The Southwest Kansas Register October 26, 2014 Page 3

Remembering Anne Frank

October is Respect Life Month
Anne Frank, a History for Today, a traveling Holocaust ex-
hibit developed by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Holland,
opened at the Santa Fe Depot in Dodge City Oct. 10 and will be
shown through Nov. 3.
Sponsored in North America by the Anne Frank Center U.S.A.,
the exhibit has run in conjunction with the showing of the Depot
Theater Companys production of the play The Diary of Anne
Frank at the Depot Theater in Dodge City.
None of this would be here if not for Doug Austen, who
brought the idea to us, explained Connie Penick, Chief Operating
Offcer of the Depot Theater Company for the past fve years and
a member of the company for 32 years.
The theater company decided this drama is worth telling,
Connie said of the play. We felt we absolutely had to do this,
and when we got the rights for it, the Anne Frank Center asked if
we would be interested in the exhibit.
The exhibit came with a hefty price tag, $6,000, but a member of
Connies church got the ball rolling to collect funds for the exhibit.
I was at church in the choir and started talking about it, Con-
nie recalled. This lady, Nancy Sapp, came up to me and said, I
dont want to know the cost; just tell me what you need.
The traveling exhibit also was made possible by a grant from
the Mariah Fund and by donations from Ronald Albrecht, the
Dodge City Tourism Task Force, the Dodge City Public Library
Foundation, and the Depot Theater Guild.
The Anne Frank exhibit is open Monday-Wednesday from 1 to
5 p.m., Thursday-Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 3 to 7 p.m.,
Sunday from 1 to 3 p.m. There is no charge to view the exhibit,
but there is an opportunity for a free will offering which will be
used to support future exhibits. For more information, call the
Depot Theater Company at (620) 225-1001.
By CHARLENE SCOTT-MYERS
Special to the Register
A
nne Frank, the German-Jewish girl whose diary
became famous following World War II and a
symbol of the more than 1.5 million Jewish children
murdered during the Holocaust, is being celebrated at
the Depot Theater in Dodge City.
The play, The Diary of Anne Frank, was performed
through Oct. 25, and a traveling exhibit, Anne Frank:
A History for Today from the Anne Frank House, is
on display at the Dodge City Depot through Nov. 3.
Anne was born in Frankfurt am Main on June 12,
1929. She and her parents, Otto and Edith Frank, and
her older sister Margot, fed Germany to Amsterdam
in the early 1930s to escape Nazi persecution. But
the Nazis caught up with the Frank Family. On May
10, 1940, Germany attacked the Netherlands, which
surrendered fve days later.
The Nazis immediately began issuing anti-Jewish
laws, as they had done in Germany. Anne no longer
could attend her Montessori school. Jews were not
allowed to attend school with non-Jews, ride on street-
cars, swim in public pools, or even sit in a park. Jews
could not own businesses. Annes father Otto turned
over his business to his Dutch colleagues.
The Nazis issued an edict in May 1942 forcing all
Jews in the Netherlands age six and older to wear a
yellow Star of David on their clothes. Otto Frank knew
what was happening to Jews, churchmen, and disabled
persons in Germany and Austria.
In 1939 Hitler had ordered all mentally and physi-
cally disabled persons put to death, and more than
270,000 were murdered in Germanys eugenics pro-
gram. In Holland, members of the religion class of
more than 20 adult disabled persons taught by Corrie
ten Boom were murdered. She and her sister, Betsie,
were imprisoned at Ravensbruck womens labor camp
in Germany, where Corrie found her sisters body one
morning on a pile of persons who had died the night
before. Corrie later wrote the book The Hiding Place,
which became a movie by the same name. (I heard
Corries unforgettable talk on forgiveness before an
audience of weeping people in Dallas years ago.)
The Nazis closed the Netherlands borders, so the
only way for Otto Frank to save his family was to
take them into hiding, which he did on July 6, 1942.
Anne was 13 years old. The family members secluded
themselves upstairs behind a movable bookcase in the
back of Ottos spice factory at 263 Prinsengracht. A
week later, the van Pels family--Herman, Petronella
and their 16-year-old son Peter--joined them. A den-
tist Fritz Pfeffer arrived Nov. 1. (Anne gave them
different names in her diary.)
Anne had received a red and white checkered album
on her 13th birthday June 12, 1942, a month before
her family climbed up to their hiding place. Anne
recorded her deepest feelings, hopes, and fears in this
album, her diary, until four days before her arrest.
Not being able to go outside upsets me more than I
can say, she wrote. Im terrifed our hiding place
will be discovered, and that we will be shot.
Another diary entry refected her desire to live the
normal life of a teenager again. I long to ride a bike,
dance, feel young, and know that I am free, and yet I
cant let it show.
Such close quarters caused the inhabitants of the
Secret Annex to get on one anothers nerves. Anne
and her mother often were at odds, and Anne disliked
the crabby Fritz, who was unwilling to perform any
chores. Young Peter was another story. He was only
three years older than Anne, and the two naturally grew
close emotionally. They enjoyed talks about the past
and their longing for a happy future.
The eight people would spend two years and a month
hidden in the cramped Secret Annex. They fnally
were betrayed by an anonymous caller to the Nazis,
and on the morning of Aug. 4, 1944 an SS offcer and
security police entered the building and marched upstairs to the
bookcase that hid the door to the Annex. The intruders knew ex-
actly where to fnd the eight hidden Jews. All but Otto would be
among the 105,000 of Amsterdams population of 140,000 Jews
to be liquidated.
Anne was only 15 years old when she was arrested. She, her
family and four friends were taken to the Westerbork Nazi deten-
tion camp in northeastern Netherlands, shipped like cattle on the
very last train leaving from there to Auschwitz in Poland on Sept.
3, 1944. (I have a friend, Jewish artist Alice Cahana,
who also was a teenage prisoner at Auschwitz. Her
mother, grandfather and two brothers were murdered
there. Alice was one of fve Hungarian Jewish Holo-
caust survivors featured in Spielbergs 1998 Academy
Award winning documentary The Last Days.)
At Auschwitz, Anne Franks mother Edith saved her
scraps of food for her two daughters until they were
separated from her and transferred to Bergen-Belsen
death camp in Northern Germany at the end of October,
1944. Edith starved to death on Jan. 6, 1945. She was
one of 1,100,000 people to die at Auschwitz, 90 percent
of them Jews. Three million of Polands 3,300,000 Jews
were killed. Five thousand Catholic priests were also
murdered in Poland. Seventy-eight percent of the 7.3
million Jews in occupied Germany were murdered.
An epidemic of typhus was raging at the Bergen-
Belsen camp when Anne and her sister Margot arrived.
Margo died of the disease in early March of 1945.
Anne died March 12, one of more than 10,000 Jews
who died of typhus at that camp.
Only a month later on April 15, 1945, Bergen-Belsen
was liberated by a British-Canadian unit. Reichsfhrer-
SS Heinrich Himmler, SS and Gestapo head, surren-
dered. He had directed Hitlers 15,000 death camps in
occupied countries. The Third Reich built additional
camps between 1939 and 1942 to hold large numbers
of prisoners without trial or judicial process. Himmler
had supervised the building of Dachau, the frst of the
Nazi concentration camps, opened in Germany in 1933.
Himmler organized the murders of millions of Jews and
Christians, many in gas chambers.
Ninety percent of Europes pre-war Jewish popula-
tion lost their lives in Hitlers death camps. Of the
more than 6 million Jews murdered, the most pitiful
were the children, called useless eaters by the Nazis
because they could not use them for forced labor.
Otto Frank was the only member of his family to
survive the Holocaust. During the Nazi retreat from
Auschwitz, he was left behind in the infrmary and
freed by Russian soldiers. He later retrieved Annes
diary which the secret police had dropped on the Secret
Annex foor. Otto lived to be 90 and said sorrowfully
after the war, I have nothing left but life itself. He
died in Switzerland in 1980.
Of the 107,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands
between 1942 and 1944, only 5,000 were estimated to
have survived. Anne was fortunate to have her family
and friend Peter nearby during her last years and she
took special solace from listening to a church clocks
bells down the street.
Father, Mother, and Margot still cannot get used
to the chiming of the Westertoren clock, which tells
us the time every quarter of every hour, she wrote in
her diary. Not me. I liked it from the start. It sounds
so reassuring, especially at night.
Friends and I on our way to Israel in 1981 visited
the Anne Frank House along the Prinsengracht Canal
in Amsterdam. We climbed the stairs to the fake
bookshelf door, which was open. I went inside to the
window where Anne peeked out to watch the clock. I
wanted to see it as she saw it. The clock is high up on
the 278-foot tower of Hollands most famous church,
the magnifcent Westerkerk, built in 1619-1631 and
surviving many wars, including the vicious war that
claimed its admirer, the brave young girl Anne Frank.
(Her statue is located outside the church, where Rem-
brandt is buried.)
More than a million people have visited the Secret
Annex and millions have read her diary that her dad
published in the Netherlands on June 25, 1947, despite
Annes dire prediction:
Writing in a diary is a really strange experience
for someone like me. Not only because I have never
written anything before, but also because it seems
to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be
interested in the musings of a young girl.
Local support brings
Anne Frank to Dodge City