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Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl Lit. Circle #4

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Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl Lit. Circle #4

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Even though everyone in the Annex is Jewish, I was kind of surprised that they celebrated (such as exchanging gifts) for Christmas. I think that they celebrate St. Nicholas Day because it is a a major and fun event for the Dutch. This reminds me of how my family celebrates Christmas. Even though we are not Christians, we celebrate is because it is a fun and big holiday in the U.S.

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When Anne moved in the Annex, she has been having very sad and scary dreams. Many times at night Anne would find herself waking up screaming. In pages 161-162, she had a dream where she meets her friend Hanneli Goslar calling for her help. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Anne.

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One of the things that really drew me to picking this book in the first place was how personal and intimate it was. It's this young girl's diary, and we're reading her letters to her imaginary friend Kitty. As Anne grows older, so does Anne and Kitty's relationship. Her letters get more and more intimate, and personal, and close. Sometimes I really feel what Claire was talking about in one of her posts. That I almost shouldn't be reading this. Anne is essentially stripping herself naked and baring her soul to us. Her diary is her at her most vulnerable, and it's a beautiful, yet irking, thing to read.

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As we've seen in Anne's revisions throughout the diary, she clearly matures quite a bit at some point. This section was her point, and she really begins to blossom from an ignorant, carefree child (even though we all know she was much more than that, but nobody would see her so seriously), to a mature young lady. Anne really grows up in this part of her diary, and it's like scratching an itch because we've tasted little bits of this mature Anne, and now we finally have her.

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Peter has always been sort of a background character. He's someone you would never really pay attention to unless he did something that could somehow affect the "more important" or "relevant" members of the annex. In Anne's recent entries, they get a lot closer, which in turn exposes Peter's true personality to us. It was clear from the beginning I think that Peter always had underlying issues with his self-esteem and views on himself even through he tried to mask those by acting out or being silly. I'm glad Peter is opening up, but it's also quite sad to think about why he's like that. Judging based on the dynamic between Mrs. and Mr. van Daan, Peter was either neglected as a child or put down. Most likely both. According to Mrs. van Daan's parenting, Peter should be seen, not heard. On top of that, his father is extremely harsh on his whatever he does. His family is no doubt a raging factor in his self-esteem issues.

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Alright, I know this is random, but I can't not talk about it, and I already did the mandatory important entries.
I find it both interesting and confusing how Anne has strong connections to two different Peters. Sometimes, whenever she goes into talking about Peter S., I get a little confused and have to go back to make sure I'm reading about the right Peter. It is just a little funny how both of the two that Anne is seeming to form strong relationships with have the same names.
In the very very beginning of the book, before they go into the Annex, Anne talks about Peter S. When they go into the Annex and Peter V. is introduced, I almost thought they were the same until I double and triple checked.

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Beginnings of another kind of relationship? But when?

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Beginnings of another kind of relationship? But when?

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At the bottom of page 202, Anne mentions that she feels nice when she makes eye contact with Peter Vaan Dahn, and that it isn't a feeling that she "should have too often". I can tell that this is probably a start to a more romantic relationship, as I have seen others in the Padlet mention a romantic relationship forming between them, but I haven't really noticed how it started developing.
I might be really bad at noticing signs, but until Anne mentions this part, I had yet to noticed anything other than a friendship between them. It seems like a sort of out-of-the-blue relationship to me personally. She also at one point before this explicitly states that her love is for Peter Schiff only, and that Kitty should not think that she likes Peter Vaan Dahn, and I think it is interesting to see how fast that changed.
Now, I know that I am not good at noticing when these things develop, so it might just be a me problem not seeing anything quicker, but I still felt I should post of it.

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Anne saying, "Who will be the first to discover the chink in my armor?" (pg 224), made me wonder what her relationship with Peter appears as to the other Annex residents. I wonder if anyone else can tell that Anne likes Peter, and that he likes her, because typically parents can read their children's emotions well. However, Anne has described how her and Peter's parents do not understand the depth of their emotions, so it is unlikely that they have noticed their new romantic feelings for each other. I wonder how far this relationship will develop during their time in the Annex.

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"Can you tell me why people go to such lengths to hide their real selves?" (-Anne to Kitty, page 185)

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"Can you tell me why people go to such lengths to hide their real selves?" (-Anne to Kitty, page 185)

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I think that a reason behind someone hiding themselves from the outside world is fear of being hurt, along with a wish to be accepted.
Anne often talks about how the people around her hurt her emotionally because of their targeted remarks about her. Because of this, she wants to shut her true self into her mind and portray a different side to herself. She once spoke of how she wished that she was someone else so that she could please the others in the annex. She wants to be someone who doesn't need to take the blame for everything.
Anne also talks about how she wishes that she could be her true self towards others, and that she wants to be able to portray what she is really feeling without being targeted for it. This also comes into fear because she is afraid that if she were to act how her mind firstly reacts, people around her would judge her and hurt her, or that she might hurt them.

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This section shows us Peter's true personality as he and Anne get closer. Anne explains that he has a "huge inferiority complex", which makes him think he is not as smart as everyone else in the Annex. He also has little confidence in himself because of this. This makes me think about the major influences in Peter's life that would have caused him to hold himself in such a light. It is possible that the Nazi propaganda has hardwired his brain to belittle himself, but the main culprits are likely his parents. Peter's father especially has treated his son very cynically, in a way that could have caused Peter to doubt his capabilities. It is interesting to see how both the Frank and van Daan parents have such a negative impact on their children's mental health.

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During my reading, I noticed that Hanneli, one of Anne's friends, has come into the young girl's thoughts multiple times. Whenever she thought of Hanneli she would pray for her and hope that she survives these terrible times. When I read this, it made me think, what did the survivors of the Holocaust do after the war was over?

In this article, it explains what happened to the survivors of these terrible events. After the Germans had left the concentration camps, many survivors were relieved, yet exhausted from the traumatizing events they had to experience. At the time, many of those who were still alive, were in very poor health and were suffering from terrible diseases. As a result, about 13,000 people had died once the Holocaust was over. Many survivors wanted to emigrate to the U.S. or Palestine, but these countries had strict immigration policies which is what gave the survivors not many options for a new home. Since not many people had homes, organizations would set up temporary living spaces until the survivors could find permanent homes.

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The ITS was created after the Allies centralised tracing and documentation efforts, recommending that the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRAA) run the organisation. This important document, known as the ‘ITS Charter’ sets out the relationship between the Central Tracing Bureau (as ITS was formerly known), the National Tracing Bureaux and zonal tracing bureaus.

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library, International Tracing Service Digital Archive, Document Number 82495270-72.

In January 1946, the new centralised tracing service was moved to the town of Arolsen (later Bad Arolsen), Germany, where it remains today. Bad Arolsen was located in the American military zone of occupation, but it was close in proximity to the French, British, and Soviet zones.

ITS Photo Collection, Arolsen Archives.

As well as helping survivors and displaced persons to trace their missing relatives, the ITS also conducted investigations into burial sites of death marches in an attempt to identify those murdered on these. Investigations relied on burial site searches, questioning local mayors, interviews, testimony and hospital records. From this, the ITS created maps such as this one, showing where bodies were found, identification (though this usually wasn’t possible) and the routes death marches took.

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library, International Tracing Service Digital Archive, Document Number 101099771.

A letter in the ITS archive written by Władysław Lukrec on 9 February 1946 when searching for his son, Tadeusz Lukrec, who had been imprisoned in Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, and Buchenwald. Władysław wrote to as many as organisations as possible to find him, but the archive does not contain information on if they were ever reunited.

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library, International Tracing Service Digital Archive, Document Number 90583911.

The ITS archive is made up of thousands of documents, from a variety of sources. This card, for example, is a prisoner registration card created by the Nazis and belonging to Adolf Schmidt, a German man from Saarbrucken, who was imprisoned in Buchenwald as a political and criminal prisoner on 18 June 1943. The card was collected from the camp by Allied soldiers following the liberation of Buchenwald in 1945, and now forms part of the ITS archive.

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library, International Tracing Service Digital Archive, Document Number 7043544.

An extract from a pamphlet produced by the United Kingdom Search Bureau highlighting the difficulties and frustrations of early tracing efforts. c.1946.

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.

The International Tracing Service (ITS), now known as the Arolsen Archives, is an archive based in Bad Arolsen, Germany, containing over 30 million pages of Holocaust-era documents relating to the fate of over 17.5 million people. The ITS was originally founded to centralise postwar efforts to trace missing persons and help survivors discover the fate of family and friends caught up in the Holocaust and Nazi persecution during the Second World War. The creation of the ITS was disjointed and messy: it emerged out of several, separate (and sometimes competing) efforts by numerous organisations at various points, during and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

One of the primary strands of the archive was created by the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) in Versailles, France, in 1944, as Allied forces liberated Europe and discovered thousands of people who had been displaced by the war ( Displaced Persons – DPs). In order to begin helping, organising and repatriating these people, SHAEF requested that all DPs be registered and issued with an identification card.

As the Allies’ war effort progressed further into Europe, the documentation and tracing efforts of the Allies’ military forces followed and they moved to Frankfurt am Main, Germany. After SHAEF was dissolved in July 1945, the tracing efforts were temporarily taken over by the Combined Displaced Persons Executive (CDPX) before being handed over to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRAA) in September 1945. Shortly after, the archive moved to Bad Arolsen.

UNRRA was put in charge of uniting the efforts of the various organisations, including indexing for names and organising Nazi documents that had been gathered during liberation, such as concentration camp and ghetto records, transport lists, Gestapo and police documents, and records of forced labour. This resulted in the creation of the Central Tracing Bureau (CTB), an archive that encompassed available documentation and centralised the search for missing people and Displaced Persons.

After UNRRA ceased to exist in 1947, it passed the CTB onto its successor, the International Refugee Organisation (IRO). In 1948, the IRO renamed the CTB the International Tracing Service (ITS). During this initial period of its existence between 1945 and 1955, the ITS primarily focused on helping people discover the fate of their relatives and other missing persons, registering and interviewing DPs, as well as conducting research projects, such as the ‘graves re-check’, which attempted to map the routes of the death marches and establish who died and where.

In 1955, an International Commission (IC) for the ITS was established to permanently govern the archive. The IC was originally composed of nine countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States of America), although this was later expanded to eleven with the inclusion of Poland and Greece. The IC oversaw the archive, but between 1955 and 2012, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) managed its administration and general running.

Under the supervision of the Red Cross, the ITS functioned as a closed archive, meaning only those who worked there could access the documents. On request, it continued to help people trace their relatives and friends, although the process was often inefficient and extremely slow. It also aided the German Government and helped provide documents for restitution claims.

In 2006, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) led efforts to lobby the ITS to open its doors to the rest of the world and become an open archive for research. After significant initial opposition, the IC voted unanimously to open the archive and allow each IC member a digital copy for its citizens to access in their own country. Following this vote, the Red Cross felt it was no longer an appropriate organisation to lead an active research archive, rather than a tracing organisation, and withdrew its guardianship. It was replaced by the German Federal Archives, who continue its maintenance today.

In December 2011, the United Kingdom’s digital copy of the archive was deposited at The Wiener Holocaust Library, where it is still used to help historians and relatives of victims uncover what happened to hundreds of victims of Nazi persecution each year. In 2020, for example, ITS researchers at the Library investigated the experiences of over 326 victims of the Holocaust.

The ITS remains a crucial archive to understanding the history and long-lasting effects of the Holocaust and those who survived. As the historian Dan Stone writes, the documents preserved in Bad Arolsen, ‘speak first and foremost to the ongoing suffering of Holocaust victims; [that] there was no ‘happy ending’ in 1945’ but, equally as important, these documents can also be used ‘to write a history of Nazi persecution focused on the victims that does not neglect the perpetrators’ [Dan Stone, “The Memory of the Archive: The International Tracing Service and the Construction of the Past as History”, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 31:2, (2017), 69-88, 87]. Using perpetrator and postwar documents, the ITS continues to help historians to reinstate the voices of the victims and survivors, without ignoring those that inflicted their conditions.

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Survivors and the Displaced Persons era – The Holocaust Explained: Designed for schools

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The International Tracing Service (ITS), now known as the Arolsen Archives, is an archive based in Bad Arolsen, Germany, containing over 30 million pages of Holocaust-era documents relating to the fate of over 17.5 million people. The ITS was originally founded to centralise postwar efforts to trace…

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In this section, we truly begin to see how Anne is growing up. She has more complex thoughts, emotions, and perspectives on life. Anne is able to recognize why her and her mother's relationship is not great, and the wrongs that they both have done to get them to that point. She also understands more now. As she mentions around Christmas, Anne did not comprehend what her father's story meant the previous year (1942), but she does now (1943). Anne is also able to talk about more mature topics in a "normal" way with Peter van Daan, and can recognize her love for Peter Schiff, rather than her more mild feelings for others.

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In pages 174 - 180, Anne shares in her diary a lot of emotions that feel so extremely private to her. She of course wants to take these feelings and put them onto paper to share with "Kitty", but the feelings she expresses are the kind that make me feel like I honestly shouldn't be reading this. Anne writes down thoughts that show how she is growing older and more into her own feelings. She talks about Peter Schiff (not to be confused with Peter Van Daan) and how she longs to be with him. Because of my age, maybe, I don't seem to quite understand the deep feelings that she has for him, but I can figure that he was definitely extremely important to her. I find this as something that I personally can not really connect with right now.

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This will be edited whenever I find something I want to define. If you find something you want defined that I have not defined already, comment it with the page number.

Ecstasy (175) - a state of very great happiness : extreme delight (-Merriam Webster)
Genealogical (190) - relating to the study or tracing of lines of family descent (-Oxford Languages)
Monotonous (191) - dull, tedious, and repetitious; lacking in variety and interest (-Oxford Languages)

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In the beginning of the reading, Anne reflects on her past self by going back and reviewing her entries from the year before. She had noted that a lot of her writings were about all the bad things that happened between her mother and herself. Anne was shocked by all the hate and anger that was put behind the words when it came to talking about her mother. Guilt had crossed her mind when she realized how much hate she was talking about and the cruelness behind her writing. This shows that Anne was able to see those mean and vulnerable parts about her past self and was willing to build on it so that she can be better. The fact that she was able to notice this is already a change in Anne, she isn't stubborn or insisting that she was right all along. Instead, she is owning up those past times where she was not the best person and now trying to fix those mistakes. Now, Anne is going to try to be nicer to her mother and the other members of the Annex she despises in order to become a better person. This proves that Anne is trying to shape herself into a new and improved being.

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Beside the obvious fact that Anne has a crush on Peter, their relationship with each other has changed quite a bit. In the beginning Anne viewed Peter as a quiet boy who seemed only interested in himself and never bothered to interact with other people. Now that Peter has opened up to Anne, she realizes that she has been misjudging him this whole time and that they actually had some similarities. They make time to confide to each other and finally release those cooped up feelings they had. Anne and Peter are now very close friends and try to make time to talk to each other whenever they can throughout the day. In her entries, Anne notes the similarities they have, both don't have a real mother and they struggle with their innermost feelings while being unsure about themselves. Being able to connect and have a topic they both can relate to is a reason behind the strong bond that is developing between them. This relationship could have serious affects on both Anne and Peter, but I'm not sure if they would be positive or negative. The unlikely friendship behind these two people is very interesting and will most likely become stronger as the book continues.

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Dec 2nd: pgs. 1-100
Dec 9th: pgs. 101-161
Dec 16th: pgs. 162-224
Jan 13th: pgs. 225-363
Feel free to read the foreword, introduction, afterword, editorial history, and the inhabitants of the secret annex and their real names on your own time because they aren't included in the required page due dates that we've set.

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Dec 2nd: Kalea
Dec 9th: Claire
Dec 16th: Shalimar (that's for this Padlet!)
Jan 13th: Izzy, Brandon (we'll each bring one in)
You're welcome to bring in any other resources you find for whichever due date, but that doesn't mean you're excused on yours! (Unless you want to switch with someone, that's 100% fine just let me know so I can edit this post)