Review: Anne Frank Beyond the Diary: A Photographic Remembrance by Ruud van der Rol and Rian Verhoeven for the Anne Frank House

Title: Anne Frank Beyond the Diary: A Photographic Remembrance
Authors: Ruud van der Rol and Rian Verhoeven for the Anne Frank House
Year: 1995
ISBN: 0-14-036926-0

Anne Frank Beyond the Diary: A Photographic Remembrance is a compilation by Ruud van der Rol and Rian Verhoeven for the Anne Frank House and I think it is meant to be a complement to Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. This book illustrates the life of the Frank family prior to and during World War 2 both in Frankfurt Am Main, Germany and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, based on Anne's diary entries.

Anne Frank was a 13-year old Jewish girl who resided in Amsterdam, the Netherlands during World War 2 whom had fled from Frankfurt Am Main in 1933 with her family, parents Otto and Edith Frank and elder sister Margot due to the severe persecution of the Jewish people by the German Nazi authorities. She had received a red-and-white checkered cloth-bound diary with its impotent lock from her parents on her thirteenth birthday on June 12 1942.

She began writing in this diary almost immediately and continued to do so when they went into hiding from the Nazi authorities on July 6 1942 when Margot received a call-up notice to be deported to Westerbork concentration camp on July 5 1942. Anne and her family went into hiding in an old house attached to Otto Frank's office located at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam. Anne later dubbed this hiding place the Secret Annex.

Anne wrote the diary from June 14 1942 to August 1 1944. She mostly wrote about herself - her feelings, thoughts, physical and psychological changes and relationship with her family and other people, especially the van Pels family and dentist Fritz Pfeffer, whom all joined the Frank family in the same hiding place. Most importantly, Anne had managed to write about the happenings in the Secret Annex with uncanny accuracy. Besides her diary, Anne also wrote fictional stories told to her by Otto when she was younger.

The people in hiding at the Secret Annex were discovered as the final months of the war were approaching, i.e. on August 4 1944. Anne was 15 years old then. The Secret Annex was raided by the German Nazi authorities, headed by Karl Josef Silberbauer; they had been finally betrayed. To this day no one knows who had actually had betrayed them. Otto Frank was the only survivor of this horrific experience, out of the eight people hiding in the Secret Annex. Anne and her sister Margot died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just weeks before the camp was liberated by the Allied forces the following April.

This book revealed that there were some prisoners who managed to talk to Anne and Margot during their final months in Bergen-Belsen before both girls died; amongst them was a childhood friend of Anne, Hanneli Elizabeth Goslar. Apart from this, it also revealed the painful journey of Otto in searching for the whereabouts of Anne and Margot as well as that of his wife Edith, and he was finally being informed of their deaths in July or August 1945.

It was only then, Miep Gies, one of the helpers to the people hiding in the Secret Annex gave Otto pages to Anne's diary, which she had managed to save them from the clutches of the German Nazi authorities when the Annexe was emptied on the orders of the German Nazi authorities one week after it was discovered and raided. Otto then painstakingly embarked on the journey to publish Anne's diary as well as establishing the Anne Frank House at 263 and 265 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam to spread the message in Anne's diary to the world. This book also discussed the issues of anti-Semitism and anti-racism in the contemporary context, which is still very much relevant today.
         
I would highly recommend this book especially to readers who have read The Diary of a Young Girl. Even readers who have not read the diary would find this book to be an interesting and appropriate introduction to The Diary of a Young Girl. Apart from this, Anne Frank Beyond the Diary: A Photographic Remembrance could serve as an excellent reference to the history about the Holocaust as Anne Frank is the symbol of the estimated six million Jewish people murdered during World War 2.

I am not a big fan of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl but I have read it and was intrigued by the unanswered question who had actually betrayed the people hiding in the Secret Annex. Although this book did not provide the answers to this crucial question, however, it comprehensively covered the life of Anne Frank and her family and issues related to anti-Semitism and anti racism. The best part of all is that I had bought this book at The War Memorial in Canberra, Australia while vacationing there with my parents back in 1996; an unlikely place on the Earth for me to have bought a book.