Anne Frank

Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (12 June 1929 – early March 1945) is one of the most renowned and most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Acknowledged for the quality of her writing, her diary has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films.

Born in the city of Frankfurt am Main in Weimar Germany, she lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. By nationality, she was officially considered a German until 1941, when she lost her nationality owing to the anti-Semitic policies of Nazi Germany (the Nuremberg Laws).

She gained international fame posthumously following the publication of her diary, which documents her experiences hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.

The Frank family moved from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933, the year the Nazis gained control over Germany. By the beginning of 1940, they were trapped in Amsterdam by the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in the hidden rooms of Anne's father, Otto Frank's, office building.

After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were eventually transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they both died of typhus in March 1945.

Otto Frank, the only survivor of the family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that Anne's diary had been saved, and his efforts led to its publication in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl.

It has since been translated into many languages. The diary, which was given to Anne on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life from 12 June 1942 until 1 August 1944.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank

Margot Frank

Margot Betti Frank (16 February 1926 – early March 1945) was the older sister of Anne Frank, whose deportation order from the Gestapo hastened the Frank family into hiding, and who subsequently perished in Bergen-Belsen. According to the diary of her sister Anne, Margot was keeping a diary as well, but no trace of Margot's diary has ever been found.

Margot Betti Frank, named after her maternal aunt Bettina Holländer (1898-1914), was born in Frankfurt-am-Main and lived in the outer suburbs of the city with her parents, Otto Frank and Edith Frank-Holländer, and her sister, Anne Frank, during the early years of her life.

Margot Frank was 16 years of age when she and her family went into hiding. Her family hid in the back upper floors of her father's office building.

She attended the Ludwig-Richter School in Frankfurt-am-Main until the appointment of Adolf Hitler on 30 January 1933 to the position of Chancellor in Germany brought an increase of anti-Jewish measures, among which was the expulsion of Jewish schoolchildren from non-denominational schools.

In response to the rising tide of anti-semitism, the family decided to follow the 63,000 other Jews who had left Germany that year and immigrate to the Netherlands. Edith Frank-Holländer and her daughters moved in with her mother in Aachen in June 1934 until Otto Frank found accommodation in Amsterdam.

Margot and her mother left Germany to join him on 5 December 1933, followed by Anne in February 1934. Margot was enrolled in an elementary school on Amsterdam's Jekerstraat, close to their new address in Amsterdam South, and achieved excellent academic results until an anti-Jewish law imposed a year after the 1940 German invasion of the Netherlands demanded her removal to a Jewish lyceum.

There she displayed the studiousness and intelligence which had made her noteworthy at her previous schools, and was remembered by former pupils as virtuous, reserved, and deeply religious. In her diary, Anne recounted instances of their mother suggesting she emulate Margot, and although she wrote of admiring her sister in some respects, Anne sought to define her own individuality without role models.

While Anne inherited her father's ambivalence towards the Torah, Margot followed her mother's example and became involved in Amsterdam's Jewish community. She took Hebrew classes, attended synagogue, and in 1941 joined a Dutch Zionist club for young people who wanted to immigrate to Land of Israel to found a Jewish state, where, according to Anne, she wished to become a midwife.

On 5 July 1942, she received a notice to report to a labor camp and the next day went into hiding with her family at her father's office building. They were later joined by four other Jewish refugees and remained hidden for two years until they were betrayed on 4 August 1944 by someone who was never identified.

Along with the other occupants of the hiding place, Margot Frank was arrested by the Gestapo and detained in their headquarters overnight before being taken to a cell in a nearby prison for three days. From here they were taken by train, on 8 August, to the Dutch Westerbork concentration camp.

As the Frank family had failed to respond to Margot's call-up notice in 1942, and had been discovered in hiding, they (along with Fritz Pfeffer and the Van Pels family) were declared criminals by the camp's officials and detained in its Punishment Block to be sentenced to hard labor in the battery dismantling plant. They remained here until they were selected for Westerbork's last deportation to Auschwitz on 3 September 1944.

Margot and Anne were transferred to Bergen-Belsen on 30 October, where both contracted typhus in the winter of 1944. Margot Frank died several days before her sister Anne in early March 1945. Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper and her sister Lin Jaldati buried them together in one of the camp's mass graves.

Otto Frank was the only one to survive out of the eight that went into hiding. When he returned to Amsterdam he was given Anne's diary by Miep Gies, which he later published. A diary kept by Margot Frank during her time in hiding is mentioned by Anne in her writings but has never been found. However, letters written by both sisters to American pen pals were published in 2003.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margot_Frank

Hana Brady

Hana Brady (Hana "Hanička" Bradyová) (16 May 1931 in Nové Město na Moravě – 23 October 1944 in Auschwitz, Poland) was a 13-year old Jewish girl murdered in the Holocaust. She is the subject of the 2002 non-fiction children's book Hana's Suitcase, written by Karen Levine.

Hana Brady was born in Nové Mesto, Czechoslovakia. She and her older brother George watched their parents being arrested and taken away by the Nazis. Hana and George were sent to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp. In 1944, Hana was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. While her brother survived by working as a labourer, Hana was sent to the gas chambers a few hours after her arrival on 23 October 1944.

Hana's Suitcase

The story of Hana Brady first became public when Fumiko Ishioka （石岡史子 Ishioka Fumiko）, a Japanese educator and director of the Japanese non-profit Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center exhibited Hana's suitcase in 2000 as a relic of the concentration camp. Visiting Auschwitz in 1999, Ishioka requested a loan of children's items, things that would convey the story of the Holocaust to other children.

I went to Auschwitz in 1999 and asked for a loan of some children's items. I specifically asked [for] a shoe, this little shoe, and I asked for a suitcase. A suitcase – that really tells you a story of how children, who used to live happily with their family, were transported and were allowed to take only one suitcase. [The suitcase] shows this journey. I thought an object like a suitcase would be a very important item to let children in Japan learn what happened to children in the Holocaust.
—Fumiko Ishioka

The suitcase turned out to be a very capable means of telling the story of the Holocaust, reaching out to children at their level.

In Japan, the Holocaust is so far away. Some people don't see any connection whatsoever. But when they look at the suitcase, these children were really shocked. 'She was my age.' That really helped them a lot, to focus on this one little life that was lost. They could really relate her to themselves and try to think of why such a thing could happen to a girl like her. Why the Jewish people? And why children? They then realized there were one and a half million children. —Fumiko Ishioka

The suitcase has large writing on it, a name and birthdate and the German word, Waisenkind (orphan). Ishioka began painstakingly researching Hana's life and eventually found her surviving brother in Canada. The story of Hana Brady and how her suitcase led Ishioka to Toronto became the subject of a CBC documentary. The producer of that documentary, Karen Levine was urged to turn the story into a book by a friend who was a publisher and whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Said Levine, "I first read about Hana’s suitcase in December 2000. I read about Hana’s suitcase in The Canadian Jewish News. My heart started to beat. I fell in love with the story instantly. This was a different kind of Holocaust story. It had at its centre a terrible sadness, one we all know too well. But it had a modern layer to it that lifted it up, that had connection, and even redemption."

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hana_Brady#Hana.27s_Suitcase