Other Annotated Titles

The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank

Night

Wartime Lies

Hide And Seek

On the Other Site of the Gate

The Cage

Katerina

A Scrap of Time and Other Stories

Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor

Maus

I Never Saw Another Butterfly

 

The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank



Lindwer, Willy. The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank. Translated from Dutch by Alison Meersschaert. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

This book is composed of the stories of six women who all knew Anne Frank in the last seven months of her life, and although they tell of their own experiences, many aspects of their stories also reflect the story of Anne Frank. Each chapter (told in first person narrative) is introduced by Willy Lindwer, the man who also produced a film documentary of these last seven months of Anne Frank. Some of the women knew Anne and her family as children; some first met the Frank women in camps. These women tell of the fear of death; for themselves and others that existed day in and day out. To survive, they held their own feelings inside; but to live day to day in these camps, they had to find a way, a mostly silent secret way to remember they were people deserving to live. It was a secret that they did not even speak aloud amongst themselves. The book contains an excellent collection of photographs of life before the war; during the occupation and from the camps after the liberation.

[This book was chosen because The Diary of Anne Frank is usually the first exposure many young people have to the Holocaust. It is important to know what happened later: what happened after the Franks and other people in hiding were discovered and transported to the concentration camps.]

Anne Frank has become the best known symbol for the murdered Jews of the Second World War. She wrote her diary while hiding in the "Attic" from 1942 to 1944. The final chapters of her life, the unwritten chapters of Anne's diary are: arrest, deportation, and annihilation. Anne, her sister Margot, and their mother Edith met their deaths in the concentration camps. Anne's father, Otto Frank survived the camps.

Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper knew the Frank family prior to the war. Originally Otto Frank refused to believe his family had died in the camps; Janny wrote to confirm what Mr. Frank had already been told, his daughters had died. Janny speaks of seeing Anne in the camps and of why she, Janny broke years of silence to speak.


Anne came to the barbed -wire fence--I couldn't see her. The fence and the straw were between us. There wasn't much light. Maybe I saw her shadow. It wasn't the same Anne. She was a broken girl. I probably was, too, but it was so terrible. She immediately began to cry, and she told me, "I don't have any parents anymore."

I remember that with absolute certainty. That was terribly sad, because she couldn't have known anything else.

Assimilating these experiences is very difficult for me. Actually, I never have....Every time the rage would leap up into my throat. But you can't assimilate it; the only thing is that it becomes a bit farther removed from you.
pp.27-28


I want to repeat, I have told this because I want to make it very clear to a large number of people that all discrimination--whatever form it takes--is evil and that the world can go to pieces because of it. Actually, literally, go to pieces. Discrimination against someone because of his skin color or his ears or his hair, or God knows what--we can all die from that. It only takes one person to say, "He isn't as good as I am, because he has..." You can fill in the rest.
p.84

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