Analyzing Anne Franks Harrowing Experience with Nazi Anti-Semitism

Abstract

Essay Topic: Anne Frank and Jew's Anti-Semitism Introduction German exercised Anti-Semitism over the Jews for centuries. During the Hitler era, the Nazis group played a significant role in defining pure Anti-Semitism over the German-Jews people who lived within and outside Germany. Jews in hiding like Ann Frank and her family, among others, were taken from their hiding into concentration camps while the least valuable lost their lives. In simple terms, Anti-Semitism means hatred of Jews that was primarily coined around their strong Christianity beliefs, culture, and color, among other factors that differentiated the Jews from the Germans. The Germans wanted to dominate the Jew by expressing their superiority over them, which was the worst experience for the Jews. Ann Frank was among the many Jews who experienced Anti-Semitism at the hands of the Germans during the Hitler era. For this reason, this essay aims at analyzing how Anne Frank's experiences define the general anti-Semitism of the Jews from the Germans during Hitler's era. Though she died at a tender age, Anne Frank's diary expresses her defined skills as a writer that represents the reasons behind the origin of the hiding place and the extent of agony and hardships her family, among others who lived in the Secret Annex, experienced for being Jews. The torture in the concentration camps and the inhabitable environment attributed to lack of food, water, and sanitation, not forgetting the immediate death of hundreds deemed worthless by Nazis, best define why being a Jew proved a threat to many. Anne Frank, born Annelies Marie Frank, was a German-Jews born in 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany (Siegal, 2017). She was a daughter to Edith Hollander Frank and Otto Frank, a prominent businessman in Germany and outside Germany, "Netherland," where the family settled after the family left Germany when Hitler made life increasingly unbearable for the Jews. Ann Frank literally enjoyed her early childhood as just four years, Hitler Adolf became Germany’s chancellor and, together with his Nazis government, instituted a series of measures to make the life of German-Jews life unbearable (Miron, 2018). Hitler and the Nazi men aimed to persecute the Germanys Jewish citizens not because they had committed any crime against the governing force but rather because their religion, race, and color subjected them to such mistreatment. It was all about discrimination and racism domination in Hitler’s government. Ann Frank’s father "Otto" was the first to resist the strong waves of mistreatment from Nazis and thus fled to Amsterdam by the fall of 1933 and established a potential business that sustained him and his family during their stay in Amsterdam (Siegal, 2017). Ann Frank was hesitant to leave Germany, but after a year with her grandmother in the city of Aachen, Ann joined her family in Amsterdam and started school in 1935. Ann Frank enjoyed a peaceful life in the Netherlands for the next five years, only to be cut short in 1940 when Germans invaded the Netherlands and made Jewish life increasingly restrictive and dangerous (Foray, 2011). At this time, the Germans had entered the Second World War and demanded enough soldiers to battle the war. Thus, they decided to exploit the strong Jews while manipulating the less important to express their superiority. The Germans were very powerful, leaving many Jews under their harsh control. Between 1942 and 1944, Nazis and Dutch collaborators deported over a hundred thousand Jews in Holland to concentration camps during the Holocaust (Foray, 2011). Fortunately or unfortunately, Ann Frank and her family managed to secure a hiding place behind Otto’s business in Amsterdam, leaving false trails that they fled to Switzerland. The hiding place is currently called Ann Franks Secret Annex Museum, which holds an excellent history of anti-Semitism during the Hitler era, where Franks family and seven other Jews called a home. As Ann Frank narrates in her diary, the hiding Annex was not as comfortable as the Amsterdam home. It was a small apartment consisting of eight people defining the limited levels of privacy. Unfortunately, tension and fear of being discovered made the eight live indoors with no trace of outside and little noise during the daytime to avoid detection by people working in the warehouse below the hiding Annex. One can argue that the hiding place was a living hell as the people within it lived an abnormal life but enjoyed that they were alive and not subjected to physical torture that their fellow Jews were going through during this time. At this hiding annex, Ann Frank expressed her writing skills regardless of her levels of education and the tension that surrounded her life. Ann compiled her diary as an archive of her observation, feelings, and experiences during her stay at the hiding place (Foray, 2011). Loneliness was a significant theme in Ann Frank’s diary, which the author attributed to the increasing levels of discrimination and racism that the Germans expressed toward the Jewish. However, Ann displayed keen insight and maturity while writing about the war, humanity, and her identity as a Jew, all aimed at expressing the negative attitude that the Germans held toward Jews translating into severe Anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism as an intense hatred for the Jews became well expressed after the Germans discovered the hiding annex exposing Ann and the other seven Jews to painful experiences. According to Solly (2022), though the Germans were harsh on the Jews, even the Jews accepted to be misused, attributing Ann’s hiding place discovery to a fellow Jew's betrayal. It is imperative to acknowledge that Hitler's governing era spelled tension and fear among Jews attributed to the increasing hardships that this governance exposed the Jews. Nevertheless, that was not enough justification for the Jews to shoot an arrow at their fellow brothers and sisters. On the contrary, it would have been an excellent opportunity to collaborate and fight for a common mission. However, based on Solly (2022), one of the Jews betrayed Ann Frank and her fellow Jews by exposing their location to the Nazis to protect his family and forgot the painful fact of Jewish culture that was mutual with the betrayed population. Anti-Semitism was directed at all Jews; thus, even the betrayal was nothing to save the betrayer from the harsh treatment from their opponents with time. The discovery of Ann Franks and the rest in the hiding annex was a start of a very agonizing life that claimed the lives...