Anne Frank Quotes

“Any attempt at action is better than inaction. An attempt can go wrong, but inaction inevitably results in failure”
― Miep Gies, Anne Frank : The Biography

“If no voice speaks up for us, may the stones of this city testify on our behalf, this city whose prosperity owes so much to the efforts of the Jews, this city where so many institutions attest to the communal spirit of the Jews, this city where relations between Jews and non-Jews have always been exceptionally close.”
― Melissa Müller, Anne Frank : The Biography

“n his inaugural speeches Hitler announced his intention to revive Germany and defend it against the cancerous growth of democracy. Once in power, he issued emergency decrees stripping the opposition parties in the Reichstag and in the diets of power, steps taken ‘for the protection of the German people,’ as these proclamations grandiloquently declared. He used the burning of the Reichstag on the night of February 27-28, 1933, as a welcome opportunity to defeat his most powerful enemy, the Communist Party. Freedom of assembly and freedom of speech were suspended. Realizing that they would soon be at the mercy of a dictatorship, people reacted with uncertainty and fear. They hunkered down, kept quiet, and waited.”
― Melissa Müller, Anne Frank : The Biography

“The first volume of Mein Kampf appeared in 1925, the second in December 1926; from 1930 on, the two parts were available as one book. Otto Frank leafed through Mein Kampf and had read a few passages in it. ‘No nation can rid itself of this plague [the Jews] except by the sword,’ Hitler wrote. ‘Such a process is and always will be a bloody business.” At the beginning of World War I, the German government should have ‘exterminated the Jews mercilessly’; Germany would not have lost the war if ‘it had gassed 12,000 or 15,000 of them.’ Like Lieutenant Otto Frank, Adolf Hitler had been awarded the Iron Cross in World War I.

How much longer would this man be allowed to promulgate his madness? Otto wondered. How far would people let him go? When would they realize what his intentions really were? What if he actually came to power? What would become of the Jews then? Would the Franks still be safe in Germany? Would Hitler be able to deprive them of their livelihood? There was only one thing Otto felt absolutely certain of and stressed repeatedly to his family and friends: We must not allow this man to deprive us of our German identity. If only the economy would finally pick up.”
― Melissa Müller, Anne Frank : The Biography

“On May 10, 1933, National Socialist student groups marched “against the un-German spirit” and burned “un-German writings” in street actions designed to attract publicity. By now it seemed inevitable that the Franks would emigrate to Amsterdam. “When the Jews write in German, they lie,” the Nazis had proclaimed. The works of Thomas, Klaus, and Heinrich Mann, of Arnold and Stefan Zweig, of Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Maria Remarque, and Franz Werfel, not to mention the Communist writings of Marx and Engels and the books of Bertolt Brecht and many others, were tossed into the flames in many German cities to the accompaniment of shouted slogans; it was as though the demonstrators wished to burn the authors themselves at the stake.

Otto Frank’s favorite poet, Heinrich Heine, whose poem “Lorelei” every schoolchild knew by heart, was declared a nonperson. In future textbooks, “Poet unknown” would replace the name of Heinrich Heine, a poet who had written a hundred years earlier, “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”
― Melissa Müller, Anne Frank : The Biography

“The Franks, it seemed, had emigrated just in time. The Reich’s Law of Citizenship of September 15, 1935, had declared Germany’s Jews aliens in their own country. They were not even second-class citizens; they were last-class citizens, unable to vote. That same day the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated to “protect German blood” from all “alien blood.” In the interest of “preserving the purity of the German nation,” the Nuremburg Laws spelled out in detail the definitions of “Aryan and Jewish, half and quarter Jewish, related to Jews by marriage, and racially pure.”

To discriminate against Jews, to persecute them, was thus legally sanctioned. Germans were now free to indulge their bigotry and hatred knowing they were in compliance with the law, a reassuring feeling for people with a strong traditional respect for governmental authority.”
― Melissa Müller, Anne Frank : The Biography

“Anne Frank was only one of the Nazi’s victims. But her fate helps us grasp the immense loss the world suffered because of the Holocaust. Anne has touched the hearts and minds of millions; she has enriched all of our lives. Let us hope she has also enlarged our horizons. It is important for all of us to realize how much Anne and the other victims, each in his or her own way, would have contributed to our society had they been allowed to live.

To my great and abiding sorrow, I was not able to save Anne’s life. But I was able to help her live two years longer. In those two years she wrote the diary that gives hope to people all over the world and calls for understanding and tolerance. It confirms my conviction that any attempt at action is better than inaction. An attempt can go wrong, but inaction inevitably results in failure.

I was able to save Anne’s diary and thus make her greatest wish come true. “I want to be useful or give pleasure to the people around me yet who don’t really know me,” she wrote in her diary on March 25, 1944, about one year before her death. “I want to go on living, even after my death!” And on May 11, she noted: “You’ve known for a long time that my greatest wish is to become a journalist someday and later on a famous writer.”

Through her diary Anne really does live on. She stands for the triumph of the spirit over evil and death.

A note by Miep Gies, Amsterdam, January 1998”
― Melissa Müller, Anne Frank : The Biography

“When we are shocked to think that six million children, women, and men were driven to their deaths and we ask ourselves, “How could such a thing happen?” We should keep in mind the indifference of normal human beings the world over, good, hardworking, and often God-fearing individuals. Of course, it was the Nazi regime that was responsible for the mass murder, but if not for the apathy of people not just in Germany and Austria but everywhere—basically decent people, no doubt—the horrible slaughter could never have assumed the proportions it did.

A note by Miep Gies, Amsterdam, January 1998”
― Melissa Müller, Anne Frank : The Biography

“The Franks’ decision to go into hiding was not, however, an unusual one. Of the Jews living in Holland between 1942 and 1943, twenty thousand and perhaps as many as thirty thousand—the estimates vary widely—saw going into hiding as their only alternative to deportation. “We are quite used to the idea of people in hiding, or ‘underground,’ as in bygone days one was used to Daddy’s bedroom slippers warming in front of the fire,” Anne noted (Jan. 28, 1944; vers. B/C). But the way the Franks went into hiding was by no means typical. Most families separated, with the parents entrusting their children to the care of organized resistance groups. They drummed new family names into the chilren’s heads, names that didn’t sound Jewish, and arranged for them to live with people who—at least to the children—were utter strangers. The adults sought out other refugees. Most married couples had to separate. Very few of those who went into hiding could rely on the kind of loyal, well-organized team of helpers the Franks had, selfless people whom they had known for years and who not only provided them with essentials but also stood by them as friends, even bringing them gifts on their birthdays and holidays.”
― Melissa Müller, Anne Frank : The Biography

“Little by little, new details about atrocities committed against Jews kept making their way into the annex. Some were doubted, others confirmed, but they still did not provide a coherent picture. On the last day of March 1944 Anne wrote again about the atrocities Jews had to fear. In concise, detached language she reports the unimaginable extent of the National Socialist madness. “Hungary is occupied by German troops. There are still 1 million Jews there, so they too will have had it now!” (March 31, 1944; ver. C). Within two months, Adolf Eichmann had half a million Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz. Almost all of them died in the gas chambers.”
― Melissa Müller, Anne Frank : The Biography

“But the murderous hatred of the Nazis, their will to destroy, was apparently stronger; too many people, moreover, stood silently by and watched the Nazi machine grind on. “The little man is just as guilty, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago!” Anne realized. “There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage” (May 3, 1944; ver. A).

The Nazis and their silent helpers could take Ann’es life from her, but not her voice. “I know what I want, I have a goal, have an opinion, have a religion and love. . . . If God lets me live, I shall attain more than Mummy has ever done, I shall not remain insignificant, I shall work in the world for mankind” (April 11, 1944, ver. A). In the end, the Nazi terror could not silence Anne’s voice, which still rings out for all of us, whom she had hoped so ardently to serve.”
― Melissa Müller, Anne Frank : The Biography

“Of the 1,019 Jews who arrived from Westerbork on September 5, 258 men and 212 women survived the selection process. The remaining 549, among them all the children, were killed immediately after their arrival in the gas chambers of Birkenau and their bodies burned in the neighboring crematoria. All eight residents of 263 Prinsengracht survived the first round. Anne, at fifteen years and three months, was among the youngest.”
― Melissa Müller, Anne Frank : The Biography

“Of the 1,019 prisoners sent on the last train from Westerbork to Auschwitz, Otto Frank was one of the forty-five men and eighty-two women who survived.”
― Melissa Müller, Anne Frank : The Biography

“It is often said that Anne symbolizes the six million victims of the Holocaust. I consider this statement wrong. Anne's life and death were her own individual fate, an individual fate that happened six million times over.”
― Miep Gies, Anne Frank : The Biography