The Diary of Anne Frank Act I

Anticipation Guide A person’s adventures are limited by his or her physical mobility. War brings out the best and the worst in people. Wisdom comes with age. Happiness depends on material possessions and comfortable surroundings.

Vocabulary conspicuous unabashed insufferable meticulous fatalist ostentatiously

Hitler’s Rise As a young Austrian, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) dreamed of becoming an artist but was twice rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1913, he moved to Munich, Germany, and at the outbreak of World War I volunteered for the German army after Austria rejected him for military service. When World War I ended, Hitler began his political career as a member of the German Workers’ Party, renamed the Nazi Party in 1920. Soon he became head of the party, which rose to power on a platform denouncing Jews, Communists, and the financial burden placed on Germany in the Versailles Treaty, which ended World War I. Hitler was legally appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933, but he quickly assumed dictatorial powers. He rigged elections and combined the positions of chancellor and president to become Führer, or leader, of Germany.

Hitler’s “Final Solution” The “Final Solution” was ordered by Hitler and officially planned at the Wannsee Conference in early 1942. At the conference, fifteen Nazi officials decided on the administrative details of the plan: All of Europe’s Jews would be deported to camps in eastern Poland, where they would be either worked to death slave laborers or exterminated. Up to two thirds of Europe’s Jews had been killed by the end of the war.

Holocaust Shortly after Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis began their systematic persecution of the Jews. The twelve-year period-from 1933 to 1945-of persecution, imprisonment, slave labor, deliberate starvation, torture, and mass-murder resulting in the deaths of some six million Jews has become known as the Holocaust (“sacrificial destruction by fire”). During this period, the Nazis also murdered around five million other people they deemed “inferior”-including Gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, and political dissidents-but Jews remained the primary target of the Nazis’ genocidal extermination.

The Diary of Anne Frank In May 1940, Germany occupied Holland. During World War II many people in Europe were put into concentration camps. Laws against Jews limited their access to communication, transportation, and, ultimately, work. Jews were cut off from the rest of the community and then rounded up and sent east. Most were never seen again.

The Diary of Anne Frank The Franks, who were Jewish, had fled Germany to get away from the Nazis. After several years in the Netherlands, they had to flee again. They left their home in the middle of an ordinary day, with dishes in the sink and a note placed in a wastebasket to make people think they had fled to Switzerland. But, they went into hidden rooms above Mr. Frank’s office. Anne Frank was thirteen years old when she and her family went into hiding. The Franks and four other people hiding with them were helped by Christian friends who risked their own lives to do so. This play is about life in the Secret Annex based on the diary that Anne kept.

Paragraph Writing Pretend you had one hour to prepare to go into hiding.  You can NEVER return to your home.  You can not carry a suitcase; it would be obvious you were going into hiding.  It is winter, therefore VERY cold outside and there is limited food where you are going.  What items would you take with you?  How would you disguise these items and how would you carry them?