It was at Belsen that Anne and her school friend, Lies, met again, for Lies and her family had been sent there earlier and had been placed in a separate section for “neutral foreigners.” In that “privileged position,” Lies was still able to receive packages through the Red Cross Organization. When she heard that a group of people had arrived from Auschwitz, Lies managed to make contact with Anne, across the barbed wire fence that separated them, and Lies describes her thus: “She was in rags. I saw her emaciated, sunken face in the darkness. Her eyes were very large. We cried and cried.”
Anne was freezing and starving, and Lies attempted to get some extra food across the fence to her friend. She packed up a woolen jacket, zwieback (rusks), sugar, a tin of sardines, and threw it all across the fence. All she heard, however, were screams, and Anne crying. When she shouted and asked what had happened, Anne called back, weeping: “A woman caught it and won’t give it to me.” Lies told Anne to come back again the following night, and that time, Anne caught the packet, but this time it contained only zwieback and a pair of stockings.
Anne’s sister, Margot, died of typhus at the end of February (or the beginning of March), after having been critically ill and in a coma for days. Anne was already sick at the time, and she was not informed about her sister’s death. After a few days, however, Anne sensed what had happened, and soon afterward, she herself died, peacefully, feeling that nothing bad was happening to her, shortly before the camp was liberated by the Allies.
In summary, when the Nazis occupied Holland in 1940, Anne was only eleven years old. Like many parents, Mr. and Mrs. Frank tried to protect their children from the edicts issued by the Nazis, and although the girls knew that they had to change schools and wear the “yellow star” (signifying that they were Jews) on their clothes, they did not have any direct contact with Nazis. In general, the Dutch people were sympathetic to the plight of the Jews, and many of them helped them with a kind word or little gifts. The grisly, wholesale murder of Jews in concentration camps did not really get underway until 1942, and in 1940 no one could imagine that the annihilation of an entire people was possible.
By the time Anne and the others went into hiding, in June 1942, they knew that Jews were rounded up, beaten, stripped of their possessions, and sent East. They suspected that the conditions out there were not good, but Nazi propaganda insisted that the “resettlement” was to the Jews’ benefit, and there was no clear information to be obtained as to what really went on there. In her diary, Anne writes: “Our many Jewish friends are being taken away by the dozen. These people are treated by the Gestapo without a shred of decency, being loaded into cattle trucks and sent to Westerbork. . . . Most of the people in the camp are branded as inmates by their shaven heads. . . . If it is as bad as this in Holland, whatever will it be like in the distant and barbarous regions they are sent to? We assume that most of them are murdered. The English radio speaks of their being gassed” (October 9, 1942).
From this, and other remarks which Anne makes, we know that she and the other members of the group in hiding knew what was happening to the Jews on the outside, to a greater or lesser extent. There was a radio in the office, and they would creep downstairs at night and listen to the BBC broadcasts, so that they had a fairly good idea of what was going on.
The windows of the “Secret Annexe” allowed its inmates to see something of what was going on in the streets outside, and on December 13, 1942, Anne writes, “I saw two Jews through the curtain yesterday; it was a horrible feeling, just as if I’d betrayed them and was now watching them in their misery.” The members of the group of “protectors” (or helpers) also brought eyewitness accounts of what was happening to Jews outside.
Every sudden, unexplained noise, every real or imagined break-in by burglars, and every stranger who visited the office and the warehouse was a continuous source of fear and concern for the people in the “Secret Annexe.” There were several occasions when they sat up all night, afraid to make a sound, fearing that they had heard some-one moving around downstairs.
The Allies’ air raids on Amsterdam, the anti-air cannon fired by the Nazis, and the aerial dog-fights between Nazi and Allied aircraft in the sky also constituted a source of alarm for the group in hiding. The building was old and could easily catch fire. For that reason, they had each prepared a small bag of basic necessities to grab in case they had to leave the building in a hurry. But that, of course, was the greatest danger, as it involved their worst fear of all: discovery by the Nazis.
“We had a short circuit last evening, and on top of that the guns kept banging away all the time. I still haven’t got over my fear of everything connected with shooting and planes, and I creep into Daddy’s bed nearly every night for comfort.” That is how Anne’s entry for March 10, 1943, begins. This kind of remark recurs at intervals through the diary, but it would seem that eventually the inmates of the “Secret Annexe” did become accustomed to the situation. After all, two years in hiding is a long time, and they knew that the Allies were advancing and the situation of the Nazis was deteriorating. By the time the diary ends, in August 1944, Anne had every reason to be optimistic, and she was even thinking about going back to school.
