demonizing the left, the Jews, the communists, someone else is to blame. On goes the drumbeat of that. And that same year, during elections, the Nazis got, brace yourself, 40% of the vote. 40. And that old firebrand from the failed coup of 1923, the whipper up of crowds. The clever public speaker, Adolf Hitler was nominated the Chancellor.

[Becky]

And the night he got elected, there was marches through the streets with torches. And he's screaming, just give me four years. You know, he's the only one that's gonna change Germany and he's gonna fix everything that ails it.

[Susan]

He had to rely on the support of sort of a coalition of the conservative factions of government who thought that they would have him under control because there was, in fact, a president. President Hindenburg. That name should be easy to remember. After all, that was ahead of him in the hierarchy. And, you know, the old crackpot thing, surely this is not a guy to take that seriously. And of course, behind the scenes, Hitler was like, they said I could never take power, and now that I have it, they think I'm not going to hold it. And I'll just come in with the narrator voice again, they were not right. Well, the Nazi party platform was against liberalism, against socialism, against the middle class, against the elite, against the clergy, interestingly, and above all, against the Jews. They were here to give the working man a fair chance. We are New Hope. We are here for Das Volk, which means the people. We love the people. We are here for the people. They're really there for just some of the people.

[Becky]

Actually, clergy makes total sense because the clergy put God above everybody else. Whereas Hitler and his band of Nazis wanted, you know, the Nazis to be above everybody else. They wanted complete power. And God would, you know, supersede that.

[Susan]

Oh, would thwart it. Well, Hitler himself had written, and I quote, no nation can rid itself of this plague called the Jews without recourse to the sword. It is a bloody business if that's not a direct omen through backdoor maneuvering and I don't know what all else. He was actually given, quote, temporary power, absolute power, functionally, for two or three years, and really there was no ability to oppose him. And when President Hindenburg Died when anne was about 5 years old. There was no further check on his power, and he moved to consolidate all power to himself. Absolutely, and not temporarily. Hitler was now the boss of Germany. Guess what happens? Freedom of speech. Over. He stripped power out of all other political parties and stepped up his rallies. Germany first blood, soil and honor. We must restore Germany's position in the world. He is still bent out of shape about the loss of face from World War I, as are evidently millions of others. But his political opponents weren't taking him seriously enough. You know, chuckling over their shoulder with their thumb. Look at this guy, this crackpot. He's gonna burn out. Nobody can take him seriously. He literally just called democracy a cancer on society. They're looking around with a big smile on their face. We're the society of philosophy. We invented kindergarten. This cannot happen here. It's happening. Unbelievably, not a majority, but about a third of the population bought it. And not only bought it, they poured chocolate sauce on it and ate it up with a spoon.

[Becky]

Even the people that were friends with the Franks said to them, you know, let's see what this guy can do. Of course, these are the Christian friends of the Franks. While Otto and Edith's eyes just got bigger and bigger and they're like, let's see what he can do.

[Susan]

But Papa and Mama are like, let's see what we can do. Oh.

[Becky]

Oh.

[Susan]

They began casting around for an exit strategy. This is the better safe than sorry department president Otto Frank. The problem was no foreign country would really offer you a visa without some sort of a job already lined up. Luckily, his brother in law recommended him for a post at his company, but it was in the Netherlands. Excellent. It was a industrial pectin supplier who wanted to diversify into the housewife market. Pectin. In case you're not domesticles, the history chicks, Goddess of the hearth. Pectin is a thing you need to make jelly. Or if you're a Brit person, it's a thing you need to make jam and not jelly. It is a very specific product. But the company called Opetka was really considering hiring Papa to transform their brand for the average housewife because they had the industrial market locked down. That's fine. Well, meanwhile in Germany, it's not just chanting and threats. It's not just torches and brown shirts anymore. The legal system is ramping up against Jews.

[Becky]

Jewish teachers were let go from their positions and the new ones that were hired were encouraged to not reward intelligence in Jewish students. And they separated them in classes Jewish businesses were boycotted with soldiers blocking entrances. Jewish law firms and Jewish doctor's offices were all boycotted and closed.

[Susan]

There were public book burnings of what they deemed to be anti German propaganda. Anything that was ever written by a Jewish person, any communist writing, including one of the books I read, pointed out a poet named Henrik Heine, who wrote, get this, Brace yourself. Wherever they burn books, they will also burn in the end, human beings in 1821. Whoa. Well, and. Oh, wait, okay, let me lighten the mood. Let me lighten the mood for just a second because I went down a rabbit hole right here, which I didn't expect to do. The play that that line is from is called Al Mansour. And that name struck me and I went back into my on the Prairie books.

[Becky]

Huh.

[Susan]

And Almanzo had said something to the effect with regard to the origin of his name, that it went back all the way to the days of the Crusades where a man named Almansor saved one of his relatives. And from then on, there had always been an Almanzo in the family. Well, he's the only Almanzo anyone can ever find, genealogically speaking, in his family. And the likelihood that it would have been all the way back to the Crusades are kind of not likely. But how likely would it have been for a well read person to read a play written in 1821 with a character named Al Mansur?

[Becky]

Oh, that's an interesting tie in because.

[Susan]

I'm kind of wondering. And Al Mansour actually was a Muslim who has seen that they are burning copies of the Quran during the Spanish Inquisition. So that is the context of that quote, that is the sentiment that is put into the ground in a plaque at the site of all the book burnings. It's a place called the Bebelplatz. And there is a book burning memorial that you look into a glass window and you see shelves of books down below street level. It's pretty amazing. And I will link you to an Atlas obscura post about the book burning memorial. Rabbit hole over. Sorry, I know. I was just like, wow, how far can I get away before I have to come back? So Papa made arrangements actually incorporating under his own name instead of being just a rep. And by December, most of the family were in their new home in Amsterdam. Because you gotta leave the little one with grandma while you're moving, I'm telling you right now.

[Becky]

Especially when that little one is Anne and she doesn't stop talking and she's extremely active, jumping all over the place, getting into everything. Yeah, she hung out With Grandma as long as possible.

[Susan]

Well, and Grandma stuffed her full of candy and toys and loved everything about her. And it was a win. Win. You know what I mean?

[Becky]

Completely. Completely. But they were able to see the writing on the wall and get out. Within a year of Hitler coming to power, they were gone.

[Susan]

Throughout this story, you will see that Papa is amazingly full of forethought. I'm wondering if he had been good at chess, because he is kind of thinking at all times a couple of moves ahead. I was always very amazed by, you know, luckily he had already, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, man, that guy is something else. So good. So in Amsterdam, and I like how they brought Ann to Amsterdam on Margo's 8th birthday. She comes home from school. Do you make your kids go to school on their birthdays? Because I don't.

[Becky]

Yeah.

[Susan]

What? Yeah, well, anyway, Margot was made to go to school, so all academic. She comes home and all of her presents are on the table. Plus, they've put little Anne in a tutu. Surprise.

[Becky]

Hooray.

[Susan]

I say, as an oldest child.

[Becky]

That'S how my. That's how my kid is when his college brother and sister come home. Because he just likes to think that he's an only child right now, until they come home. And then he's just grumbly.

[Susan]

Well, the house goes probably for your child, too, from this palace of quiet to bang, you know, slam. And then here's Ann wandering around the house. Everybody who's this age does this. It's not just Ann. Why the sky blue? Can I have a cake? Hannah has a new doll. I know it's dark, but can I go outside? It's not bedtime, you know, everyone has to lay down. And it should be no surprise that Mama enrolled her in school asap.

[Becky]

Well, yeah, she was very bright. She needed to get educated. And Margo had been in a normal school, but they. Normal school. I'm sorry. I'm not offending this particular type of school, I swear. But they chose a Montessori school for Anne for are the reasons that I'm sure you can explain.

[Susan]

Well, you know how I feel about Montessori. I talk about it on the show all the time. I went for a while. My son went all the way through sixth grade. It's just. It's good for independent thinkers. It's also really good for kids that like to move around. Especially good for boys, I'm just telling you. Most Montessori schools in Germany, however, had been shut down because they allowed the children too much freedom they refused to report how many Jewish students they have and they refuse to abide by Jewish quotas. So the government in Germany had just closed down the Montessori school. So they have been liberal in mind all over Europe, not just here in Amsterdam. But anyway, I know Mama was worried her five year old daughter's going to school in a foreign country. She doesn't speak Dutch, she's never been to school before. Mama looks around, gets her handkerchief, makes sure she's got a hold of it, gets ready to cry. Psych. Because Ann, within a minute, Ann finds a girl named Hannelee who speaks German and they're off like, bye, Mama, Have a good day. Don't embarrass me. I said bye.

[Becky]

And both Anne and Margo picked up Dutch very quickly. Edith struggled, you know, she's older, you know, old dogs and everything. I couldn't learn Dutch at this point in my life, that's for sure.

[Susan]

Well, it's hard to learn another language when you're a grown up person. And she had no duolingo. She had no. See, little kids get surrounded by the conversation all day. And if you're a housewife and you're kind of relying on other people in your neighborhood who are probably speaking German. So she just didn't have enough opportunity.

[Becky]

I think of all of them, she had the hardest time accepting that they had left Germany. She, you know, she really felt bad about leaving. You know, she left everything behind and moved to Amsterdam. And then Otto's gone at work all day and he travels and the kids are at school. Yeah, I agree with you.

[Susan]

So soon. Anne had a giant circle of friends and a couple of best friends, Hanne, Lise, which the Dutch couldn't pronounce, so they called her Lise. And that's how she appears later in the diary, by the way. So she had a friend named Hannelee and Suzanne and Anne and they were called Hannah, Sanne and Anna.

[Becky]

So cute.

[Susan]

Would they have been friends if their name hadn't rhymed? I just don't know.

[Becky]

I don't know. What about the Heathers?

[Susan]

Oh, that's true. Well, I do have one of these kids. You start a new school by the end of the day. He has all their Instagrams, you know.

[Becky]

Well, the Franks are settled in their new home in Amsterdam. This is a good time to take a break and when we come back we'll find out what happens to them in Amsterdam.

[Susan]

Something that travel has taught me, hauling this suitcase around that is 48.6 pounds. That is pretty dang close to the edge is that what I need to do is get myself to more of a capsule wardrobe I would like to have. And I'm working toward having clothes, a minimal amount of clothes with maximal happiness about them.

[Becky]

Maximal, huh? No, I agree. And they need to be higher quality so that they can last. I know I'm speaking for you here, but you buy them, they're really cute, but then they're not made well. Quint's items are made well. They're made in classic styles that you can wear year after year. I live in one of those houses where I have to switch my closets out when the seasons change. So I just brought out all my summer clothes and I have this Quince linen sleeveless swing dress that I wore all last summer. And I was so excited. It was like seeing an old friend. When I took it out of its container, I was like, yay, I get.

[Susan]

To wear this again. Man, linen is so good for summer, isn't it?

[Becky]

Yeah. And I was looking on their website, they have these Italian fisherman sandals, and I thought they were so cute. I remembered that I've seen these shoes for years. So I'm actually contemplating those because I know that I'll be able to wear them for years and years and years and years.

[Susan]

Quince's quality is incredible and everything feels intentional and curated on their site. And the prizes are shockingly reasonable. So I finally feel like, okay, I have a goal, and then I have a partner in reaching that goal.

[Becky]

In addition, you can feel good about buying items from Quince because they work directly with top artisans and cut out the middlemen. They give you luxury without the markup and only work with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices at.

[Susan]

50 to 80% less than what you'd find at similar brands. So treat your closet to a little summer glow. Up with quints. Go to quince.com chicks for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.

[Becky]

That's Quince Q-U-I-N C E.com chicks to get free shipping and 365 day returns.

[Susan]

Quince.com chicks so here we are all settled in in Amsterdam. This is a little societal thing that I really, really loved. If the little kids wanted to get hold of their friends to come out, they did not knock on the apartment doors because the mothers were driven absolutely batty by this. Their tradition was to kind of make up a song with your friends. Like a little special friendship song, like a friend handshake they might have now and then. You whistle it outside the window. Well, Anne can't whistle. She has a severe overbite. So it's. She had to yell it, which I. I mean, you might as well just knock at that point.

[Becky]

She's the only one that's yelling. You know, all the other kids are whistling, so it's just one kid that's yelling.

[Susan]

Well, the children's little world was a happy one. But behind the scenes, Papa was worn thin trying to start his business. He often had to hit the road to do sales calls. Their budget didn't run hiring outside salesmen to travel. The Franks were so worried about family that had been left behind in Germany. Germany had taken citizenship from all Jews. And you had to register if you were Jewish, half Jewish, quarter Jewish, even if you were related to Jews by marriage, you had to sign up in a book. Or were you a pure blood? That sounds, you know, Harry Potter, if you're familiar. Half blood, Muggle, born blood trader, you know. So much symbolism J.K. rowling has put in the Harry Potter Deathly Hallows book. No criticism of the government was allowed back in Germany, even by pure bloods. No contact between Jews and not Jews. Everyone was encouraged to inform on their neighbors back home in Germany. It was not good. Anne's uncle Walter was seized during a raid which has unfortunately become very famous. A raid on the Jewish population of Germany called Kristallnacht. It was a night of absolute terror. There was breakage, burning of synagogues, burning of businesses, beating of Jewish citizens. He was kidnapped, this uncle, with about 20,000 other men and sent to concentration camps which at this point were just tent cities to hold whoever the Nazis saw as aliens, to kind of break them, force them to self immigrate, to harass them, to sow fear. Not just the Jewish population. Artists, intellectuals, communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill and anyone who was disabled. Catholic priests were also often incarcerated in concentration camps. But you cannot give thugs, I. E. The guards of the concentration camps. Absolute power over helpless people. Things quickly turned into brutal, abusive places where the prisoners were tortured and killed. So Kristallnacht, as retaliation for the assassination of a German official, there was a riot unleashed all over Germany on the Jewish population with so much destruction and fire. And the German authorities told the fire department and the police departments to stand down, stand by and do nothing unless an Aryan building or an Aryan person was in danger. And then, and only then, could they intervene. The name Kristallnacht refers to the next day as the sun came up the shining of the shards of broken glass that littered each and every street in each and every city and village where this had taken place. 100 people were dead at least, and 20 to 30,000 men were sent to concentration camps and Anne's uncle was one of them. In addition, if you can believe this, the German government placed the fault for this entire affair directly on the Jewish population and demanded that they pay the equivalent of a 400 million dollar fine to compensate the government for the cleanup. I'm sorry to say that we are posting this near or upon the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, and I am wondering if it's going to appear on the news. So look around as you're listening to this, if you're listening in real time, and see if you can read us a little bit more maybe about Kristallnacht. It was a terrifying, not beginning of the Nazi horrors, but in fact happened in the middle. Things had happened before this, but it's the most famous thing that people remember.

[Becky]

Yeah. You know what struck me about this is that it wasn't. It was designed to look like all these little rising up of rebellions within Germany, like these little independent groups, but in actuality, it was a well coordinated and orchestrated evening of terror. You know what I'm saying? Does that. I mean, it's supposed to look like it's these independent people that all had the same idea at the same time, but in reality there's a puppet master that's controlling the whole thing.

[Susan]

Well, and you don't accidentally kidnap 20,000 people.

[Becky]

Yeah. And have a place to put them.

[Susan]

Yeah, yeah. So the common sense was not firing either. If they thought that was going to be something that people were like, really, how strange. That all happened at the same time. No, people knew. People knew.

[Becky]

Well.

[Susan]

And it was getting harder and harder to leave Germany because countries all over the world were slamming their doors on refugees. There's a catch 22. The Germans. You to leave. You want to leave, but no one will take you. Also, you had to pay the Nazis this huge amount of money for, quote, abandoning the Reich. It was just crazy. And all this buzz from Germany how the Netherlands were our Aryan brothers. The Dutch territory has been stolen from us back in the 1600s. Our cousins should join us. That's unsettling.

[Becky]

But there were still, you know, a great deal of Germans that were able to get out of Germany and into the Netherlands, including the Van Pell family, who went to work with Otto. The husband, Herman, he was a former butcher turned Spiceman And Otto was diversifying into spices. There were so many German Jews coming into the Netherlands that the Dutch built a kind of a resettlement center in the middle of the country called Westerbork. And it was actually financed by Jewish organizations as kind of a way station for refugee Jews coming into the country, you know, before they could be sent out to where they're have put a pin in that.

[Susan]

Well, the Netherlands were neutral or had been during World War I, but they're tiny and they shared a border with this big behemoth. And Dutch people as a whole were not anti Semitic. Jews had lived there for hundreds of years. Although I have to say, the new German Jews that have just come were not like the orthodox Dutch Jews that the Dutch were used to seeing in all their black, kept to themselves, who might nod at you, but otherwise didn't get that involved in society. These were, you know, middle class, upper class people that went to the same school as your child. They hung out. They were kind of just like them. Some of the new German Jews were so much like their Dutch counterparts, so secular that some Jewish families put up Christmas trees. So you're sort of safe here in the Netherlands, but not really daily life. Sure, whatever, but worldwide happenings? No, not at all. But the worry was there, you know, years before what we knew as currently the outbreak of World War II, Poopa was putting out feelers for a job in the United States, in South America, in London, he's trying to think ahead. All German Jews are combing the earth for a refuge and not finding one, said Mama. Austria went down, Poland went down. Of course, the Allies had had it. America declared war. Papa's cousin begged him, please send the children. If you won't come yourself, send Margot and Anne to live with me in England for the duration of the war. They can come on a visit their children, and I'll just keep them here. And he said, no, no, no, the family has to stay together. I've seen too much of this effect. All these children are here in the Netherlands without their parents because they all separated in Germany. And now nobody knows where anybody is. This family's going to stay together. Thanks, but no thanks. And then the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. So one day we're off to school, eating our chocolate bar, riding our bikes to this friend's house and singing outside. And the next, the air is full of German planes dropping troops dressed as farmers in fake Dutch army uniforms in civilian clothes all over this small country.

[Becky]

Anne later would say of that time, the good times rapidly fled. I mean, it was like, you know, a switch went off.

[Susan]

To add insult to this upcoming injury, for the next couple of days, the Dutch government mandated that all German immigrants were placed under house arrest. They're worried about collaborators, and no one hates those guys worse than us, said the Jewish community. But to the Dutch, it's like, no, all of you are suspect. A lot like the Japanese internment camps. You look like those guys. Please stay home. If only Papa had sent the girls to London. His regret must have been great at many points from now on. So the Dutch fought for three days, but you know they're no match for the giant German army. The city of Rotterdam, home of Heidi. If you remember the story of Heidi, which I love. I'm gonna go reread that. In fact, I was going through my mother's books and she had a copy of Anne's book that was still titled Het Actor House. And I thought that I was picking up that book to bring home as one of my things that I wanted to save from my mother's things. And in fact, it is a similarly hardbacked copy of Heidi. So I, I have that. But unfortunately, my mom' copy of Anne Frank's book is gone. It's been given away. So I do not have it. Somebody has it, but I do not.

[Becky]

Oh, dear.

[Susan]

So Rotterdam was bombed into submission. So much for being cousins. And the next thing the Dutch knew, there was a message from their queen, Queen Wilhelmina on a boat with the whole government headed to exile in England. It was dark days. Can you imagine the fear?

[Becky]

I know.

[Susan]

The queen left. She left. She's gone.

[Becky]

Yeah. So who's in charge now? Well, it's certainly not her and it's certainly not the Dutch government.

[Susan]

So the Germans are the bosses now. And I want to say was very weird. At first, the Germans did not crack down right away on. Well, they did on a couple of things. Jewish books in schools had to go right away. That was like a non negotiable. No more kosher butchers. Well, is that going to be the worst of it? Was it the cousin thing? People took tentative steps out into the world. Can we go to school? School, of course. Can we pass the German soldiers on the street? Fine. Hello. Good morning. Well, huh. You know, it's weird because there's soldiers everywhere. They're not doing anything. They're not even making faces. It was lulling you into a false sense of security is what it was. So Papa, in his very good chess maneuvering, had already diversified his business in case the Peckton business wasn't enough to float a whole family on. And it was, wasn't he had brought in this, the spice man, the butcher man. I imagine that place smelled glorious. Like wherever you have your spices right now, you should go smell them because that is what it smelled like downstairs in the factory.

[Becky]

Anne does complain about it later on in her diary about the smell of it. It always made them sneeze.

[Susan]

Well, I mean, it's airborne powder. If anything is going to make you sneeze. Well, and you probably can't smell it after a while. It's just dust, you know. Well, wholes, barrels of sausage, spices are downstairs. And. And he was smart and forward thinking in another way too. He had already put his company in the legal hands of some of his Aryan employees in case the Nazis came to confiscate Jewish businesses. Well, there's no Jews in charge here because they did come and they just rubber stamped it. Oh, hello, Dutch people that are not Jews. What a. What a nice smell in here.

[Becky]

You know, I think I'll have some sausage for supper. Yeah.

[Susan]

So again, all of this is kept from Anne. So here's what you know. If you' 11, the office ladies thought you were cute. They let you play on the typewriter. You could sing in a loud and horrible voice over their intercom when everyone went to lunch. That's what you knew about Dad's work.

[Becky]

Yeah, it was fun. And you could bring your friends with you and you could talk on the telephones. Ooh, I know it's a big deal.

[Susan]

Outside, though, it had begun. Jews had to register as Jews. Does that sound familiar? Suddenly, in addition to this, Jews were not allowed to go to movie theaters, which seemed very random. There was a Dutch Nazi terror group who raided the Jewish quarter and threw men in the backs of trucks and took them away. Like 400 men, just randomly. They happened to be in the wrong place when the trucks passed and they got taken from their families and taken away. Any Jewish man they came across by. To give them credit, the Dutch state a nationwide strike to protest this treatment of their fellow citizens. I mean, everywhere on February 25, everything stopped. No streetcars ran in shops, salespeople came out, waiters stopped serving, factories stopped working. The shipyards stopped going. Trains stopped running. Yes, all the machinery stopped all over the country in protest of this kidnapping. So you can give the Dutch people great credit for not standing for it. But the Nazis struck back, I'm sorry to say, with guns and grenades. They expressed their displeasure with great force. And the kidnapped Jewish men were sent immediately to a concentration camp. And only two of them ended up surviving the war.

[Becky]

That they even survived is a miracle.

[Susan]

So the Dutch people were on notice that playtime was over. You do not have the power you seem to think you have over what we choose to do.

[Becky]

All those lax rules, you know, it's no big deal. They were gone. Suddenly, Jewish owned businesses, the businesses themselves, not just the people, were required to register with the government. Jewish people were fired from working at universities and government jobs. They were banned from not only those movie theaters, but they couldn't give blood. They couldn't sit on park benches, they couldn't go to the beach. Just a year before, there is a photograph of Ann and Margot at the beach. And a year later, they're not even allowed to go there. And a newspaper printed as a headline, Our North Sea will no long serve to rinse down the fat Jewish bodies. How. I mean, that's how much. It's right there. You know, there's no hiding it at this point.

[Susan]

And seriously, though, Papa redoubled his efforts to get his family out of danger, even roping in that old scion of Macy's, the son of the owner, to try to get some kind of sponsorship to get them to America. But even that connection, friend of people in high places, connection couldn't get the family to America because even America was hardening its heart. The undersecretary of state wrote this. This is an American person. We can delay and effectively stop the number of immigrants into the United States. We can do this by advising all of our consulates to put every obstacle in the way and require additional evidence and resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone any granting of visas.

[Becky]

Yeah, there's no hiding it. If anybody could have gotten it, you would have thought it would have been Otto. He had not only lived in the United States, connected with the Strauss family, his friend Nathan, he actually worked in the Roosevelt administration. He knew people. He couldn't get there. Edith's brother and his wife lived in Massachusetts. All these people that could have sponsored the Frank family, they kept running into those roadblocks, and they. They couldn't get those visas for them.

[Susan]

The red tape is getting ridiculous. You have to sign up in person at an American consulate. Oh, we took all those out of your country. Country bummer. Well, you'll. You'll need to convince the Germans to grant you an exit visa. But if you leave any family members behind, we're not going to stamp your visa. Oh, my God. So everyone is being boiled in a Pot. And I always say it's lobsters because that makes more sense to me. But it's the frogs in the pot, right?

[Becky]

Yeah, it's the frogs.

[Susan]

So they just keep turning up the heat. Turning up the heat. All Jewish people need to put their money in this one bank. Bank. And you can't keep very much cash on you. That's alarming. All Jewish money is going to be in one place. That's a red flag. And as the school year approached, suddenly Jewish children were forbidden from returning to school. Separate facilities had to be scrabbled together after this surprise announcement. And Jewish children had to go to a whole other school. And the other children left behind. The Christian children were told nothing. Half the class is gone. Don't ask questions, said their parents. Don't ask questions. They were afraid of getting in trouble. Trouble. They were afraid of their little children getting them in trouble with innocent questions.

[Becky]

Oh, I think a lot of parents were trying to, you know, keep their kids as far away from all that. I mean, the Franks themselves were trying to make life as normal as possible. But in Anne's Montessori school, 87 children had to leave to go to the new Jewish only schools. Of those 87, only 20 of them would survive. The Holocaust cost.

[Susan]

My goodness. Well, the only person in her new school, in her class that ended up at the same place was Hana. So at least she knew somebody. Margot's best friend, who had blonde hair and blue eyes, ultimately registered for ballet school, was able later during the war to get a fake Dutch identification card and basically spent the whole war passing. That was another avenue that was available to her because of the way she looked.

[Becky]

Looked.

[Susan]

So Anne had at least one friend, and Margot was all alone. But here's Anne and her friends. Anne made a boy crazy friend named Jackie Van Moren, and I like the thought of them laying upside down on their beds reading their books and gossiping about boys and movie stars and leafing through their movie magazines. They loved to write and to read, and their favorite book was Jop ter Holy. Like Anne of Green Gables, I think, to perhaps a Canadian or an American or Laura Ingalls Wilder for Beckett Graham, a plucky heroine. I can't find this translated to English anywhere. And it seems like a shock to me that I can't find it. It's such a major part of Dutch folklore and life. And similar to the Anne of Green Gables book, it follows JoP, which I guess means Joseph. So it's a heroine with a boy's name who acts more like A boy, you know, and her adventures. It follows her through adulthood. There's actually a book called Yop's Daughter. So I can't find any of them and I want to read them. So if you know of anywhere I can read them in English translations, please send that along.

[Becky]

I had never heard of this particular series before, but Yopa herself was this very much like Ann. She wasn't the good girl. It wasn't a moralistic story. It was about a real kid who liked to get into shenanigans. And even more so, you know, you think about the other literary heroines that girls this age had. Jo March wasn't even as shenanigan y as Yope was and she had her friends. And it was just, I can imagine that Anne saw herself very much so in Yope, which I have always been saying. Joop, just so you know, it's j o o p.

[Susan]

It's summer and you know what that means. Traditionally it is smooth season.

[Becky]

Yeah, I started my summer skincare routine not that long ago and I've been using a Flamingo razor for years. So I start with that. The blades are inexpensive, it's sturdy, it hangs right in my shower. I love, love it. But this year I am following up with Flamingo's light hydrating spray. It's a lotion, but it's a spray, not a little pump. It's an aerosol type spray for this time of year. It's so nice because it's so refreshing and it's not thick, it's not sticky, it's just hydrating and it's a light, refreshing start to my smooth day.

[Susan]

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[Becky]

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[Susan]

Chicks that's shopflamingo.com chicks and now it really started. Clickety clack. Jews Forbidden signs went up at the zoo, public libraries, restaurants, unless they were owned by Jews. Theaters, museums. I just want to note here as we're getting hysterical. The similarity to Jim Crow laws against African Americans. Before we get much further, I'm going to ask the same question of both populations. What do you tell the children who are definitely noticing by this point, despite your attempts to keep them in the dark or in the light, I guess, is what you really want to keep the children in? You're going to live in the dark. What do you tell them? Why is this happening to them? You hardly dare to do anything, said Ann. In case it's forbidden. How. How are you supposed to know you can't sit on a park bench. I mean, you could do something wrong and get thrown in prison at any time. I am literally wondering just now, as I say this, were the Nazis inspired by the American South? I'm not even joking.

[Becky]

I don't know. Wasn't it happening concurrently?

[Susan]

Because since Reconstruction, though, those laws have been going off since, you know, the 1880s. Those laws, we talked about that during Ida Wells, more and more repressive laws about transportation and where you can sit on the bus and I don't know, it just seems like a worldwide strange phenomenon all percolating at the same time. I'm going to mark that for Rabbit Hole Investigations.

[Becky]

Future travels.

[Susan]

Yes. Well, on April 14, 1942, just before Anne's 13th birthday, the order came down that all Jews must wear a bright yellow star sewn to their outer clothing in a prominent place for easy identification. Ominous.

[Becky]

And it had to be sewn on, and it had to be worn anytime anybody from outside of the house could see them. So if they were standing in a window, they had to be wary wearing the garment that had the yellow star on it. Even in their own homes, if somebody else could see them, they had to wear it.

[Susan]

Some non Jews defiantly sewed yellow stars with that word yod J O O D, which means Jew written in black on their clothes to show solidarity with their Jewish neighbors. That is admirable. But when discovered, they were sent to a concentration camp for a couple of months. It is not a joke. We don't appreciate that people became so afraid, even show their support, to even really talk to Jews, most of them. I mean, there's brave people among us. There's always the brave. But for the vast majority of you, you just want to put your head down. It was starting to divide the Jewish people from their neighbors, which was exactly what it was supposed to do. No Jews could now ride public transportation. No non Jew was allowed to give a Jewish person rides. And the police could tell from outside now that you have to wear the stars. All Jews were required to register their bicycles right afterward. They were all confiscated. More on that later. It's almost as if the Nazis were preventing them from leaving. Making them easier to catch. You have to be off the street by 8pm you're not allowed ultimately on your own balcony. You're not allowed in your yard. After 8pm they were beginning to restrict.

[Becky]

How much valuables they could have. Jewish people couldn't own more than a wedding would. A pocket watch and four pieces of silverware per person in the family. That's pretty strict.

[Susan]

Well I wish we could go outside is all we hear from Anne and her friends. They had one place left they could go. There was a Jewish owned ice cream shop in the neighborhood. I would just like for you to imagine the terrifying balance that Jewish parents had to strike between wanting to give their child the freedom to go to that ice cream store. Store. Think about that. And the danger of like all these teenagers and you know, teenagers are not so full of common sense. Are all at the one ice cream store. Everybody knows they're there. Everybody knows they're Jewish. I can only imagine how terrifying that was. Anne loved it though. Loved it so much that she broke curfew once and came home and she got such a frightened talking to that she was never late again for curfew.

[Becky]

Well she's lucky that that's all that happened to her. Both girls did have pen pals in the United States which kind of blows my mind too sending these letters to these girls. They were in the same family in Iowa and the letters kind of casually talk about all these restrictions that are coming down. And then the return mail. The letters from Iowa just sound like everyday, you know, girl stuff. How surreal that would have been to have those letters. They've been published. Weird.

[Susan]

I think it's a very good window into history. Like when people write things and they don't intend for anyone to ever see them. It's. It's interesting to me and I'm so glad no one put them in the fire like so many letters. So Papa and Mama have already proven to be no slouches in the anticipating departments. Papa has already outwitted the Nazis by shifting his company into Aryan management with the help of his sympathetic and loyal workers. And for almost a year now those very same employees had been fortifying a hiding place. Ferrying out personal possessions of the Franks out of their house. House. Going to dinner parties and leaving with the dinnerware until visiting had been prohibited. And then they started stocking food Supplies, blankets, anything they could think of in this hiding place. At great risk to themselves, they had been asked, would you be willing to help us materially, personally, you know, with your body, with your actions? Will you help hide us? And all the office staff said they were in. Sign us up. No problem. We're there for you.

[Becky]

Really? Without hesitation.

[Susan]

Yeah.

[Becky]

He must have been such a. Not a nice guy, a personal guy, a guy you can, you know, you meet these people that you fall in love with immediately. You know, I imagine him as being that person and a very fair person to work for. And he hired the right people because you were, you've been saying, you know, he could see ahead. So he was very shrewd and he was a good reader of people. So he knew the kind of people to hire, hire that he was going to be able to trust.

[Susan]

I know one of them, the only one you've probably ever heard of. Meep Geese is her married name, which is easier to say than her maiden name. I'm just gonna go with Meep Geese. Even Meep Geese said that she felt so valued by her boss, he listened to what she had to say. Even though she was a lowly office worker, he would listen to her. I mean, note to self, if you're going to be a boss, you never know when you might need someone. So you always want to be nice to people. It just seemed like it was part of his inherent personality.

[Becky]

Mm. And Miep and her husband Jan, they became, you know, family. You choose, you know, they would dine at each other's houses. The Frank family went to their wedding.

[Susan]

So Anne's 13th birthday came around and. Oh, my, two teenagers in the house now. No good. No, I'm just kidding.

[Becky]

No, because one of them is Margo. Margo, Margo. She's fine, she's fine. She's quiet and very intellectual. And Otto had even hired a German literature tutor for her so that she could keep up on things that she might have been getting in her Jewish school. She's very smart. Smart girl. Margo. Margo. Margo.

[Susan]

Okay, well, here's Anne, who's invited half the world over to their house. Now, keep in mind, only Jewish people can come over at this time. Whatever. We've got 30, 40 of them, we'll bring them over. There were flowers and snacks. I think it's really nice that 13 year old girls bring flowers to each other for a gift, by the way. They were going to see a movie. They hadn't been able to see a movie in a long time. Rin. 1010. Papa got a hold of a projector and a screen and they were going to watch it in the living. Which was. I mean, we watch movies in the living room all the time here. It's no big deal. But think about if you're around in the 70s, if somebody had a movie projector in their house. That was big stuff. And this was years before that.

[Becky]

So yeah, I'm sitting here wondering, I know what movie that I flashback to as a child that I would have loved to have seen in my house. Okay. It was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Can you imagine seeing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in your house? I wasn't 13.

[Susan]

I have never seen Chitty Chitty Band Bang. Dang. Maybe I should see if it's on Netflix.

[Becky]

Pretty Chitty Bang Bang, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, we love you and our pretty Chitty Bang Bang. Sorry, is it a car?

[Susan]

Like a purple.

[Becky]

Chitty Bang Bang is a car? Yes. It goes from being a car to like a plane.

[Susan]

Is this the same one where they turn the knob at the head of the bed and they transfer themselves everywhere?

[Becky]

Yeah, no, that's bedknobs and broomsticks.

[Susan]

Oh, I've seen that one.

[Becky]

But this one actually has Germans in it. Now that I'm thinking about it, I haven't seen it in years. Yeah, I believe there's Nazis in that movie.

[Susan]

Well, and also Sound of Music. When I saw it as a little kid, I just thought, oh no, bad guys. Like I don't know. And then we'll go walk over the mountain.

[Becky]

We'll be safe.

[Susan]

And I didn't understand when I was little that they were walking over the mountain for their life.

[Becky]

I know.

[Susan]

So it was a big draw that movie. If there had been Pinterest, by the way, in this time, Mama would have had a board called Party Time. Because Mama was good at throwing parties. Even grown up parties too. She had book clubs. Unlike years gone by, Mama and Papa did a lot of entertaining as long as they could. Until things got pretty grim. Back to Anne's birthday party, though, among other things, Anne got the present she wanted that she'd pointed out to Papa the day before. That's what happens at 13. It was in her case, a nice red and green checked autograph book with a lock that Anne was planning to use as a diary. Out of such small moments, history is born. Her first entry in the diary was all about her birthday party and the new cat that her parents had gotten. I guess it's kind of to smooth the way like that's one thing you could still have, is a pet. Oh, and they had bought the cat special to kind of cheer up their children because they couldn't go anywhere. They couldn't do anything anymore, go outside. And so they had a new cat. And then her second entry is a lot of biographical information. Family history. My mom's this, my dad's this, followed by this is pretty serious. A girl of 13 feels herself quite alone in the world. I have people I call friends, of course, boyfriends, more than I can count that always try to look at me through mirrors, like whatever. Relations, of course, that are quite dear. But no one to whom I can bring out the things dearest to my heart. I am going to treat you like a friend, she said to her diary.

[Becky]

I love that.

[Susan]

Well, later in June, the Occupiers issued an edict that from now on, all Jews from the ages of 16 to 40 were now eligible to be called up for transportation to labor camps in Germany. Germany. This sounds like the Hunger Games. Your name goes in the hat when you turn 16 and you're eligible to be picked until you're 40. 350 people a day were to go. A day.

[Becky]

It was sold to them, like they were just going to go out and work to help the country, you know, it wasn't going to be fun, but they could bring all this stuff. They had packing lists, like when you go off to camp. But the problem was that nobody ever came back.

[Susan]

Not much later than this. I mean, less than a month later, Mama opened the door to a messenger with a fatal news note. Margot had been called up and was supposed to report to the Central Office for Jewish Immigration with her id, this whole list of supplies and all her ration cards. And of course, Mama's heart sank. She knew what this meant. Things had just gotten real, real quick. Mama told her daughters that it was Papa that had gotten the letter, although he was older than 40. I guess they didn't question that. And she left to get some things in motion. Panicking, of course, but you got to keep it all inside. Because if you run on the street and you have a star on, what attention are you going to attract? Not good attention. They had been. Thank you, preparedness department. They had been prepping for this, rehearsing for this, which is very good, actually. This is only a week ahead of when they were going to do this in the first place. But it had just gotten kind of an acute element to it that there hadn't been before. They had even put about rumors that a business partner had managed to get them into Switzerland. They'd even said goodbye to people and cried. I mean, the fiction was in Place. Within 12 hours, we were in business. They had packed a tiny, tiny satchel in one case and in Margo's case, almost like a little book bag. Margot and Meep, one of the office ladies, took off on bicycles toward the hiding place as if they were office ladies just going to work, enjoying the weather. Margot was not wearing her star. That was scary, scary, scary. What if she'd been caught? If she'd been stopped, if a car had hit her, if a soldier had liked the cut of her jib? You know, anything could have happened that they would see her ID card that said J on it and she would have been in the biggest amount of trouble. Also, Papa had had the forethought not to register the family's bicycles, although Anne's got stolen. Of course it did. So they did have one unregistered bicycle left and Margo was riding it. So really, the evidence to the average soldier is, oh, look, a Dutch lady riding down the street. She didn't have a star and she had a bicycle. Two things that didn't go along with a Jewish person running from conscription.

[Becky]

You? Yeah, and a friend. I mean, it wasn't just. It was her and Miep riding down the street.

[Susan]

Yeah, so that was good because they played to the prejudices or the presumptions of the soldier on the streets. So Dad's very smart.

[Becky]

Otto had already, as part of their pre plans, written to his mother and to Edith's brothers, hinting that they would probably be going to Switzerland that morning. He left a note implying the same thing so a lodger could find it. You know, just, oh, look, here's a note that says they're going to Switzerland. Edith had even gone so far as to jot down the address of a German officer that Otto knew so it would look like they had gotten some help to get to Switzerland.

[Susan]

And they also left the house a total wreck, as if they had been panicked at the receipt of the letter and ransacked their house and left in the night. So they made sure not to make the beds. They left all the dishes in the sink, they left all the closet doors open and shoes and crap were just strewn all over the floo to kind of add credence to the fact that they had done a runner in the night without really thinking about what they were doing. Why would the Germans think this plan had been in effect for over a year when faced with all this other Evidence. See, they were doing it again, trying to play on the presumptions of the people that were gonna find this.

[Becky]

Ianne had packed her own bag. She had thrown curlers and a handkerchief, books, a comb, a few movie star postcards that she had collected. And of course she put her diary in the bag. But it wasn't like a travel bag. It was just an knapsack so it wouldn't look out of place for her to be walking down the street with it.

[Susan]

And they put on so many layers of clothes that they were like a sweaty, sweaty beast when they got to where they were going. And they had to walk, since they couldn't take any public transportation. They walked for about an hour and they had to be casual and they had to stop often to talk and point and act like it was just any other day. It was so stressful. Think about how stressful that is and knowing what you're going to I. E. Hiding and trying not to let that show I on your face. Papa later slipped in alone. And everybody, one by one went up the stairs to this suite of rooms on two floors at the back of the office building. Almost a hidden, ready made separate apartment on two floors. And Papa had taken the precaution during this previous year to have a working toilet, to have running water, a functioning kitchen. He'd left no stone unturned with regard to this hiding place. And we'll post a picture of. It's impossible to really show you via talking about it. The. The layout.

[Becky]

It was only the whole thing. 230 square feet. That's it.

[Susan]

The lower floor just had two rooms and the biggest one was only nine by 15. I'm in a bigger room than that right now. And a bathroom on that floor. And then upstairs again was one bigger room. And then a tiny room about the size of a bed. And then an attic that you really couldn't use during the day because it was over the warehouse space downstairs. So feel feet, steps. You couldn't go up there except at night. So do we count that in the square footage? I don't think so.

[Becky]

No. I don't think that was counted.

[Susan]

So they walk in after their emotional journey in everybody's case except Papa seemed to take it all in stride because after all, he's just going to work. I mean, he was just as scared as everywhere else. But he didn't have to do anything different than he normally did. So it was all routine as far as outside was concerned. Well, everything inside, let's just call it Higgledy Piggledy everything and just dropped everywhere. You know how it is with a box room. You know, I'll just shove in this other box. I'll go in as least far as possible and just set it on top of this other thing.

[Becky]

Well, even when you move, you know, you just throw all your boxes into your new house and then figure it out later at the beginning. Those first few days, Ann and her father were the tidy ones of the group. So they just got busy. They had to keep moving. And what they did is they unpacked, they got everything clean, they washed floors, they sewed strips of fabric together to make curtains. So not only could nobody see in, but they couldn't see out either. They just put everything away and got it ship shape while Margot and Edith were just kind of sitting there crying, you know, not sure what to do. I think Otto and Ann just were those people that have to keep doing something. Yeah, those people are good to have around when you're moving. You know, I don't think we mentioned this before, but one of the other things that Miep and Jan did is they were doing runs from the Franks house to the annex with clothes on of the Franks. They put on as many clothes as they could get and take them back over to the annex and then come back and do it again. Amazing people. These are to make sure there's clothes there waiting for them.

[Susan]

Oh yeah. We did talk about the dinner plates and the food in the pockets and everything, but I had forgotten to mention that they also did the clothes. The clothes run. Yeah, they're very brave. They went above and beyond in so many ways. Just wait for that. Papa had a surprise for Ann, unbeknownst to to her, and she couldn't fit it all in the bags. Papa had chosen to bring with him a whole bunch of her film star pictures. He said it's important to make this place feel like home for you. We might be here a couple of months, he said. And so there were pictures of the British royal family were up there. She had pictures of Deanna Durbin was another one of her favorites. And also lots of pictures of famous arts.

[Becky]

And you know what, her father, in addition to doing all these other things, he made sure that there was glue and a brush so she could put them on her wall. How sweet. So that's what she did. She decorated her space just like a dorm room. And she actually said, quote, I don't think I'll ever feel at home in this house, but that doesn't mean I hate it. It's more like being on vacation in some strange pension, the annex is an ideal place to hide in.

[Susan]

Even later, I was watching this documentary where Meep Gase was walking you through the rooms and she said that was the only decoration that there ever was in that place. No pictures had ever put and put up on the walls. Nothing but what Anne had put near her bed. I just think everyone else, and Anne, I mean everyone else was just thinking this was a very temporary thing. They weren't going to waste any energy making it their own. They would not be here long enough to make that make sense. But of course the child had to be appeased. So she was the one that got to put all the stuff up. Well, another family joined them. Mr. And Mrs. Van Pels, he of the butchery and the spice expiration expertise. One of the employees and their teenage son, Peter. Peter is how they would have said it. Who would have. The upstairs. The. The big room upstairs had to do double duty as not only the Van Pel's bedroom, it had to be everyone's hangout room, because that's where the kitchen is and that's where you could be the loudest and walk around without fear of people hearing you, because there was a floor in between you and anyone that was still there. So in the Van Pel's defense, even though they became kind of intolerable, they had no space to call their own. Everyone was always in their bedroom.

[Becky]

That's true. The wife, Auguste Van Pels, she brought something with her. She brought her chamber pot. She was so proud of it that she had brought her chamber pot to the annex. That was her main contribution. They had so many rules, you know, during the day they had to try not to move around or talk. They had to wear socks so nobody downstairs could hear anything. They could only flush the toilet. And at night. So not only did that chamber pot, but some canning jars came in handy during the day to take care of that business.

[Susan]

All the office workers and the warehouse manager, who was the father of one of the office workers, were in on the secrets. But the warehouse workers were not in on the plan. And they were the monsters under the bed. They were the ones everyone was terrified of. And I don't know if you've ever seen pictures of Amsterdam, but the houses do not have the nice strip of grass of 12 to 12, 20ft in between them. They sometimes share a wall. So you're not only worried about the people downstairs, you're worried about the people on either side of you. Luckily for them, only the very, very poorest people would ever live in a district like this. And most of the neighbors were just businesses or warehouses or industry. And there wouldn't be anyone there at night, which was kind of lucky for them. But you couldn't be complacent about making noise at any part of the day because you never knew who was going to be able to hear you making.

[Becky]

Noise and staying away from the windows. So not only is is Ann and everyone trapped inside, but they can't even really look outside. And the only time they can is at night. One of my favorite times of day is at the the end when I go into my bathroom, I put on my pajamas and I wash my face and it's kind of like I'm taking off all the gunk of the day on my face and putting on my nighttime face and going to bed. It tells my body it's bedtime. And it's not really just about cleansing my skin or removing makeup, which I don't really wear a lot of, but it's about resetting it and resetting my psyche, quite honestly. And now OSEA has a new way to do it with their Ocean Wave Cleanser.

[Susan]

We just got back from Paris and one of the things we we noticed when we were there is the importance primarily of nice, clean, healthy skin. And Ocean Wave Cleanser has become a staple in our skincare routine. There's no greasy after feel. If you had told me in the 80s that I would be cleaning with a cleansing oil, I would have thought you were mad and crazy. But this oil leaves your skin skin soft, not stripped. You know that squeaky clean, squeaky clean is not that good for you.

[Becky]

No, it's not.

[Susan]

Despite its image, it's lightweight oil and it just melts and the scent is like, it's herbal and citrus and it feels fancy. And what a nice psychological boost that is for the end of your day. You're like and seen.

[Becky]

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[Susan]

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[Becky]

And right now we have a special offer just for our listeners. Get 10% off your first order sitewide with code [e-mail] that's O S E.

[Susan]

A Malibu.com Foreign of course, the office worker that we are the most familiar with would slip in at some point during the day to get the grocery list. And at this point, it was still relatively easy to get whatever you needed in the stores, as long as you had ration cards and sympathetic aesthetic merchants. A fruit and veg man, the dairy, a baker, also a butcher, they kind of knew the deal. They knew they were supplying some kind of hideout, and they didn't quail at it. One of the grocers, in fact, the fruit and veg man, was hiding a couple of Jews himself. He would deliver these giant bags of potatoes to the office during everybody's lunch hour. And the office ladies would shove them, like, wrestle them into a closet so that the men folk upstairs could retrieve them at night. A Dutch resistance group was providing fake ration carts. And Miep's husband, Jan Gies, traded the Franks and Van Pels's ration cards with that J on them for clean ones for the merchants to turn in, you know, so they don't get cheated out of their money. And he wasn't just doing the Franks. He was working with other Jews all over the city. And after a while, of course, the ration cards stopped. He had to develop a reputation quickly, like, I'm really doing this. I'm not a profiteer. I really have Jews in my care to this service. And they would give him those fake ration cards. There were 30,000 hidden Jews within the cities in one estimate, being helped in various ways by neighbors and friends. And so this resistance really sprung up, this whole underground of Dutch people who put themselves in peril to help the Jewish population.

[Becky]

You know, another thing that Otto had done ahead of time was make sure that Miep had gone around to all the. The merchants that she was going to be shopping at so they would know her face before they went into hiding, long before. So she. It became. Seeing her in that area became commonplace. So it was no big deal. He thought ahead on so many details.

[Susan]

Well, another inhabitant came to live with them, a dentist friend of Meeps who is a Jewish man whose wife, slash fiance I'm not very clear about that, was lucky enough to be out of town, out of the country when all this. This went down. So she was separated from him, and he had nowhere to go. They said, well, seven people are here. I can't imagine eight people will be in more danger than seven. Please allow him to come. It's fine. And so they accepted an Eighth person into their hideout. And I think it is so weird that rather than have him bunk up in the big room upstairs, they put him in with Anne.

[Becky]

Yeah, I never understood that either.

[Susan]

And had Margot moved? That is the clearest indication that I can think of that they thought she was still. Still a child. Oh, and not worthy of privacy, I guess. And then it was like Battle Royale about the table. The whole rest of the time they were there. Mr. Dentists. She actually gave him a name that in German means fool. The whole. The whole diary, she called him Mr. Dosel, and that means, like, lunatic or whatever. And didn't call him by his real name. They did a good thing, but really at their detriment.

[Becky]

One of the things that really surprised me is the bookcase. The moving bookcase that's at the bottom of the stairs. Everybody knows it. You know, fault and their stars. They move the bookcase. It's infamous. I guess it wasn't there originally. It was put in weeks after they had moved in by Miep's father, built the bookcase, and they stuffed it with old files to make it look like it was always there. But it was on hidden hinges so it could swing out and work as a doorway to the annex.

[Susan]

And that was so smart because you know what? You can't just have a random doorway. People are going to open it. That was very smart to think about that. I kind of want one of those, too. Where you. You have a hidden room in your house?

[Becky]

My father had built one on one of our closets in the house I grew up in. It was very cool. We would hide in there. Except one time, my brother and his friend were in there and they decided it would be a good idea to light matches. I know. They got caught. The friend was not allowed over at the house after that ever again.

[Susan]

Oh, no.

[Becky]

Yeah, that was bad, bad, bad.

[Susan]

In the mornings, Anne and Margot and Peter did lessons. History and literature were Anne's favorite subjects. She hated math. And I have to tell you, Montessori schools will not make you do math if you're not feeling it. I have discovered this to my detriment, as my child is struggling school with math. You don't like math, then by all means, do something else.

[Becky]

When she had to go to the Jewish school, that was the one thing she was most concerned about was the geometry she was gonna have to learn in the new school. Not that she was being separated. It was just math. Poor thing.

[Susan]

So you're upstairs during the morning, and then during the worker's lunch break, you could make noise, Hooray, I can go potty, stretch out. No one during these days is eating at their desk. So this wouldn't work. Now you'd encounter 30 people with their earbuds in, watching Netflix at their desk, eating a sad little sandwich.

[Becky]

Is that what people do?

[Susan]

Yes. I don't everybody eats at their desk. I never did. I always piece out it. I got people to go out and have dessert first Friday. Oh, and because we'd all go to a place and everyone would try to order a salad, I'm like, what you really want is the pie or whatever. So order that first. And if you're still hungry, get a salad. Yes, people still eat at their desk unless someone forces them to get up and walk away. So during lunch it was awesome because Meep or one of the other office people would deliver the goods from the morning's shopping trip. And the news. Not good news, of course, although they tried to keep a lot of this from the upstairs people. For everybody's safety, Jews were being seized and sent en masse from the Netherlands to work camps. The condition of the work camps in Poland was notorious. Notorious Auschwitz Birkenau in particular. Every day they'd hear about friends and neighbors that had been seized. They knew what was going on. And the visitors would eat lunch with the captives and depart in time to take up their work. When the warehouse guys got back and the afternoons were equally quiet. And not until they got the all clear at around 6 o' clock could they rest easy again and not have to be so on guard all the time.

[Becky]

They could even go downstairs into the office and they would play board games. They played man Monopoly.

[Susan]

Well, that is a game that takes a long time. That would be the only time I would finish a game of Monopoly. Like, well, it looks like I have two years. I guess we're playing Monopoly.

[Becky]

We'll just leave the board set up here. Yeah. They did have three meals a day for about the first year, which is remarkable.

[Susan]

I think the helpers, directed by Mr. Frank, had stocked the secret annex with a considerable amount of canned goods and bulk items. But I. But of course it was never intended as a long term living situation. And as time wore on and in the outside world of wartime, it became increasingly more difficult for even people on the outside to obtain food. The occupants of the secret annex had to suffer along with the rest of the population. Some of the meals that Ann describes are like beans, beans, beans, beans, and then rotten spinach. Some of the meals got really, really sketchy. However, through all that as she's complaining, Anne is realizing that her hiding place and their food situation is better than many Jews in hiding throughout Europe. And she does feel grateful for it.

[Becky]

A lot of potatoes. Cabbage. They made really weak cabbage soup. Kale, your favorite decorative vegetable.

[Susan]

All those brassicas. Cause gas like no tomorrow.

[Becky]

Yeah. And they can only flush the toilet once a day.

[Susan]

Luckily, human noses, after a while, you don't smell the rake. While they were downstairs and listening to the radio, they. There was a show on the BBC that they really wanted to catch. Every evening, Queen Wilhelmina, from her exile in London, would give a heartening speech to her people and tell about Allied movements and victories and that kind of thing. And. And it's kind of sad to read about. All of their hearts kept leaping every time they'd get some news. Oh, it's almost over. It's almost over. No, it's not almost over.

[Becky]

No, not at all. Actually. The BBC also broadcasted in other languages at set times around Europe so that people could get the news in their own countries that wouldn't have the news. Like, thought that was really nice for the BBC to do that.

[Susan]

Well, when they went downstairs, they had to stay in the back offices away from the street, because there was a big window in Meep's office and they couldn't go in there. But just being able to come down the stairs widened their horizons by at least 50%. And once a week, they could take a bath because the downstairs had hot water and not a bathtub. They're taking a bath in a big bowl. A Laura Ingalls Wilder in the office or whatever area of the house was your choice to set up shop in.

[Becky]

Yeah, it doesn't sound very luxurious, but Ann and Margo seem to enjoy this time.

[Susan]

They're teenagers, and it's literally the only amount of privacy they ever have in exactly given week. I think I'd be looking forward to it, too, just for that reason.

[Becky]

And Mrs. Van Pels didn't bathe for a while. She was. She wasn't into it. It was a while before she took a bath.

[Susan]

She's such a fastidious person otherwise. It kind of surprises me. Did she not want to take, like, a peasant bath?

[Becky]

Maybe.

[Susan]

Well, it is such a stifling and small world. This is for a person who was just starting to feel that freedom you get in your teens. I am just having that happen to me for the first time with my new teenager. You know, you're choosing your friends. You're able to move around in the world a little More your. Your parents let you go places. Without them, you can form your own opinions about things. And just right at this critical moment when she's gotten out of her chrysalis or her cocoon and she's about to fly free, Ann got shoved back into a cage. I mean, it was a safer place than out outside, a more comfortable hiding spot than most Jews had. But still her spirit longed for her old life or the idea of a possible life that didn't include all these rules. And she began seriously writing in her diary after a couple of months in what the translation of her book calls the Secret Annex. So I guess we can call it the Secret Annex now. I think she started writing seriously in there after a couple of months because that had been the deadline that people said, we'll be out of here in a couple of months. And when that was no closer to being true, she looked around and decided she needed a person to talk to, somewhere to put her thoughts and her ideas of frustration. And that's when she started daily and very religiously writing in her diary. She needed a friend. She and Margo were too different. And Peter Van Pels was a command to himself who hardly came out of his room, probably to avoid his mean parents. And so Anne began treating her diary as a correspondent. She wrote into it all the thoughts and feelings that she would have shared, say, with her friend Jackie or her friend Hannah. She wrote the diary as if she was writing letters.

[Becky]

The Jupiter Hoyle books, she kind of based her style on those because they were written partially as diary entries and partially as letters to Yoop's friends. So that's how Ann decided to do hers. And she, at the beginning, toyed around with a few different friends of Yoop's and settled on Kitty Franken. She addressed her letters in her diary to Dear Kitty. And it's assumed that it was Kitty Franken from the novels.

[Susan]

And that would be like you or I writing to Ruby Gillis or Anne Shirley from Anna Green Gables or Dear Laura Ingalls Wilder, blah, blah, blah. So, yes, well, we learn about conflict in the apartment, which is natural when these people that don't know each other very well are crammed into this little area. We learn about trouble between Anne and her mother. Again, as I understand, very natural between teenage girls and their parents, especially their mothers. We learn about Anne's feelings about the war, about her friends, fates. We hear news. I mean, there's so much going into these diary entries. If you have not read the diary of a young girl, I highly recommend going to read is not a hard read. There are parts of it that are matter of fact about such brutality in the war that you kind of wonder how desensitized people are by now. Like just casually mentions, oh people, blah, blah, blah, or we'll get shot.

[Becky]

Well, that was in the. Even when they were still out in their correspondence to their pen pals in Iowa. That's how they were written. It's just very casual. We're not allowed on the streets anymore. After 8 o' clock, just no big deal. And then my mom got me ice cream. You know, just part of the day. It's just part of their life. Yeah.

[Susan]

As it goes on, there is a growing sense of self and I guess I'm going to call it philosophy. She ran out of space in the one book and began another and another and another. Um, it's very sad that we are missing most of what you might consider to be book two. From December of 1942 to December of 1943 is only partially reconstructed due to some later revisions she made with the raw material. That book itself has never been found.

[Becky]

She filled up that first diary between June and December. It was filled up.

[Susan]

She needed it. She needed it. I think it saved her reason. And you know, you saw Cast Away with Tom Hanks. People need the fricking volleyball. If you don't have a friend, you have to have something. And this diary was her Wilson.

[Becky]

It was her Kitty Wilson. Yeah. You know, and her father got her a cash register book, you know, like an accounting book, so that she could write what she called her beautiful sentences in it. Sentences that she read in books that she just. That just really struck her. So it's kind of like all those quote memes that are out there. She had it all in one of her books.

[Susan]

It was like a Pinterest board marked fabulous quotes.

[Becky]

Yes, that's it. I am so not a Pinterest person.

[Susan]

Thank you for.

[Becky]

Yes, that's it.

[Susan]

I will say. Outside the world was just full of atrocities that the helpers, which I am calling the office people downstairs, tried desperately to keep from them. Tales of more friends and relatives in peril. Stories of what happened to them once they got there. The fact that there's now a bounty for turning in hidden Jews so they average man can cash in too. Keep your eyes out for suspicious things like faces looking out of a window or more bread going to a place than should and blah, blah, blah. That is so stressful for the helpers too, that now everybody's on the hunt. Anne just writes in her diary. Sometime this terrible war will be over and we can be people again instead of Jews. Her hope in the Dutch people is so evident in these pages. In the future, even in God, she took a special refuge in her religion in a way that started to happen to a lot of Jewish people during the war. Kind of their faith kind of buoyed them up, even if they had thought themselves as secular before. Not all, but just some, including Anne. We see in her tiny world the flowering of a mind from little girl to womanhood. You can see it happening on the pages. She developed an attachment to Peter Van Pels. Only natural. He's the only boy within striking distance.

[Becky]

And she was a flirt before, you know, before they went into hiding. She actually had a boyfriend, a Beau, who was 16 and she was 13.

[Susan]

I am not sure that most modern parents would let that fly. That's like an 8th grader and a junior in high school.

[Becky]

Mom was, mom was happy about it. And this relationship with Peter, as it developed, she was a little concerned because, you know, Margo should have had Peter because age wise, they were closer. But Margo kind of signed off on it and said, know, I'm glad you have somebody that you could have this time with, which is nice.

[Susan]

Well, it was like Return of the Mac all over the place. I, if I were her parents, I would just be like, why? Why does this happen? I mean, you know, why it's happening. But still, it's like really an unneeded complication right now. But at least Ann and Peter were happy. This is another passage or series of passages that her father had excised from the diary during the first couple of editions. Her, I guess, shall we call it, sexual awakening. I am not going to assume too much at once, but there is a passage, let's see, in June of 1944, where she mentions that her period was late. That's all I'm saying about that. She also talked about her frustrations at being frozen in child status. She's put in amber here in, in this attic. And no one is ever going to let her grow up and participate in the decision making process until she can gets out of there. She just had a deep desire to be allowed to grow up, to be treated like an adult. A radio broadcast encouraging all the Dutch to document their war experiences led to this period of grand revisions in the diary. And like any writer, she would read back over her early work and say, what was I thinking? Oh, I was harsh here. Why did I think like that? And she set out to ready her Diaries for possible publication after the war. Or I should say a novel based on her diaries to be published after the war. I think she always wanted her diaries themselves to remain private. So that's an important distinction. I think she wrote several times that she had discovered her calling. She wanted to be a journalist, she wanted to be a writer, and she wanted to write a book about her experiences in the war for publication. And this revision of her diary was her prep work for that future novel.

[Becky]

And yeah, she even, she said, after having heard that radio broadcast, she said in her book, quote, just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the Secret Annex. The title alone would make people think it was a detective story. But seriously, it would be quite funny ten years after the war if people were told how we Jews lived and what we ate and talked about. It's 1944, it's the second year that she been in there, but she's still thinking it might be funny. Maybe that's a mistranslation of the word, like peculiar maybe.

[Susan]

Oh, maybe because it just doesn't, I.

[Becky]

Don'T know, it didn't jibe right with me. But what she did is she started to take. This is so brilliant. She took colored paper and either cut the paper in half or folded it. And on each page she wrote a different section. So like a different letter to Kitty in each paper. So later on she could either take, take some out, put some new pages in and put it all in order for editing purposes instead of making it one long document that she'd have to go back. Like the notes I'm looking at right now tucked in paper and arrows and stuff. She had the forethought to put them all on individual pieces of paper. Brilliant. We talk about the talent of Anne Frank a lot and how she was such a gifted writer. Compare, compare her journal, her diary, to a journal that you wrote at 13. Which I did. And I have to say, even though I do get paid to write, my first entries as a 13 year old were nowhere near what hers are.

[Susan]

Well, and I have talked before about how sad I am that I threw all the prequels I wrote for Star wars in the trash and I will never get them back. I would give anything to go back and be able to reread them. I'm sure they were probably horrible, but like, maybe they weren't. Maybe I got some things right. I'll never know. Well, in addition, addition to writing about life in the attic, she actually tried her hand at writing stories, perhaps called Fan Fiction at first, but then her own stories. She was really trying to work on her craft. She had decided on her goal for her future life. She'd found her passion trapped in the attic. That is pretty admirable. Especially since tension in the hideout had reached the breaking point. The stress, the fear, the personalities of every everybody. The food supplies from outside have gone down to a trickle. They are stuck eating rotten potatoes, spinach that smells like a sewer. Supplies from the outside. The dairy man wasn't delivering anymore. The bread had been suspect, you know that they had been suspected. And the bread had stopped coming. There was no one with good news and there was nowhere with good news. And it felt like they were sitting on a volcano because at any minute any of this could blow up in their faces. Margot and Ann at last got closer. And Ann wrote Marco's behavior becoming a real friend at last. She's not catty anymore and doesn't regard me as just a little kid. Can you imagine Margot being catty? I guess to your little sister you act different.

[Becky]

Yeah. Oh, I'm sure. You know, if she was contrary to what Anne wanted, I'm sure it would seem like she was being mean.

[Susan]

It's so painful to me to see all of this yearning and life put in this little bottle. I have to tell you that reading that book made me feel so sad. It's all like it can't go anywhere. And she's still optimistic most of the time. And it amazes me.

[Becky]

Yeah, and she's so driven too. I mean, yeah, okay, she's got a lot of time. But her parents made sure that she was still studying. They got correspondence courses, you know, through the helpers, which stopped at a certain point. But, you know, they had information, they had books to read. Each of them in the annex were learning things, you know, to keep their minds fresh. But Ann, when she was doing that rewrite in 76 days, she filled 200 pieces of paper with her story. She finished rewriting her diary in 76 days with edits. I mean, it wasn't like a direct copy. She was editing it and changing it and rephrasing things and, you know, doing anything any writer does on their second go through.

[Susan]

So things were about to take a turn for the worse. I want to leave Ann content upstairs with her project and her dream for the future just for one more minute. And then when we come back, we are going to talk to about the end game. Stay tuned.

[Becky]

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[Susan]

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[Becky]

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[Susan]

Download the Rocket Money app and enter our show. Name the history chicks in the survey so they know we sent you. Don't wait. Download the Rocket Money app today and tell them you heard about them from our show and we are back. Well, a secret cannot be kept forever. And the more people involved and the longer it goes, the less likely the secret will be kept. They had a series of scares. Terror, you know, entered their heart. Some thieves broke in and the police, looking for the thieves, even banged on the bookcase. The police were literally downstairs on the landing at one point. Why did we call the police on the thieves? I just don't know. There was a power outage that made the whole family think, oh no, the Gestapo is coming for us. It was in fact just a blown fuse, but they had to live for the entire night thinking that they were about to be captured. There was a new employee hired because Bep's father. Bep is one of the office workers whose father was the warehouse manager. He became too incapacitated to work any longer, and they had to hire a new warehouse manager. This guy started poking around. I heard strange noises, climbing on a ladder and listening at the ceiling, all kind of things. And one night, this fool, while listening to the radio, Mr. Van Pels dropped His wallet in the the office. And the cleaning crew found it and brought it to the new warehouse manager. So not only did Mr. Van Pels lose all the money in it, which was pretty much all the money he had. Now the warehouse manager is confronting the office workers, whose wallet is this? And started to get an idea that there was something going on. And so he started pilfering from the business, figuring, nobody can stop me, because if they stop me, I'll just tell what I know. It was really stressful. The cleaning lady started to say, this is weird. Do you notice. Notice that, you know, there's a lot more trash in the morning than there used to be? That kind of thing. The office workers begged the prisoners upstairs to stop coming downstairs at all. Please, for your own safety, you have got to stop coming downstairs at night. It is getting too dangerous. And the Franks and the Van Pals insisted on continuing their nighttime sojourns downstairs. I mean, I get it. They didn't want to stay pinned up, but it was causing a lot of trouble.

[Becky]

Well, they needed to listen to the radio too.

[Susan]

Well, but when the people who know what's happening tell you it's too dangerous. Even Ann made a mistake. She left the window in her bedroom cracked. And the storekeeper across the street saw a suspiciously open window and wondered, oh, no, is this how all your break ins are happening? I'm gonna get my ladder and go see. This must be how your thieves are getting in. All these thieves you're having. I'm gonna go and take a look. I think they're sneaking and opening this window during the day, and then they're coming back at night. I think one of your warehouse employees is a criminal. And he was going to get up there and his ladder just wouldn't reach. And that's literally the only thing that saved him that time. That is an unnecessary close call. Somebody saw Anne's face in a though.

[Becky]

Yeah. For Otto, who had done such an outstanding job of being two plays ahead, it was starting to slip. At this point, if they've been in hiding for two years, you know, that's a long time for eight people to be in a very small space.

[Susan]

And the helpers were under great and constant stress. It was almost worse for them. Psych. I see. I can't say it's worse for them psychologically, but they'll be in the same amount of trouble if they get caught. And they had to be out in the world facing the Nazis with a face on, you know, one by one, the helpers went down with Very serious illnesses. Some were very stress related. I think all of the adult men had stomach problems that never left them. The, the grocer we discovered earlier that had been harboring Jews was taken in for harboring those two Jews. He had. Is he going to give them away to save himself? Is he going to accidentally let something slip? One of the helpers had a sister who worked for the Germans. It was a powder keg. The Allies had landed on Norman Normandy beach, but no one was coming to save the Netherlands. Seemed like if only help would come. If only help would come.

[Becky]

But can you imagine hearing that on the radio like they did? The Allied forces had landed on Normandy Beach. Otto started to track the movement of the Allied forces on a map with little pins. Are they going to make it here in time, you know? No.

[Susan]

Well, not very long after this, on August 4, 1944, based on an anonymous phone tip, which is still in doubt, who made that phone call? An SS officer and four Dutch Nazi officers invaded the office, found the secret annex and arrested everyone inside. An was 15 years old.

[Becky]

They went right to the bookcase. The person, whoever it was, I mean, there's all depends on who you talk to. You get different theories about who it was. But they knew where to go right away.

[Susan]

They knew all valuables were stolen by these officers of the law. All the men were questioned, which I thought was curious. No bother to talk to the lady people at all. And they slowly started to realize, oh, these people have been here a long time. They really genuinely don't know anything. Like, no, they don't know where anybody is. They don't know about anything. They don't even know the news. They know nothing. They've been here for so long. And so the questioning was relatively short.

[Becky]

Well, they had asked Otto, how long have you been here? He said, two years. They're like, no. And so Otto showed the marks on the wall where they had been measuring Ann that showed, you know, two years. Yeah, that's, that's how long we've been here. See, see how tall she is now.

[Susan]

So I did read that one of the officers saw Papa's war decorations or some indication that he had been a decorated soldier during World War I and was completely thrown by this, like, oh, my two impulses for a, patriotism and B, anti Semitism are in direct conflict right now. But you were an officer, he said to Papa, and he's like, yeah, I was. And you outranked me, said the German officer. It was a big conflict. But ultimately, I mean, you have all these Dutch Nazis there. I mean, you're not going to be able to skate over this. And so they were taken in. And after a few days in prison, they were on a train to the Westerbork concentration camp.

[Becky]

You remember Westerbork? That's the one that the Jews themselves had built for Jewish refugees at the beginning of the war. It was turned into a concentration camp. It was kind of like a holding place. They filtered all the captured Jewish people and anyone that was, you know, anyone that they were arresting, because it wasn't just Jewish people, although that was the majority, they brought them there. And then once a week, trains from there would leave to go to the other concentration camps. This was kind of almost of all of the concentration camps, this was. This is in quotes, the nicest one. While the Franks were considered criminals, they were not treated as well as some of the people that were brought in. But they closed and they had food, but it wasn't so bad. So people thought, well, if we could just wait it out here, it'll be okay. It'll be okay. But it wasn't.

[Susan]

Well, Westerbork was not in itself considered to be a death camp. It was a transit camp. You know, it's just a sorting out. It's the mail facility. This is where you sort out the situation. Your goal was to stay in Westerbork. As horrible as the overcrowding and conditions were, Westerbork was the least of your worries because occasionally, I. E. Every Tuesday, the bosses had a quota to send on to Poland the death camps. And you did not want your name on those lists.

[Becky]

Now, the Nazis did say how many people had to be put on the trains, but there was a group of Jewish people who had to actually pick the names. Cruel.

[Susan]

Well, the new arrivals tried to make themselves useful, but the facts are they had been some of the very last Jews out. One of the sources I read said that the Nazis thought they'd moved on from all that. And this was an irritation. They had to dig out the old paperwork and, like, figure out how to do this again because they'd already sent everyone. So they were the last there and no one knew them. You know, you try to make yourself useful, but the Jewish Council has to come up with a thousand names. Those eight new ones nobody knows are very easy for you psychologically to just put on the list. And in less than a month after they got to Westerbork, the Franks were taken by the SS and all of their barking dogs and loaded into cattle cars for the trip to Poland. Their trip to Westerbork had been in a third class rail carriage, so. So that was good enough, you know, not so scary. Even though they were headed to the unknown. Anne looked out the window the whole way and was able to kind of absorb the outside in a way that she hadn't. But now they were in a 60, 70 person loaded cattle car for the trip to Poland. There was an empty bucket for bathroom, and there was one bucket full of drinking water. They were crowded in like sardines. It was pitch black. The air had become suffocating almost immediately when the Nazis shut the door. And after three days and two nights of torturous travel because, I mean, you couldn't move. How are you getting to that empty bucket if you're not right by the empty bucket? You just had to sit in your own filth for three days. You know, you just don't think about that. And so here they are. They've been in the dark, they're cold, they're scared, they've had no food, nobody has fed them. The water supply had not really been replenished. And after three days of this and two nights, suddenly the door was opened. All the screaming, the lights on your eyes haven't adjusted. There's dogs barking. Everyone's yelling, get out. Get out of the train. Get out of the train. And then a voice says, anyone who feels weak, get on carts for transport. And all of the prisoners in striped garments, the ones that had been there a while, said, do not get on the carts. Do not get on the carts, no matter how weak you are. Stand up. It was time to face what was called the selection.

[Becky]

Anyone over 50 or under 15, anyone pregnant, any mothers that were refusing to be separated from their children, any old people, any sick people, they were all sent immediately. They didn't even survive the night. They were sent immediately to the gas chambers.

[Susan]

So anyone who ended up on the right, the right side, the smaller group, wouldn't go to their deaths right away, but they would be simply worked to death. Those were your fates. Those are your two choices. Go immediately or be worked to death. Well, all eight of the secret annex people ended up on the right side. They were tattooed with an ID number, although those records have been lost, so we don't really know what Ann and Margo's numbers are. We know the range, range in which they fall, but we don't know their number. Each prisoner had to endure, quote, disinfection in a spray of chemicals. You had to give up your clothes, all the hair on your body and Head was shaved off. If you were lucky and you were a woman, a woman prisoner did it if you were not lucky. There's this cruel game the Nazis played where a man would get an extra ration of food if he would do it. If he would shave one of the new prisoners. Humiliation was the name of the game. They were starving, they were thirsty. They were headed into a big shower room. Don't drink the water. They were told by well meaning current residents, don't drink it. It's full of disease. It's full of typhus. Which is true. They weren't lying. But to tell thirsty people not to drink the water is just another bit of torture, I think. There was no soap, there were no towels. They were hosed off with cold water and then handed a ragged dress to put on right over their wet skin. They never saw their father again, by the way. The men were marched away immediately to the men's camp. So that's the last they ever saw of their f. The last their father ever saw of them was when the men and women were separated to go to the disinfection process. And then it was just hell. It was just hell. Honestly, I have to tell you I had my Auschwitz books in the car. I cannot stand to see them. I kept them in the car like I did with Stephen King's it all that long time ago. And I have to tell you, Auschwitz is not only worse than the Stephen King's it, it is got the misfortune of being actual history. And those books have been sitting in my car and I won't bring them in the house. I, I, I hate it. I hate it that I had to read them for this. It made me very angry and grumpy for a long time.

[Becky]

I felt about it like I felt when I first saw Schindler's List, that it was, it was a horrible way to spend some time. But it's necessary for humanity to see those pictures and read the stories. As painful as it is, it's, it's necessary to see the atrocities that were done to these people. It's unfa, you can't describe, I mean, we're trying to describe it here, but you can't describe it. And the one thing, thing that got me more than anything about this particular part of the story is that they were on the last train from Westerbork to Auschwitz. The very last train.

[Susan]

And they had been on the last train out of the Netherlands. If they had just been able to hold on a little longer, if that phone call hadn't happened. They had no idea that annex was there. Yes. They were so close many times of not being in this situation. Well, they worked 12 hour days at backbreaking labor in horrifying conditions under constant threat of death or mistreatment from the people in charge. That's probably as far as I'm going to go in an open forum, although we are going to link you with the video series that I found that goes into a lot more detail. If that's a particular rabbit hole you would like to follow an and Margo became ill and that's kind of a death sentence could be in a camp like this. And there was nothing that their mother could do to help them. Although that particular incident didn't happen to kill them. Many other times it didn't end up well for the person that got sick. An SS officer quote, attacked Margot and Mama stepped in and they never saw their mother again after her mother objected to the officer touching Margot inappropriately. Well, the Russians were coming, the Russians were coming, the Germans were afraid and Auschwitz was to be cleared out. What does that mean, cleared out? A train was sent to another camp, Bergen Belsen. And Mama was left behind in Auschwitz, possibly as punishment for daring to stand up, I guess. And Margot and Anne were sent to Bergen Belson. Thin, no hair, inappropriate clothing, housed in a tent that ended up collapsing at Bergen Belsen. Forced to stay there for maybe three days in the mud, in the cold, with inadequate clothing, under a tent that was barely even keeping the rain off anymore. The barracks were finally refitted with enough bunk beds that you could at least have a shelf. But there was little food and just no way to get clean. They had given up on sanitation so long ago. The toilets were just like mounded with poop.

[Becky]

Bergen Velsen was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz was originally. It was a model camp. It was an exchange camp for prisoners of war to say, oh look how nice we're taking care of people. But at this particular point in the war it's overcrowded, it was wintertime, it was harsh. It was worse in some ways than Auschwitz in that the whole plan was to just have them die there from whatever killed them, not the Nazis, but you know, just the elements and illness and, you know, exhaustion. And it was still a death camp. Even though they say it wasn't a death camp. It was still a death camp.

[Susan]

Well, Anne's friend Hannah was there, believe it or not, but in a more privileged part of the camp. Her family had had visas for Palestine and they were considered people, therefore, that could possibly be exchanged for German prisoners of war later. And she'd been there for over a year. And they had been kept in far better conditions than any of the other camps, certainly not to the depth of what was happening to Anne's group from Auschwitz. The people on the privileged side got Red Cross packages of food and were absolutely forbidden to speak to the, quote, criminal prisoners on the other side. But Hannah actually managed not only to talk to Ann almost every day from kind of far from the fence, she managed during several occasions to slip in and packets of food.

[Becky]

The first time she threw a packet over the fence and just started crying because there another woman had jumped in and grabbed it. You know, it was coming to Ann and she had gotten it and Ann didn't. But Hannah was able to get her some afterwards.

[Susan]

Yeah, Hannah had a bad report about this period after the war. Hannah actually survived. But Ann was despairing, said Hannah. Ann did not look the same. Her voice was barely recognizable. She had suffered so very much. Her father was dead is what she assumed. She told Hannah she did not want to live any longer. She had nothing left. Her mother was gone. Her father was gone. She had no clothes. She was freezing. She couldn't bear the lice any longer and had taken off her clothes just to get rid of the itching and was coming outside in the wintertime with only a blanket on. She couldn't take it. She was suicidal. She wanted to die secretly, although none of the people at Burke and Belson knew this. Certainly to give her this news, her father had just been liberated at Auschwitz by the Russians. If only Anne and Margo had been around and allowed to stay, they could have been liberated by the Russians. They made it. The Russians made it. They liberated Auschwitz. If only their mother had lived a few more weeks. Their mother, who had been despairing because she thought her children were dead. They were not dead. Their mother had died in Auschwitz right before the Russians got there. It's like the ultimate game of Romeo and Juliet where one thinks the other has died and gave up and meanwhile the other one's still alive, but then wakes up and then gives up. It was a horrible circumstance all the way around. The whole family fell apart just before they could have been rescued. It's just timing in this case. I mean, there's so much else that went into it, but the very end game was all up to just a matter of a couple of weeks either way. Well, there was no official execution taking place in Brigham Belsen like you said, but 17,000 people died. There in Anne's last month on the Earth, in March 1940, 45 alone, 17,000 people died at that one camp of quote, natural causes. There were so many that died that the Nazis no longer even bothered to keep death records anymore. They would just make mass graves. This is today's the end. It was at some point in that month, at some point, and we don't know when, that Margot died of typhus officially, although she really died of starvation, neglect, despair, heartbreak, mistreatment, antisemitism, you know, any number of causes. But she was followed by a few days later by Anne at some point during that month. And the British arrived to liberate bergen Belsen on April 15, just weeks. So Mr. Frank, who had survived the war, made his way back to Amsterdam and moved in with meep geese and her husband. And on the very same day that he found out that his entire family was dead, meep geese who had been saving these papers for Anne, there's no reason to save them for Ann anymore, went to a cabinet in her house and got out Anne's diaries that she had saved.

[Becky]

She had scooped them up, they were, were on the floor of the annex and she had picked them up because she knew that Anne would want them after the war. But that wasn't going to happen. She handed all these papers to Otto and she said, here's your daughter Ann's legacy to you.

[Susan]

One 13 year old birthday present notebook, several school notebooks and 327 sheets of thin paper is what he held in his hands. The only remnant, the only memory he had of his family. And he held onto em for a while. He couldn't read them. And I don't blame him, I don't. But when he finally did, he was so energized. Within its pages, Anne had written that she was going to write a book about her experiences after the war was over. That writing was her destiny. I can't stay away from Anne's diaries, said Papa. They are so unbelievably exciting to me.

[Becky]

When he read them that it was a totally different Anne than he knew. He said, quote, there was revealed a completely different Anne to the child that I had lost. I had no idea of the depth of her thoughts and feelings. He was surprised at the amount of faith in God that she had. When they were in the annex, she would just kind of not pay attention when prayers were said or lessons were given. But in the pages of this diary she revealed how much she had relied on her faith during this time, which was the most surprising thing to him.

[Susan]

He determined that he was going to make her dream come true, since she was not allowed to live long enough to achieve it for herself. And he determined that he was going to publish her diaries.

[Becky]

The version that Otto wrote, he had taken her diary and he edited it down. He took out things that were. She talked about sex and detail. He deleted parts about fighting with her mother and anger. He didn't rewrite it. He just took a lot of things out from the original version.

[Susan]

Her book, which was published under the title Het Auchterhuis, which means like after house, like secret Annex, is what it is in English, but it means like the behind house. It was published in 1947, and it was widely published after it was translated in English in 1952.

[Becky]

There's three different versions of Ann's diary. There's version A, which was Ann's unedited diary. Version B, which is Ann's edited diary, the one she wrote on all those different individual pieces of paper. And then there's version C, which was what was originally published, which was edited by Ann in some parts by Otto, and then also by editors at the publishing house. They changed just tiny little details. You think, okay, that's all there is. We know everything there is to know about Anne for Frank. But no, just this year, researchers discovered two pages, page 78 and 79 of her plaid diary that Ann herself had pasted brown paper over. Underneath, they found parts that Ann herself probably thought were too private for anybody to read. She described sex in a lot of detail, maybe as much as your 13 year old could. She talks about contraception and menstruation and prostitution. So there's parts that she considered too dirty that she had covered over that had just been discovered this year. Amazing.

[Susan]

And then somewhere in the world may be the second notebook.

[Becky]

True.

[Susan]

You know what I'm saying? Like, it could just be sitting, you know, have you ever seen the end of that Indiana Jones movie where they pan back and discover that there's millions of nondescript boxes and one of them is holding the Holy Grail? There could be a library somewhere in Amsterdam in. In Germany. Maybe one of the. Maybe the SS guy wanted a memento and took a notebook and it's somewhere in Germany in somebody's attic. I mean, book two's still missing. Yeah, her book, it's been translated into 70 languages and there have been 30 million copies sold worldwide. And that is a legacy. Anne once wrote, I want to live on after my death. I want to leave something behind me. And her diary has Made her immortal, if only in spirit. And now it's time for media. And as usual, we'll start with books. And as usual, with a subject like this, there are a lot to choose from. So I have pared my list down to the best adult audience biography that I found. The best, I would say mid level. And I don't think little tiny kids.

[Becky]

No.

[Susan]

Might want to be exposed to the latter half of this story. So I, you know, didn't pick them.

[Becky]

Yeah, I didn't either. I just think it would be too watered down and. Yeah.

[Susan]

Okay, so then. And then there's a couple of others too. So the best biography that I found for adults is Anne Frank the Biography by Melissa Muller. But get the latest edition that you can Anne, because the. There's been some new discoveries that she was able to include in the later edition. So I love that. And then my teen book is Anne Frank by Peggy J. Parks and it is part of a series that includes Marie Curie and Cleopatra and Hillary Clinton. So they cover a wide range subjects in that series. Well, I have other books, obviously the Diary of a Young Girl by the Woman Herself and Frank have to read that.

[Becky]

If you can get your hands on the critical edition, you can compare and contrast all three versions, which I did not do, but it would be really cool to be able to do that.

[Susan]

And also in the latest edition of Smithsonian magazine that I subscribe to, as if they knew what I was doing on the COVID Exclusive, the New Anne Frank, the Long Hidden Diary of a Young Polish Woman's last. So this is a feature on a different memoir writer from the same war.

[Becky]

You know what, I was going to point that out too because Anne's is just one voice from, you know, an estimated what, 13 million people who died in the Holocaust. So there's a lot of other versions out there, other journals or diaries written by other people. So I don't want to send you to one specific one, but just know that they're out there and keep your eye open for them so you can get it a different perspective.

[Susan]

That's correct. That's why I also recommend a book called Survivors Remember Flares of Stories of Childhood during the Holocaust. Like Susan said, it's not just Anne Frank, it's not just the Netherlands. So that is a collected series of stories edited by Anita Brostov that will give you a little more picture of what was happening. But there are so many people who left records behind, so fall down that rabbit hole.

[Becky]

Okay, well, I had the Melissa Mueller book as well and I also Kind of liked Anne Frank the book the life, the afterlife by Francine Prose. And for ya, it's not middle grade. It's probably a step above it. I liked Shadow A portrait of Anne Frank and her family by Barry Dennenberg. Okay, so that was, it's. For me, it was a really fast read. Yeah. The coffee table picture book, I guess that sounds makes it lighter than it looks. That I liked is called Inside Anne Frank's house and it's published by the Anne Frank house. There are so many photos. Things that are in the Anne Frank house are in this book and they're very large and I thought it was a good visual for the entire story.

[Susan]

Now, Anne's favorite book, Jupiter Hoyle can't find in England English anywhere. So I, I am wishing for a link toward those books in English. But there is an analysis that I really liked that I will provide you a link to by a person who, who writes a blog called Pretty books.

[Becky]

Oh, I read the same one. I thought that was a great. Yes, I agree. Good analysis. Yeah. And there's pictures.

[Susan]

And then also don't miss there. And it's on YouTube right now. Until they catch us. I don't know. Part one is what we'll provide the link to an academy award winning best docum starring meep geese called Dear kitty Remembering Anne Frank is on YouTube. So don't miss that. Meep geese just died not too long ago. So this was kind of her last assistance toward history. Remembering that what happened there.

[Becky]

Yeah, that is a good one. I got a lot out of that one too. There is a lot. I mean the streaming services all have something specifically about Anne and then obviously about the holocaust and world war II in general. There's one on Amazon that I really liked that I didn't think I was going to because I had to read it. And I'm not always a fan of reading my television, but it's called My daughter Anne Frank and it's in German with English subtitles and it's a dramatization retelling. So it's not documentary exactly, but there's interviews spotted throughout Miep and Hanneli. And I don't remember the other person, but there's. Yeah, I thought that was a good one.

[Susan]

There's also on Netflix if you're a subscriber. Auschwitz, the Nazis and the final solution, which is a six part miniseries documentary. That one is going to require some fortitude. Just beware and preview it before you show your children because I. It's graphic in parts to Lighten that up a little bit. I found a place how to pronounce Dutch words, specifically the words in Anne Frank. So if we have failed, which we probably have, it's not his fault. Our memory just could not process the sounds we needed. So we'll provide you to that link so you can really see how it's really pronounced.

[Becky]

I don't know that I actually attempted too many, so I might be in the clear on this one. You know, as another offshoot of this, there's an Amazon series called the man in High Castle, which is complete dramatization. It's a sci fi alternative history scripted series, but it's excellent, isn't it?

[Susan]

If the Nazis had won World War.

[Becky]

II, exactly what the United States would be like.

[Susan]

So Rick Steves, you know, the travel guy with the unfortunate khaki pants. Poor Rick Steves, Queer eye, go fix him. Because he. I really appreciate his travel work. And then he has produced very recently and helpfully a video called the History of Fascism in Europe, Believe it or not. And it's on RickSteves.com and we will provide you a link and he will basically take you through in a very easily digestible format what happened between World War I and World War II to get Europe in the place where it was. You know, Italy and Germany both. Also, don't miss the American Holocaust Museum website. And then of course, the website for the Android Frank House itself.

[Becky]

Yeah, that one. I actually would suggest you start there. I mean, obviously it's, you know, got so much stuff, including an excellent timeline and a virtual tour. So for those of us who can't get to Amsterdam, you can tour in Frank's house online. So we'll give you links to that too.

[Susan]

And there is a relatively recent work for chorus and symphony called Anneliese, which is of course Anne Frank's full first name by a composer named James Whitman Burn. And I would have liked to close out this show with the movement called Sinfonia. My request for clearances has not come through. Once it does, if it does, I will close out with that song. Otherwise, we'll provide you a link to a performance of it on YouTube and I'll close with something else in the interim. But as a child of symphony musicians, I really, really appreciate this. Somebody took the time to go through Anne Frank's diaries and her biography, combined with them into a libretto, and this man has set them to music. And the particular movement that I want to direct you to is called Symphonia, and it is very melancholy.

[Becky]

I can't Wait to hear it. I did not know about that. I did know about the souvenir d' Un Frank rose. There's a yellow orange, salmon colored rose that is named after her. I can't find it for sale in the United States yet, but it's also not rose buying season.

[Susan]

So when is rose buying season?

[Becky]

You can buy bare roots over the winter, but in the spring. I. I'm not a big fan of bare roots. I have about a 50, 50 success rate with them.

[Susan]

And then also, I guess I don't want to leave without mentioning the most famous adaptation of the Diary of anne Frank in 1959 starring Millie Perkins. If you can catch a hold of that.

[Becky]

I think you can. I want to. I saw it. So I. You must be. I'll. I'll link you up. If you can get it online without paying anything or streaming. I'll. I'll tell you where to now. There was an essay that I read that I thought was. It gave me kind of a different perspective. It's called the Misuse of Anne Frank's Diary by Cynthia Ozen. She wrote it in 1997 in the New Yorker. And it's a critical look at how Anne has been betrayed. Betrayed? Ooh, in a way, yes. How Anne has been portrayed by different people. You know, is she this saint or is she this normal girl who went through hell? So I'll link you.

[Susan]

You did that. I would definitely lean toward normal girl who went through hell. I think that's her appeal, is it could be anybody. Well, if you read a lot of.

[Becky]

Things, you know, they focus on, you know, her hopefulness and her optimism, and they don't always focus on the negative things she has in there. You know, people do. You know what I'm saying?

[Susan]

Yeah.

[Becky]

Yeah. So it's a good essay. That's it.

[Susan]

And so that brings us to the end of our coverage of the life and legacy of Anne Frank. And in closing, why don't we leave you with two quotes from Anne herself. How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. And perhaps more seriously, what is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again. Thank you for listening.

[Becky]

Bye.

[Susan]

If you liked what you heard today, please, please tell a friend or leave a review for us on Apple podcast. I hear it is very, very easy from your iPhone. So maybe on your lunch break, just give us a couple of taps. The Pinterest board for Anne Frank has been percolating for some time, and I will make it live as soon as I publish this episode. Show notes and links if you want to share this with someone else are [e-mail] thanks for being here and we will see. See you next time. Sa Sam Sa Sam Sat Sa.