80 Years Later: Anne Frank’s Sister Breaks Her Silence

On June 12, 1942, a young girl received a diary for her 13th birthday. The gift was given during one of the most  turbulent and bloody chapters in modern history. Just a decade before a terrifying  force had been unleashed in Germany, the Nazi party, led by Adolf Hitler, took.

. . power and began to systematically persecute  the German Jewish population.

It was really very scary to go out in  the street to do your shopping and many, many people disappeared. many were arrested. Forced emigration, imprisonment and murder were becoming daily  threats for Jews and as World War II broke out and Hitler gained more and  more territory in Europe.

Those Jews who fled persecution found  themselves under threat once again, unable to escape. After several weeks and months, the measures against the Jewish  population started to bite. She was not allowed to go into parks, she was not allowed to go to the movies, she was not allowed to.

. . use public transport, which was a very visible measure also  in terms of the persecution of the Jews.

The girl in receipt of the diary was Anne Frank, a young German Jew who had fled with  her family from Frankfurt in 1933, but now found herself trapped  in occupied Amsterdam. For some she is a victim, for some she is a source of inspiration, for some she is a brilliant writer. As she put pen to paper to record her experience, She could never have envisaged that it would lead to one of the most well-known works  of literature the world has ever seen.

People said, well, who is interested in a diary of a young girl? Nor could she have realized that it would also  be the document to a harrowing and ultimately tragic story of persecution inflicted on a child  who had become the symbol of millions of others. I'm very impressed with you, Mr Nolan.

It's a remarkable fact that a  book has been able to inspire. so many people in so many different ways. Through her, of course, the world is learning about what has happened.

The story of Eva Schloss, also an immigrant to Amsterdam, would run in parallel to that of Anne Frank. She could not have imagined, however, how inextricably their lives would be linked. One day a little girl came  to me and introduced herself, and she said it was Anne Frank.

Separately, Eva and Anne would spend two years hiding  from the constant threat of the Nazis. These two young girls would  share similar experiences, but their lives would have  very different outcomes. There are one and a half  million children murdered, but if you talk about that, people can't imagine.

So Anne has become a symbol for all  those one and a half million victims. Eva survived to tell her story. but the legacy Anne Frank left  would end up having a global impact.

In the Holocaust, Anne has become the most  important victim actually. Anne was born to a German Jewish family. Her father's family had lived in  Frankfurt for seven generations.

They were very culturalized. They were very settled in Frankfurt. Her mother was Edith Hollander, also from a Jewish family.

Anne's father was Otto Frank, seventh generation German Jew, who had actually fought in the First World  War and been decorated with the Iron Cross. Three years before Anne was born, her sister Margot was born. Anne was born on the 12th of June 1929.

She was a pretty normal girl  growing up in a German family. The lives were very much like  kids live their lives today, playing in the street, going to birthday parties, a very normal childhood. In 1933, the Nazi Party seized power in Germany.

Hitler's antisemitism meant that Jewish  persecution was implemented immediately, and the very normal childhood experience by Anne and thousands of other Jewish children  in Germany would be changed forever. She came with her family to the  Netherlands in the beginning of 1934. Nuremberg laws were introduced and life became  increasingly difficult for German Jewish families.

All books of Jewish authors are  ordered burned in the public squares. Authors, scientists, artists are driven from Germany. 1600 have fled to Holland.

12,000 to France. 1200 to Spain. Three thousand to Czechoslovakia.

The Franks chose to move to Holland  and in 1934 arrived in Amsterdam. Otto knew people in the city and  went originally himself to start, see if he could find work, start a business, which he did. Anne and Margot both enrolled in Dutch schools and  both seemed to adapt well to life in Amsterdam.

Basically she was. . .

Raised as a Dutch girl in the 30s, went to school. She was fond of reading. She read a lot of books.

She was actually quite precocious, though, for a 13-year-old and quite self-absorbed. She was the chatterbox in the class and  always getting into trouble with the teacher. The family quickly settled  into their new surroundings.

The Netherlands became their home and a  normal life could once again be resumed. Throughout the 1930s Hitler made several  territory gains in Europe, one being the Anschluss in Austria in 1938. Eva Schloss, a child living in Vienna at the time, found herself having to move.

I was born in Vienna in 1929 and I had an older  brother who was three years older than me. We were a very happy family  there and all this ended up abruptly when the Nazis came in and we were. .

. lucky enough to be able to get out in time. They first fled to Belgium before  finally settling in Amsterdam, another Jewish family fleeing from persecution.

Amsterdam was a lovely city. The people were very welcoming to refugees. I went back to school.

I got a bicycle. We were together again as a family. And it looked as if life was going to  get back to some kind of normality.

The years in Amsterdam before  1940 were very peaceful, very normal, and they felt that they had found  a haven of safety from the Nazis. We moved onto the Merwedeplein, a modern square in Amsterdam. Well, it was actually more a triangle.

The apartments were on both sides, and it was a big open space where all the  local children came to play after school. And one day a little girl. .

. came to me and introduced herself  and she said it was Anna Frank. We were 11 when we met.

I was more a tomboy. I liked to play with the boys and  as well tricks on the bicycle. And Anna was more sophisticated little girl, interested in her clothes, in hairstyles, in film stars and as well in boys already.

She said Her family comes from Germany and  I couldn't speak much Dutch yet. So she took me up to her  apartment and I met her family. During this meeting between Ava and  Anne on the square of the Merwedeplan, neither would be able to comprehend how  their lives were going to be intertwined and their idyllic life in Amsterdam  would soon be turned upside down.

They chose Amsterdam because  in the First World War, Holland was neutral. And they felt that. .

. there would be a refuge for  Jewish people in Holland. Unfortunately, in May 1940, the Germans invaded that country as well.

Towns and villages were in flames as the  invaders rolled on at a breathless pace, encircling the defenders  and slashing their armies, destroying in the name of a new order the homes  and shops of those who had dared to resist. The Nazi machine broke the back  of Dutch resistance in four days. After the occupation of the  Netherlands in May 1940, life seemed to stay pretty normal  and pretty much the same as before.

Life continued, but I must say we were afraid what would happen. And after several weeks and months, the measures against the Jewish  population started to bite. Jews not wanted.

Jews keep out. Even in parks, if Jews are allowed at all, special yellow benches are set apart, labeled for Jews. She was not allowed to go into.

. . parks, she was not allowed to go to movies, she was not allowed to use public transport.

Not theater, swimming pools, those were things which upset us children. And then we had to leave our school  and we had to wear yellow star. Which was a very visible measure also  in terms of the persecution of the Jews.

And then they started to arrest people, especially young people, male. So it was really very scary to go out in the  street to do your shopping or anything like that. And many, many people disappeared in 1941.

Many, many were arrested. The turmoil and persecution faced by the Jews  in Amsterdam was beginning to become unbearable, but it would be a letter sent to all Jewish youths which would decide the  fates of both Anne and Eber. After two years, in July 1942, about 10,000 young people got a call-up notice to be deported to Germany to  work in German factories.

My brother Heinz, who was 16 at the time, and Anna Sister Margot and many, many others of their friends  got this call-up notice. Many parents sent their young people, but they didn't end up in  Germany working in factories. They were sent to Mauthausen  and just murdered there.

So it was very, very difficult, but nothing, of course, what was going to follow up. What came next would see tragedy  beyond compare for Eber and Anne. Both their lives would play out to  the backdrop of war and mass genocide.

The takeover of Germany by the Nazi regime in 1933  and the subsequent occupation of the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia forced much of the Jewish  population to emigrate to avoid persecution. The Netherlands was one of many countries that  took in Jews from persecuted areas of Europe, and both the families of  Anne Frank and subsequently Eva Schloss would establish their home there. Unlike World War I, where they remained neutral, Holland would find itself in  Nazi-occupied territory in 1940, and once again the Jews who had fled persecution found themselves the persecuted.

Life for both Ava and Anne  would become increasingly hard, but it would be a letter sent to their older siblings which would have  irreversible consequences. That was the time that my father  and Otto Frank and many other parents decided they wouldn't send their children, but they would go into hiding. Well, they tried to leave the impression that they  had to leave for Switzerland, where the family of Anne's father lived.

Otto decided because where he worked  was a warehouse with rooms above. The annex to the house was pretty much unused, so it was an empty space. These annexes, they are a common feature in Amsterdam.

There were lots of sort of staircases and rooms  at the back that could be easily obscured. So he started making plans in 1942 that should there be an eventuality, the family would. go into hiding.

Now it came more suddenly than he had anticipated. After Ava's brother had received his letter, Ava's father, like Otto Frank, would decide that hiding would be the only option. Without having prepared a hiding place, Ava's family would have to seek an alternative  method which would see her family divided.

We had to split up. Nobody wanted to take a family of four. So I went with my mother and my father  and mother went to a different hiding.

place. Anne Frank and her family entered the  hiding place at 263 Prinsengracht on July 6, 1942. A few weeks later, the Van Pels moved in.

Herman Van Pels was Otto Frank's business partner. His wife August and their son Peter  all joined the Franks in the annex. The last person to enter  the annex was Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist from Berlin who emigrated to the  Netherlands after the Kristallnacht in 1938.

So you imagine there were in  these limited number of rooms, there were eight people in hiding. I think Anne's relationship with these people is  very much influenced by the fact that she was 13, 14 years old. She was a young teenage girl and  with a very lively character.

really fell trapped. I was more an outdoor child so I found it very  very difficult to sit still day in day out. Missed my father and my brother and my friends.

So I think the strife for freedom is  is very much dominant in the diary. The living conditions in the secret  annex were extremely cramped. Anne, having been forced to share  a room with Fritz Pfeffer, who in the diary she refers to as Dr Dussel, would find solace in her writing.

Her writing was partly an act of catharsis, as with many teenagers, but it was also spurred on by a  radio broadcast that she happened to hear on the BBC World Service. There was radio broadcast because you  were not allowed to listen to the BBC, but people did. Somebody from the interior minister, I believe it was, said everybody who can should write a diary about  what happened to them during this occupation.

It's very important for the future. The first entries in the hiding place reflect  a sort of sense of adventure and excitement. However, the boredom and tedium soon set in.

followed by the fear as they  heard the bombing raids. When you read the diary, you read about all these scenes and all her emotions when it comes to her  relation with the other people. She loved her father.

She had kind of a difficult  relationship with her mother. Her relationship with her sister, Margot, was on and off. During the course of those two years, she also falls in love with Peter, the boy in the secret annex.

However, Towards the end of the diary, she's outgrown him and she's concentrating  more on her personal philosophy, how difficult it is to have those ideals  when everything around her is crumbling. The Germans made house searches in the apartments  because they really wanted to catch every Jew. So we had a hiding place within the hiding place.

The people from the resistance came and built hiding places where we could go when  they came at night to search for us. Otto had secured a loyal group of his  workforce to aid the Franks in hiding. They were Miep Gies, the office administrator, Jo Kleiman, and Victor Kugler, the office managers, and Otto's secretary, Beb Foskiel.

Well, the four employees of Otto Frank  enabled them to stay here for 25 months. They provided them with food, with drinks, with books, very important for Anne. To look after eight people for over two years  was an incredible burden of responsibility.

They made a choice to risk their own  lives in order to save that of others. Throughout their time in the annex, the eight of them would often tune in to radio  broadcasts to listen to the progress of the war. They were heartened to learn that on June 6, 1944, the Allied force it had landed in Normandy.

More than 800,000 Allied troops entered  occupied France by the end of June, which along with the Russian forces to the east  would create a two-front war for the Nazis. This was the beginning of the end of World War II. The invasion was a great source of  motivation to Anne and all those in hiding.

They could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Otto would listen for news of the advancement and plot it on a small map of Normandy  hung on the wall of the annex. Eva, however, would not hear of the Normandy landings and  Allied advancement as she and her mother Elfride, along with her father and her brother Heinz, had.

had been betrayed and captured in May 1944. After two years, we were betrayed by a Dutch nurse who  pretended she was a member of the resistance, but she was really working with the Nazis. Unlike Eva Schloss and her family, it would be and continue to be  to this day a complete mystery as to the identity of the person  who betrayed the Frank family.

There was a telephone call in the morning  of August the 4th 1944 where they said that it was a woman's voice who who said that  there were Jews hidden in 263 Prinzergracht. The Franks, the Van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer  were all getting along with their restricted daily routine when the  Dutch police and a Gestapo officer, Carl Silverbauer, entered the office and asked the staff  at gunpoint to open the bookcase. They knew from the anonymous tip-off  exactly what was going on in the building.

They went up to the annex and all were arrested, including two of their helpers, Jo Kleiman and Victor Kugler. Miep Gies had managed to evade arrest. She knew that the authorities would  soon be coming to clear the annex, so managed to rescue what she could.

It was then she found Anne's diary. Knowing that Anne was a budding writer, she placed it safely in her desk drawer. It was there the diary remained, lying dormant, waiting to be reunited with its owner.

Eva's capture had happened on May 11th, 1944, her 15th birthday. They were settling down to breakfast  when there was a knock at the door. The Gestapo barged in and arrested Eva and her  mother and took them to the Gestapo headquarters.

We were first sent to Westerbork, which was a holding camp. And we were immediately put on a  list and transported to Auschwitz. It was in Auschwitz where Eva and her family  would be kept for the duration of the war.

After their capture, the Frank family would follow Eva's  route to Westerbork work camp in the Netherlands and then east to Auschwitz. Anne and Margot were transported to Bergen-Belsen. There was no food.

It was pretty much abandoned. It was riddled with disease. So you imagine the combination of despair, of cold, of starvation and disease.

It was pretty impossible to survive Bergen-Belsen. Anne and Margot's health deteriorated  rapidly in Bergen-Belsen. In March 1945, a typhus epidemic swept through the camp.

And although there are no records, it is this which is believed to have killed  firstly Margot Frank and then two days later. And Frank, the real tragedy lies in  that just a few weeks later, Bergen-Belsen would be  liberated by British forces. With five German attempts to cover up, we found these in the open field.

Clear-cut evidence of beatings and  outright murder was on every hand. Nameless victims were numbered for  records which the Germans destroyed. This was Bergen-Belsen.

Eva and her mother Elfride, along with Otto Frank, all of whom were still in Auschwitz, would each find themselves seeing  out the final days and felt the relief as the Russian troops liberated the camp. All three would not foresee at that time how  inexplicably their lives would become linked, not to just each other, but to Anne Frank and the legacy she would leave. The lives and experience of Anne Frank and Ava Schloss had mirrored one another throughout  the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

Both had been forced to hide  and both had been betrayed, captured and sent to concentration camps. This is where the similarities end, however, as Anne Frank, along with her sister Margot, tragically perished in Bergen-Belsen  just weeks before the liberation. Despite the death of her father, Erik, and brother, Heinz, Eva and her mother both managed to survive the  horrors of Auschwitz along with Otto Frank, Anne's father.

As the Allied troops advanced  from the west and from the east, World War II drew to a close. We were liberated by the Russians  on the 27th of January 1945. And Otto Frank was liberated with us in  Auschwitz and he did the same journey as we did.

We saw him several times, but there were several hundred people. It took him five months to get back to Amsterdam. and the Germans were fighting very, very hard in Poland.

So the Russians took us away from Auschwitz, and the only way  we could travel was eastward, always in cattle trucks, till we ended up in Odessa, and there we waited for the end of the war. And we were, of course, very anxious to get back to Amsterdam, and in Odessa we waited for a  troop transport ship to come. which came eventually and  then we went to Marseille and then all the way up through France to  Belgium and eventually back into Amsterdam.

So from end of January till June we were all the time traveling really. Otto knew that his wife Edith had passed away but he still believed there was some hope  for his two daughters Anne and Margot. But he didn't know about his two girls.

So he always said he had great  hope that they would be alive. And we, of course, as well, my father and brother. Eva, her mother, Otto Frank and hundreds of others would sail from Odessa in the Ukraine to  Marseille in southern France.

From Marseille, they traveled north back to Amsterdam. They arrived in Amsterdam in June 1945, six months after they were  liberated from Auschwitz. The Amsterdam they came back to was not the  same place they had left the previous year.

The threat of the Nazis was no longer there, but their occupation had taken its toll. It had suffered a lot, of course. The last year was the hunger winter, because the Germans took everything the  Dutch produced to feed their own people.

And many, many thousands of Dutch people  perished from starvation. So we were not well received, actually. Not because they didn't want us to come back, but because they had suffered and they didn't really know what to do with  more people who needed help.

Returning to Amsterdam, Otto Frank found that his family home in  the Mvaderplan was no longer available. He couldn't move back in his own apartment  because other people had moved in. He had nowhere to go.

Survivors came back. It was like arriving here from another planet. So Otto moved in with Miep Gies, who was one of the helpers.

It was still around the  corner from the Merida Plan. Eva and her mother, however, found that their apartment was  still there for them to move into. We were lucky we were able to  get into our own apartment, because when we came to Amsterdam it was a  furnished apartment belonging to a Christian.

and she gave it back to us. And we waited for news of our family. Finding refuge with Miep Gies, Otto Frank was still unaware  of the fate of his daughters.

The thought of being reunited  with them kept his hopes alive. So he went to the Central  Station every day where. .

. People arrived from wherever they had been and whatever camp they had been  in order to look for them, in order to know about their  fates or about the whereabouts. And he came to visit everybody who was connected with Anne or Margot and to try to  find out if they knew anything.

There were lists of people  who went to different camps. He appealed in a newspaper. for news of his daughters and we  still have that advertisement.

And then he was introduced to two women who were in Bergen-Belsen in the same  barrack as the Frank girls. Otto Frank came to tell us  as well that he had heard that both his girls had perished in Bergen-Belsen. Eva and her mother had also been living in  hope that Eric and Heinz would be found, but they would receive the same news as Otto.

In July, we got the notification from the Red Cross that both my father and brother  had perished in Mauthausen. several days before the American  army came to liberate that camp. Edith Frank, having witnessed her children being taken  away from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, died in the January of 1945.

Both Anne and Margot were to  die within days of each other, with Anne having to witness  her older sister's death. From the eight people who were in hiding  in the annex of 263 Prinzengracht, Only one survived. That was Otto Frank.

When he came first to tell us that the girls had died, he looked as if he couldn't  carry on with his life. He went back to tell Miep. And Miep went to the drawer where  she'd been keeping Anne's diary.

And she said to him, here you are, Mr Frank. Here is the legacy of your daughter. She went into the secret  annex after those who were in hiding were captured and taken away from here.

And she managed to save lots of the diary papers. Miep knew that within a couple of days, everything would be taken away. She kept them with her until after the war.

And when she learned that Anne would not return, she gave these papers, notebook sheets to Anne's father. Miep hadn't read it. It was Anne's private diary.

Otto went into another room and quietly read it. He came out ashen-faced and said, Miep, I never knew my daughter. Otto and Elfriede would begin  to see more of each other, offering support from their  shared experiences and losses.

One of the first people to hear Otto  read extracts from Anne's diary was Eva. A few days later he came with the diary and opened the packet very carefully  and he read a few sentences, but he always burst into tears. He couldn't read it in one go and  it took him three weeks to read it, he told us that.

He agonised for a long time as  to whether he should publish it. She wanted to be a writer, she wanted to be a published writer. But at the end of the day, it was a private diary.

And she said things that were maybe  not suitable for other people to read. She wasn't very nice about her mother. Everybody told him he should publish it, and especially a history professor  told him he has to publish it, it's his duty.

Otto was paying more and more  visits to Eva and her mother. During these encounters, Eva would start to witness Otto's philosophy, which would be the driving  force for his life's work. And Otto came very often.

My mother cooked him a meal. He was very lonely. We talked a lot, and he told me, me that he who had lost everybody really he  had no hatred he said you know if you hate you'll be so miserable otto frank dedicated  the rest of his life to the diary of am i think what is remarkable was that he managed  to do so in a very special way not just being that a memory of what had happened  and how his family had suffered, but very much as a message to young  generations to build a new future.

Otto would find that global recognition  would initially come from America, firstly with a hit Broadway stage show  and then an Academy Award winning film, Obsessions of Anne's, which would seem fitting for her legacy. Otto Frank had lost everything. The hope he carried with him as he made  the epic journey back to Amsterdam was soon evaporated when he heard the devastating  news of the death of both his daughters, Anne and Margot.

At the same time, Otto was given the diary which Miep Gies had kept. Eva Schloss with her mother would  witness firsthand the rise of what would become one of the world's  most regarded works of literature. one of the world's most tragic  stories and the creation of a symbol of hope and equality  in the face of persecution.

I knew they liked each other, Otto and my mother, but I had no idea how close they were. I was a very difficult teenager. I didn't want to do any housework.

I was quite obstinate. I was too miserable. Otto came and, you know, they talked and he helped me a lot.

Then when I finished with school, I didn't know what to do with myself. And Otto and my mother decided  I should become a photographer. which I couldn't really  care what I was going to do, but I agreed.

So Otto said it would be good if  you would go abroad for a year, which I did to London. Otto came to visit me quite a  lot and he kept an eye on me. So he already took the part a  bit of a sort of stepfather.

Otto and Elfriede grew closer and closer  over time and would marry in 1953. Eva received the news whilst living in London. He said, well, your mother and me have fallen in love, and they were married for 27 years, so longer than they were  married to their first spouses.

Otto had already decided that the  Diary of Anne Frank must be published. He showed it to a few people  and gauged their opinions. And then a professor called Jan Romijn  from the University of Amsterdam read it.

And he published an article in the. . .

newspaper Het Parool, saying that everybody should read this diary. It was this article that led to  the first publication on June 25th, 1947. A third of the diary was actually taken out, removed for two reasons.

First of all, Otto wanted to preserve the memory  of his late wife and the others in hiding from some of the not quite  nice things Anne said about them. But also, the publishing company itself deemed some of  the things that Anne wrote about as unsuitable. When the diary was first published, it had not such a great impact.

It was very much a book like. . .

many other books that dealt with  the occupation of the Netherlands. When the Dutch book came out, he gave it to everybody who had known Anne. It was very, very generous, of course, because he wanted everybody to read it.

And it was published in a time  that people focused on the future. They wanted to forget about what  happened here between 1940 and 1945. They had suffered a lot and people wanted to you know, to forget about it.

In Europe, people didn't really want to  talk about what had happened, about Auschwitz or anything like that. But of course, the diary is not really about this. So only after the mid-50s, the diary became a great success.

It came out in 1952 in America. Great difficulty finding an  American publisher as well, because people said, well, who is interested in a diary of a young girl? The publisher who picked it  up in America was Doubleday.

They had taken a risk as no one really knew  whether there would be any interest in it. It took an article by the novelist Meyer  Levine to really popularize the book. Meyer Levine became a friend of  Otter and who loved the diary.

He wrote a big article in the New York Times how wonderful it was and it became an  immediate bestseller in America. The stage play was dramatized  by Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett and opened in the Court  Theatre on Broadway on October 5, 1955, and was played by Susan Strasberg. The production grew and grew in popularity, which was helped in part by the attendance  of many Hollywood stars at the time.

Ava witnessed its instant success. The play was a great success in New York first, then in London, then it was translated, was in Germany. Then a film was being made?

The film was released in 1959 to great critical and commercial acclaim. It was directed by George  Stevens and the screenplay was written also by Goodrich and Hackett. The lead of Anne Frank was  played by Millie Perkins.

However, it was Shelley Winters who won an Academy  Award for her portrayal of August van Pels. The world wanted to know more about Anne Frank, and Otto was eager to tell her story  and continue to spread her philosophy. Many Americans came to Amsterdam and always knocked on the door of the  house and wanted to see where Anne had been hiding.

It was considered a great idea to think  about preserving that hiding place, but not as a museum. Otto's vision was to see Anne's legacy as one of bringing people together. The foundation goes back to 1957 in order to  purchase the house and to open it to the public, so it took three years to prepare it.

What he did invest his time and energy bringing together people from around the world  for international student conferences. Anne Frankhaus was first a  study group for young people, people from all over the The world came together and  they had conferences to talk about what they can do to change the world. The basic feature of this house is its emptiness, which was the deliberate decision of Otto  Frank that this place should remain empty.

It represents the absence of Anne Frank. The success of the play, the film and the opening of the house fueled the proliferation of  readers of the original diary. As people were getting to read the diary, particularly youngsters, they related so much to Anne, and they started writing to Mr Frank.

They saw him in the diary as a very caring person. Having known Otto for 27 years, I can see, you know, he was really a humanitarian and an. .

. being two years cooped up with him  helped her a lot to become who she was. The point of entry when you read  the diary is usually your own life.

When I'm inspired by Anne Frank, it's not because my life is  similar to hers in any respect. And that goes for actually everyone. So it's about a book that  was able to inspire people, although their lives are  completely different from her life.

Through her, of course, the world is learning about what has happened. And that is, of course, very, very important. We have her diary as a kind of silent  messenger of someone who is not there anymore, and who is not there anymore because  of what has been done to her.

So we have to explain to young  people how dangerous it is if we are prejudiced against other human beings. In preserving the memory of his daughter and  also the act of persecution inflicted on her, Otto, through single-minded determination, managed to elevate Anne Frank from a young, talented writer, the victim of a terrible chain of events, to become not just a face, but the symbol of the Holocaust. She has also become a figure of acceptance, forgiveness, and equality, universal themes which all  human beings can relate to.

Her thoughts evolved into Otto's philosophy, which today is still maintained through the  Anne Frank Foundation and the Anne Frank House, reaching out to millions across the world. Behind the global popularity of her  story is the diary of a young girl, an individual with her own aspirations and ideas, who happened to be caught in  extraordinarily tragic circumstances.