Anne Frank And Family Captured

I had the good fortune to travel to Europe when I was 12 years old. We visited London, Paris, spent most of our time in Ireland (the home of our ancestors)-and Amsterdam.

While in The Netherlands (which I was still calling “Holland” while trying to find a pair of wooden shoes to fit my pre-teen feet), my parents took my sister and I to the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family were holed up-trying to avoid the Nazis.

At the time, I had certainly heard of Anne Frank-knew about the diary she kept-but I hadn’t read it—and, like most people, I suppose, was woefully under informed about the Holocaust.

Although much of my trip has faded in the nearly 40 years since I was there, the trip to the Anne Frank house has remained with me. Seeing the bookcase give way to a secret passage to the attic still gives me chills.

It was on this date in 1944 that the Nazi Gestapo, acting on a tip from a Dutch informer-captured Anne and her family. After two YEARS in hiding, they were sent to a concentration camp, where Anne and nearly all the others perished. For some reason, the diary was not confiscated-and its survival gave voice to the victims of the Holocaust following it being published in 1947. Her father Otto was a survivor—and felt that her story should be shared with the world. An instant bestseller, it has been translated into 50 languages.

Below is a short video clip of the place where Anne Frank lived for two years in hiding:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8EL6lR_7X0

It is difficult to imagine the emotions of those people, day after day living in terror-having to remain completely silent for hours on end during the day when the building was occupied. Imagine what it must have been like to be discovered after all that time in seclusion!

Anne made her last diary entry on August 1, 1944. Three days later, it was all over. Shipped to Auschwitz concentration camp—and then to Bergen-Belsen. Anne and her sister Margot caught typhus in the deplorable conditions and died in early March 1945. She would never know that the words she penned in hiding would be read and remembered by millions of people the world over.

I know there are people who believe the Holocaust never occurred. Whether out of sheer ignorance in the face of indisputable evidence-or disbelief that human beings could inflict such horror on others is immaterial. It happened-and Anne Frank was one of the few who could articulate the experience –through the eyes of a young person whose life was suddenly turned upside down—because of her ethnicity.

As a Catholic Irishman, I will never know the feelings, the depth of understanding that the Jewish people have borne. I can understand, however, the simple story of a young girl who grew into womanhood in an attic in Amsterdam.