Anne Frank
Anne Frank is probably the best-known child who died in the Holocaust, but her fate is little different to that of its other 1.5 million child victims. Anne’s story is told in her famous diary, “Kitty”, where she recorded how her family was hidden from the Nazis by employees of her father.

Anne Frank was born in Germany but her family fled to Holland when the Nazis came to power. She attended school in Amsterdam until 1940, when the Nazis invaded and expelled all Jewish children from schools and adults from their business and professions.

In June 1942 Anne’s older sister Margot was listed for a forced labour transport and the family immediately went into hiding in a vacant annex off Otto Frank’s former office. They were protected and supported by four of Mr Frank’s former employees, principally a young woman named Miep Gies, and her husband Jan (named “Miep and Hank van Santen” in Anne’s diary).

Together with the Franks in hiding were another family named van Pels (“van Damm”) and a man named Fritz Pfeffer (“Dussel”). For two years Miep and the three others procured food and other supplies illegally for the eight hidden Jews.

On October 9 1942 Anne wrote in her diary:

“Our many Jewish friends are being taken away by the dozen. These people are treated by the Gestapo without a shred of decency, being loaded into cattle trucks and sent to Westerbork (camp)…It is impossible to escape; most of the people in the camp are branded as inmates by their shaven heads…If it is as bad as this in Holland, whatever will it be like in the distant and barbarous regions they are sent to? We assume that most of them are murdered. The English radio speaks of their being gassed.”

Tragically, Anne was to find out firsthand what it was like “in the distant and barbarous regions they are sent to”, for on August 4 1944 the annex was raided and all eight Jews were arrested, together with two of their protectors. (Miep, as an inconspicuous office girl, was overlooked, but she found Anne’s diary and kept it safe until after the war.)

Anne was taken with her family to the Westerbork camp she had written about. From there they were transported to Auschwitz, where she, Margot and their mother Edith were selected for forced labour and transferred to the women’s camp. In January 1945 Edith died and the sisters were sent on (separate) death marches to Bergen-Belsen, another camp. Both Anne and Margot died of typhus in Belsen, only four weeks before its liberation. Anne was just 16 years old.

Of the eight Jews who had hidden in the annex, only Otto Frank survived. Miep Gies had continued running his business during the war and returned Anne’s diary to him when they met again. Otto lived with the Gies family until 1952, when he moved to Switzerland. They remained close friends until his death in 1980.

The Diary of Anne Frank has been published in hundreds of languages throughout the world and has sold more than 20 million copies. No amount of reading or retelling Anne’s story, however, can compensate for the loss of her life or those of the other 1.5 million Jewish children who were murdered alongside her.

Janusz Korczak is one of the Jewish heroes of the Holocaust. Born Henryk Goldszmit in Warsaw in 1879, he was a doctor, educator and writer whose approach to children made him famous throughout Poland and beyond. Korczak ran a Jewish orphanage which was moved into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. There he attempted to maintain a semblance of ‘normal’ life for 200 Jewish children whose parents had been killed by typhus, starvation or German bullets.

Janusz Korczak with children

Korczak chose to share the fate of his orphans when they were deported to the gas chambers of Treblinka on 6 August 1942. He headed a procession of 192 children, surrounded by police and soldiers, as the group was marched to the railway station. At 12:55 the train left on schedule for Treblinka, where he and all of the children were gassed on arrival.