June 25, 2019
‘A kind of creeping oppression’: Anne Frank’s haunting newly published letters to her grandmother
Breaking Newstags: Anne Frank
In April of 1940, a few months before Adolf Hitler ordered Jews in Germany to wear yellow stars, a 10-year-old girl in Amsterdam sent a postcard to her pen pal in Iowa.
“This picture shows one of the many old canals of Amsterdam,” she wrote. “But this is only one of the old city. There are also big canals and over all those canals are bridges. There are about 340 bridges within the city.”
In the annals of postcard writing, this one is not particularly memorable. Amsterdam, bridges, big canals. Standard pen pal fare. What makes this postcard noteworthy is the writer and the future she could not imagine.
It is signed . . . Anne Frank.
The postcard is included in a new book, “Anne Frank: The Collected Works,” a 733-page historical volume that collects everything Anne wrote before her family was found hiding in an office annex in Amsterdam and taken to concentration camps. Only her father, Otto, survived.
...
From a postcard to grandma in the summer of 1942: “The weather is glorious and we’re out on an excursion, and because there are such nice postcards we thought of you.”
There are no more letters or postcards after that one. In a matter of weeks, the Frank family went into hiding.
“All the best,” she wrote. “Anne.”
comments powered by Disqus
News
- The Debt Ceiling Law is now a Tool of Partisan Political Power; Abolish It
- Amitai Etzioni, Theorist of Communitarianism, Dies at 94
- Kagan, Sotomayor Join SCOTUS Cons in Sticking it to Unions
- New Evidence: Rehnquist Pretty Much OK with Plessy v. Ferguson
- Ohio Unions Link Academic Freedom and the Freedom to Strike
- First Round of Obama Administration Oral Histories Focus on Political Fault Lines and Policy Tradeoffs
- The Tulsa Race Massacre was an Attack on Black People; Rebuilding Policies were an Attack on Black Wealth
- British Universities are Researching Ties to Slavery. Conservative Alumni Say "Enough"
- Martha Hodes Reconstructs Her Memory of a 1970 Hijacking
- Jeremi Suri: Texas Higher Ed Conflict "Doesn't Have to Be This Way"
Trending Now
- New transcript of Ayn Rand at West Point in 1974 shows she claimed “savage" Indians had no right to live here just because they were born here
- The Mexican War Suggests Ukraine May End Up Conceding Crimea. World War I Suggests the Price May Be Tragic if it Doesn't
- The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of