Earn Anne Frank: The Biography Drafted By Melissa Müller Exhibited In Booklet

first read Anne Franks diary which should be required reading for everyone many years ago, and reread it in thes after visiting the house in Amsterdam where she and her family spent two and half years hiding in the Secret Annex.
Ive picked up the Diary again for the third time now that Ive 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 isnt just about Anne, although its 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 Annes 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 Annes 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,.
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 AuschwitzBirkenau, Its 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 withother women in a lice and rat infested barracks originally intended to be a stable forhorses.
Afterweeks and with Russian troops onlymiles 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 werent much better for Anne after she was moved to an even more crowded barracks where she managed to survive throughout a winter of subzero temperatures, But sometime between the end of February and midMarch her endurance ran out and she died of the typhus epidemic that had also claimed her sisters life, Although we know from the outset that Annes story has a brutally tragic ending, its even more difficult to read knowing that BergenBelsen was the first of the German death camps to be liberated by the British who arrived within two weeks of Annes death.

Some people feel its too depressing to read books like this one, But I think its 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,




I bought this book at the Ann Frank House in Amsterdam, The house was the single most moving "monument" I've ever visited, Heartbreaking, yet filled with hope because of the great risk so many people took in helping hide the Frank family, It was a reminder that although the world is filled with great evil, it is also filled with great kindness and compassion,

Melissa Muller did an excellent job of portraying Ann as a real teenager, and not as the Jewish martyr that so many authors tend to do, She was a real, flawed, human being, with hopes, dreams, ambitions and flaws,

The real hero of this biography was Otto Frank Ann's father, The choices he made were heartbreaking, but necessary to keep his family together, In a time when father's tended to be distant, Otto was highly involved in his children's lives, and loved them beyond anything else, He was a wonderfully strong man who gave his entire soul to try and save his family, which he ultimately could not do,

The author also did an excellent job of painting a picture of what life was like during WWII Amsterdam, It's difficult to imagine such a liberal, progressive city being occupied by the Nazis, Ms. Muller helped explain how it was able to happen,

A well researched, thoughful and honest tribute to Ann Frank and her family, One might think that if you have read Anne Frank's diary, you would know everything there is to know about Anne, but you would be wrong, Melissa Muller does an incredible job of fleshing out Anne's diary with writings, photos, and historical records from the time,

One of the things that always saddens me the most about Anne Frank is how close the family came to survival, At the time their annex was raided, the allied invasion had started, If the family could only have remained hidden a little longer, or survived for a little longer in the concentration camps, then none of us would probably ever have heard of Anne Frank.


One of Melissa Muller's most successful feats in this biography is to remind us that Anne was a teenager, in the most turbulent period of her life, At a time when she should have been free to test against her boundaries, to rebel against her parents,to grow into a separate person, she was confined into a small space with her parents and with another family and a middle aged man.
She couldn't even rebel openly against her parents, against the restrictions, because the annex residents had to be as quiet as possible lest someone from outside become aware of their presence.
Inexplicably, when the middle aged dentist moves into the annex, Anne is the one who has to room with him, Thinking back to my own teenaged years, I can only imagine how horrible that must have been for Anne,

Muller does an excellent job of letting us see what else was going on during Anne's short life, Whereas previous books i have read have been slightly critical of Otto Frank for not getting his family out of Holland before the war started, Muller makes it clear that Otto tried to get his family to another country, to Switzerland, South America or the US, but was thwarted on all sides by cumbersome Visa requirements and financial restrictions.



It struck me when I read this book how little we have learned from the lessons of the Holocaust, We decry the murder ofmillion Jews, but ignore the modern day holocausts that are occurring in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Central America, We shake our heads at the barriers that were put in place to keep the Jews from emigrating to other countries, but we do nothing to ease the barriers we have in place today to keep people from immigrating to the US.



I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in World War II, in Anne Frank, or, for that matter, for anyone who has a stake in the immigration issues that exist today.
قبلعاما ولدت آن فرانك الفتاة اليهودية التي أصبحت مذكراتها أبلغ الشهادات ضد الممارسات النازية إدانة وتأثيرا.

في عاموبعد إحتلال الألمان لأمستردام بدأ النازيون حملة منظمة لإعتقال اليهود بهدف إرسالهم إلى معسكرات التعذيب. اختبأت عائلة آن فرانك مع أربعة آخرين في منزل خلف شركة والدها. كان هذا هو المكان الذي بدأت فيه آن بتدوين يومياتها التي جعلتها مشهورة بعد الحرب.

تدبرت العائلة أمر اختبائها في هذا المنزل من الألمان لمدة سنتين لكن تم أخيرا الوشاية بها و أسرها. توفيت آن في معسكر الاعتقال وهي بعمر الخامسة عشر فقط. توفيت أختها وأمها هناك أيضا أما والدها أوتو فرانك فقد نجا من المعسكر وعاد إلى أمستردام حيث قام بنشر مذكرات ابنته وإطلاق مؤسسة آن فرانك.

اليوم يعد المنزل الذي اختبأت فيه آن وعائلتها أحد المزارات السياحية التي يزورها آلاف السياح يوميا.

كتبت في دفتر الزوار بعد أن انتهيت من جولتي في منزل آن فرانك: لا تزال آن فرانك بعدعاما من وفاتها تموت يوميا في غزة. . ولا تتمكن من كتابة مذكراتها!

رغم أنني عادة أتأثر بهذا النوع من الكتب وتصيبني قراءتها بنوع من الإحباط إلا أن هذا الكتاب لم يحرك في داخلي شيئا رغم الجهد المبذول في كتابته ولهذا منحته أربع نجمات لسبب واحد ووحيد. . ألا وهو أنني لم أعد قادرا على هضم النفاق الصهيوني الذي يرفع قصة آن فرانك كقميص عثمان في وجه كل من ينتقد إجرام إسرائيل وممارساتها البربرية!

لتتنزل رحمة الله على روحك يا آن فرانك ولعناته على أحفادك الذين فاق إجرامهم إجرام النازيين الذين قتلوك! I have finally made it to the end of Anne Frank: The Biography, It took me a long time to finish this book, not because it is a long book, I read lots of long books, but I wanted to read it carefully, there is a lot of detail in it, and it was in the Christmas season, which for me is any time between the middle of October to the beginning of January.
I wouldn't mind having all the lights and trees and things up longer, but our electric bill was over,for December, the largest one yet, so I got myself in the right mood, which isn't a good one, and took it all down, None of this has anything to do with Anne Frank except I kept starting over again, to refresh my memory on what I had already read, and finally gave up and didn't pick it up again until January.
Anyway, on to the book,

It says on the book that it was first published in, but I happen to have the second edition which says this:

Now, sixteen years after the book first appeared, much new information has come to light.
Revised and updated with more than thirty percent new material, this is an indispensable volume for all those who seek a deeper understanding of Anne Frank and the brutal times in which she lived and died.


I'm not sure I'd call it indispensable, All those who were seeking a deeper understanding of Anne Frank before didn't have this book, so I suppose they found that understanding someplace else, But there was a lot in this book about Anne and those around her that I ever knew, The first chapter begins with the arrest, It is just another day, the same as yesterday, and the day before that, since the beginning of living in the hiding place, But this day, this ordinary day suddenly there are several men in the shop, German police,

SD members, some in civilian clothes, some in uniforms, all armed, And in a few minutes we have these men appear in this ordinary annex to the surprise of our eight people hiding there, They are arrested, taken away, and after they are gone Miep and Bep enter the annex and find Anne's diary and many loose pages on the floor, They gather them up and put them in Miep's desk drawer to be given back to Anne when the war is over and Anne returns,

The second chapter puts us back in Frankfurt, Anne has just been born and Margo is now a threeyear old, The Franks are living in an apartment in the city, From here most of what I read, the things about their families and friends I hadn't know before, The book tells how Edith and Otto met, their wedding, and their honeymoon in Italy, We learn of Otto and Edith's parents, their brothers and sisters too, Otto was a bit of a world traveler when he was young spending time in Spain, England, New York, but he loved Germany best,

As the girl's grow we find that Margot obeyed orders without protest, Anne on the other hand was willful refusing rules of behavior that Margot obeyed without protest, And we meet tenyearold Gertrud Naumann who becomes a favorite in the Frank home, often staying and taking care of the girls, For years after they move away they still keep in touch with Gertrud by writing, Things aren't always parties, vacations, and happy visits of the Franks and their friends, for we also have the first volume of Mein Kampf published in, that for some reason people actually seemed to like.
Anyway, the second part was published in, and finally you could buy the entire thing, if you really wanted to, fromand on, I guess you can buy it now if you had any desire to, but I'm not sure, Otto Frank leafed through it and read a few passages in it, So did I, I also leafed through, read a few passages, and quit, there are too many books out there to read than spend time on that one,

The next chapter is titled "Exodus" and is it about just what it says, We are far enough along, or the Nazis are, that they are now forbidding all kinds of stuff that doesn't make any sense at all, Meanwhile Margot is going to school where she was a good pupil with excellent grades, She was one of only five Jewish girls in her class, but no one cared, The other thirty seven girls didn't even seem to notice, the teachers didn't care, Margot was no different from anyone else, All was still bright in her child's world, But we're told, the adults' world was rapidly darkening, And finally the Franks leave for Amsterdam where everything is better, For a while that is,

Each chapter brings us farther along in the journey of the Franks, The next chapter being "A New Home", followed by "Growing Danger" and finally the last time we see Anne, "The Last Train", I could say more, so much happened after that last diary entry by Anne we all know, and we see that in this bookmore, what happened when the diary ended, but I have the feeling that this is getting a little long or a lot long.
There is so much to learn in this book, I will let Otto end the review:

"I am in good health and am holding up well despite the sad news of my wife's death", Otto wrote.
"If only I can get my children back!" Weeks of anxiety followed, . "There is never news from Russianoccupied territory," Otto complained to his sister, "and that is why I cannot get any news about the children in case they are in Germany.
Up to now I was convinced I would see them return but now I begin to doubt, " "I can't think how I can go on without the children, having also lost Edith, "

and finally, "there is so much misery around me that I try to help where I can, I feel no bitterness, because I saw so much misery, lived in wretchedness and meet all over the same situation, So I cannot say: Why me Out of the over than,Jews who were departed about,returned as yet, "
.