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In the Secret Annex: The Diary, the Betrayal, and the World That Followed
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Anne Frank's red-checkered diary, the Secret Annex at 263 Prinsengracht, the betrayal of August 4, 1944 — this episode traces the full arc of one of the most important testimonies in Holocaust history. From a thirteen-year-old girl writing to an imaginary friend named Kitty, to thirty million readers in seventy languages.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
What does it mean that the most widely read account of the Holocaust was written by a thirteen-year-old girl who never intended it to be published? That question sits at the center of everything that followed June 12, 1942, the day Anne Frank received a red-checkered diary for her birthday and started writing.
Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt in 1929. Her family moved to Amsterdam in 1933, shortly after the Nazi party rose to power in Germany.
On June 12, 1942, Anne wrote her first entry. She mentioned waking at six in the morning, excited about her gifts.
They stayed for two years, one month, and one week. The diary tracks all of it.
On August 4, 1944, German security police entered the building on Prinsengracht, found the concealed entrance, and arrested all eight people in the annex. Who informed them remains unknown.
The eight people from the annex were transported first to Westerbork, a transit camp in the northeastern Netherlands. From there, in September 1944, they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland.
Otto Frank was liberated from Auschwitz in January 1945 by Soviet forces. He was the only one of the eight people from the Secret Annex to survive.
The numbers are significant, but they require some care in interpretation. Thirty million copies sold across more than seventy languages makes this diary one of the most widely distributed books in the world.
There's a version of this story that ends with thirty million copies and a sense of triumph. A girl's words survived.
There are documents and there are witnesses and there are statistics. The Holocaust is among the most extensively documented genocides in history.
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