Page 177 - New Grammar with a Smile 8

3 The Young Diarist

Read the passage carefully.

Anne Frank was born on 12 June 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany. Her family moved to
Amsterdam in the Netherlands, in the autumn of 1933. On 10 May 1940, the German
army invaded the Netherlands. Anne Frank and her sister were forced to transfer to
a segregated Jewish school. Otto Frank, her father, managed to keep control of his
company by officially signing ownership over to two of his Christian associates, Jo
and Victor, while continuing to run the company from behind the scenes. On 12 June
1942, on her thirteenth birthday, Anne’s parents gave her a red, chequered diary. She
wrote her first entry, addressed to an imaginary friend named Kitty, that same day. ‘I
hope I will be able to confide everything to
you, as I have never been able to confide
in anyone, and I hope you will be a great
source of comfort and support.’ Weeks
later, on 5 July 1942, her sister Margot
received an official summons to report to
a Nazi work camp in Germany. The very
next day, the family went into hiding in
makeshift quarters in an empty space
at the back of Otto Frank’s company
building, which they referred to as the
Secret Annex. They were accompanied
by Otto’s business partner Hermann van
Pels as well as his wife, Auguste, and son,
Peter. Otto’s employees Jo and Victor,
as well as Jan and Miep Gies and Bep
Voskuijl, provided food and information
about the outside world. The families
spent two years in hiding without ever
once stepping outside the dark, damp,
isolated portion of the building.

To pass the time, Anne wrote extensive daily entries in her diary. On 4 August 1944,
a German secret service police officer accompanied by four Dutch Nazis stormed into
the Secret Annex and arrested everyone hiding there. They had been betrayed by

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