From Sherry Gaherty
It all started with watching a DVD based on a book I had read in high school where I already knew the ending of the story. It continued through 3 more books which answered a lot of the questions I had after watching the DVD.
The DVD was the PBS 2008 dramatization of the Diary of Anne Frank. It was a wonderful production which made all of the characters in the story come to life once again. The viewer followed Anne into hiding where she started writing her innermost thoughts in a diary. Anne was 13 years old and was at an age where she asked questions non-stop, questioned her own sexuality, religion and everything about her world. She was an energetic girl who spent 2 years cooped up in a small set of rooms with 7 other people but who wrote a lot about her future and of what she wanted from life. The DVD ends with Anne and her family and friends being betrayed, arrested and sent off to the concentration camps. Notes at the end of the DVD give the viewer a very brief summary of the final endings for the families but leaves the viewer with a number of questions. Who betrayed them? How were the diaries saved and published ? What happened to the Dutch people who had worked so hard in the dangerous work of hiding and feeding the families?
The second reference for me was a book by Carol Ann Lee called The Hidden Life of Otto Frank. Carol Lee gives the background of Otto long before he was married, his years as an officer in the German army during WW I and then brings the reader all the way up to the 2 years of hiding with his daughters Anne and Margot and his wife Edith. The author continues with Otto’s experiences during and after Auschwitz and tells about the hard times he had getting Anne’s diaries published. During this period and up to the 1960’s the search for who betrayed his family was still ongoing. This book brings Otto to vivid life and the reader will finish it with a new appreciation of what makes an ordinary man exceptional.
I was still left with some more questions and found a book by Willy Lindwer entitled The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank. Anne’s last diary entry was for August 1, 1944, and four days later the group in hiding was betrayed and taken away. This book is told through the testimony of six Jewish women who survived the camps and who knew Margot, Anne and their mother Edith. All three were first sent to Auschwitz and later transported to Bergen-Belsen the end of October of 1944. Here they continued to be sick much of the time, suffered from starvation and grew weaker by the day. They died within a day of each other just 3 weeks before the camp was liberated by British soldiers. As much as I already knew the sad endings for the girls and their mother, I never knew the story of their last few months. The interviews with these survivors brought the story from the diaries to a closing, however sad the ending.
I now know what happened to the family and their friends from when they were betrayed and taken away. Their betrayer and why he did betray them has been given a satisfactory explanation, as had the questions about the final months of the Frank family. Still, I wondered what happened to the Dutch friends who had endangered their own lives by hiding the seven people. It was a very dangerous time for anyone during these years but somehow these loyal friends managed. My last book was called Anne Frank Remembered : the story of the woman who helped to hide the Frank family written by Miep Gies. This woman was a secretary in Otto Frank’s firm and through working with Otto she became a very good friend of his family. When Otto realized the time had come for his family to disappear he asked Miep if she would be willing to help hide his family of four, a second family of three and a single man. She agreed, and with the help of two other businessmen who also worked with Otto they kept Otto’s business running, fed all seven people in hiding and spent considerable time with the families just keeping them appraised of the current news, celebrated holidays and birthdays, and in general gave them a lifeline to the outside world. Miep lived in constant fear of being arrested without the hidden group’s knowledge of what had happened to her. She was an extraordinarily brave woman who risked her life on a daily basis for her friends. The book explains why she was never arrested for helping the Franks and their friends and, for me, it answered my final questions.
Other readers might have questions and I hope that by reading the three books everyone will have enough explanation. The books are each readable on their own but by the time I was finished with the three I realized how well they combined to cover the broader stories of the rest of the main players in the events that occurred. It is a fascinating true story and these books and the DVD bring all of it to life for any reader.