Anne Frank Diary Reference :
Anne Frank Blog
1 March 2006
Very Late Arrivals to Auschwitz
An English Holocaust denier recently said that
the Frank family's story "proves" that not so many people died in the
Holocaust. He clearly is no authority on the Franks or the Holocaust.
The German and Polish Jews were all but obliterated by the Holocaust, for example.
Anne's father, the sole survivor of their family of four, had been
worked and starved into a skeletal condition. He survived because of
how late they entered the concentration camps. If
we look instead at Anne's extended family alive at the start
of the war,
they had an even better survival rate mainly because so many of
them had the means to have escaped to un-occupied places:
Switzerland, England,
France, the US,
and Peru. Anne's father thought
they'd be safe in the Netherlands.
The Franks escaped Germany, to Amsterdam, way back in
1934. They went into hiding just before the deportations and arrests started in Amsterdam.
They were not captured until August 1944. Then they were sent to
Westerbork and were put on the last deportation train
from there. They were sent to Auschwitz, where people had been gassed,
worked, or starved to death
since
1941.