Trisha's Reviews > Anne Frank : The Biography

I first read Anne Frank’s diary (which should be required reading for everyone) many years ago, and re-read it in the 80’s after visiting the house in Amsterdam where she and her family spent two and half years hiding in the Secret Annex . I’ve picked up the Diary again for the third time now that I’ve just finished this thoughtfully written yet deeply disturbing book based on information gleaned from letters, documents, personal interviews with family members and others who knew the Franks before and after they were arrested, as well as recently discovered diary pages that had not been previously published. The book isn’t just about Anne, although it’s interesting to read about her early childhood in Frankfurt, her education in Dutch schools after the family relocated to Amsterdam and the fun she had with her many friends there. An index in the back of the book provides a short synopsis of what happened to many of those whose paths crossed Anne’s in the course of her short life, most of whom also perished at the hands of the Nazis. Muller also includes information about the rest of Anne’s immediate and extended family and provides additional details about what life was like once the Franks went into hiding and the many risks Jan and Miep Gies took to supply them with what was necessary for their survival.
Much of this book is very difficult to read because of what we find out about what happened to the Franks after their hiding place was discovered the morning of August 4, 1944. Although the Americans had already broken through German lines and were on their way to liberating France, the nightmare was far from over for Anne and her family who had been in hiding for over two years. They were taken to the transit camp at Westerbork and in September, around the same time that Belgium was liberated, they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. It’s especially sobering to learn that Anne was on the last transit train to leave Holland for Auschwitz. Muller draws on interviews with those who survived the harrowing experiences Anne endured in the cattle cars and the camps: At Auschwitz she was housed along with 1000 other women in a lice and rat infested barracks originally intended to be a stable for 52 horses. After 8 weeks (and with Russian troops only 60 miles away) Anne, her mother and sister were transferred to Bergen Belsen which was so overcrowded that a tent had to be hastily erected to house the hundreds of new arrivals. It provided only minimal shelter, no sanitation and sporadically dispensed water and thin soup until other provisions could be found for the prisoners. Conditions weren’t much better for Anne after she was moved to an even more crowded barracks where she managed to survive throughout a winter of sub-zero temperatures. But sometime between the end of February and mid-March her endurance ran out and she died of the typhus epidemic that had also claimed her sister’s life. Although we know from the outset that Anne’s story has a brutally tragic ending, it’s even more difficult to read knowing that Bergen-Belsen was the first of the German death camps to be liberated by the British who arrived within two weeks of Anne’s death.
Some people feel it’s too depressing to read books like this one. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that reading is meant to educate us as well as entertain us. To read about the horrors that claimed the lives of over six million Jews is to be reminded that we must not let ourselves become indifferent about what happened to the men, women and children who died so brutally in the death camps. And we need to be reminded that similar atrocities are happening today in places throughout the world where genocide is still being allowed to happen.