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The Red-Checkered Diary: From the Secret Annex to Thirty Million Readers
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Anne Frank's red-checkered diary survived the raid on the Secret Annex because one woman bent down, gathered the scattered pages, and chose not to read them. This is the full story — the hiding, the betrayal, the camps, Otto Frank's return, and how a thirteen-year-old's words became one of history's most-read books.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
There is a version of history where Anne Frank's diary never survives. Where the pages scattered across a raided floor are swept up, discarded, burned.
To understand what Miep was protecting, you need to understand what was already in motion by the summer of nineteen forty-two. Germany had invaded the Netherlands in nineteen forty.
Otto Frank had spent months quietly preparing. He'd already transferred legal ownership of his company to trusted employees to get around the Nazi prohibition on Jewish business ownership.
While in hiding, Anne kept writing. The diary was no longer just a place to record thoughts.
The raid happened on the morning of August fourth. Gestapo officers entered the building and made straight for the bookcase.
The eight people from the Secret Annex were taken first to Westerbork, a transit camp in the eastern Netherlands. From there they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in September nineteen forty-four.
Otto Frank was liberated from Auschwitz in January nineteen forty-five, the only survivor among the eight people who had hidden behind the bookcase. He made his way back to Amsterdam, hoping for news of his family.
Otto read the pages. He read all of them, the original diary entries, the revised versions Anne had begun rewriting, everything that had survived the raid and Miep's long, careful stewardship.
Anne Frank wrote, during her time in hiding, that in spite of everything she still believed that people were good at heart. It's the line most people know.
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