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Imagine that you are living good moments, sharing your happiness with people you love, your family and friends, in a place full of peace or harmony. Now, imagine all of these dreams destroyed by war, specifically the Second World War. You’ve got to leave your life and wishes and start all over again
That was the reality about sixty years ago. And Anne Frank, a mere little girl had gone though it. I’m talking about, probably, the most frightening and terrible page of our history: The Holocaust.
The beginning of the 20th century was a period of changes and revolutions. The conceptions of life were changing too. It was the time of Freud, and his psychoanalysis, the machine invasion, the growth of Capitalism, the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Crisis of 1929 and the 1930s depression, and finally the Second World War. In the 30s, the Nazis came to power in Germany, led by Hitler, and the world changed more than expected.
Anne Frank was born on June 12th, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, in a family who was originally Jewish. Afraid of what Hitler, and his Nazi Army could do to his family, Otto Frank (Anne’s father), decided to move to Amsterdam, in 1934.
There, they were living a free and normal life. Anne started writing her, now famous, diary one month before the Nazis’ invasion in Amsterdam, showing and applying their fiend conception of Arian laws.
At that moment, the Jews were been treated as animals, suffering all kinds of prejudice; careers seemed almost non-existent; their stores were closed, and finally, they were forced to wear the symbol of David as identification and segregated into the ghetto. People were killed, and terror fueled their blood.
Anne’s older sister, Margot, received a report from the Nazis and their family decided to hide themselves in a “secret upstairs annex” (as they used to call it), with another family, the Van Pels. Anne kept herself hidden from 1942 to 1944, and her diary got longer with every passing day.
The first time I have read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, everything that was important to me seems insignificant. I felt as though her problems were mine, her life was actually mine. With that consciousness, I started suffering with her. The three following times that I read it, were just like if I were reading different books, because I was discovering new things and I realized how I was growing up with the beauty and truth of her words and life. The story of Anne Frank is of someone who was killed slowly, every day a little more, by Hitler’s “Arian System”, we learn with her joy, sadness, wishes, hopes and heart, of the harsh reality that some people had to endure.
She kept her beliefs until the last moment. The end of the diary is dated in November, 1944, when the Franks were found out and captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz and then to the Berger-Belsen concentration camp.
Anne and Margot could endure some months in Berger-Belsen. In February, 1945, Margot died of typhus. Anne, thinking she was the only one left, just gave up. She died in March, 1945. One month later the camp she was held in was liberated on April 12th, 1945. When the war finished, the only person of her family still alive was her father, Mr. Frank, who published Anne’s diary.
If you stop and think, you’ll realize how important that book is. It warns us about the consequences of war and it’s one of the best examples of what prejudice can do for the minorities and to human beings. I’ m just one voice here. All over the world we find people that were touched by that girl. Someone once said that “…there are some stories that the world has to know and believe, so we won’t permit that war and violence persist”
People need to have the privilege living the “right” life.
“…I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are still truly good at heart … I simply can’t build up my hopes on foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. I see the world being gradually turned into wilderness; I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the suffering of millions; and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again… I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out…” Anne Frank
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Gabriela Gonçalves Barbosa
Gabriela Gonçalves Barbosa
Estudante - UEPB
gabrielauepb@gmail.com
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Comments
HElLo ThErE!!! qwerty | Feb 1st, 2004
Hey! I
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