Photo courtesy of Julieta Leon
A Dutch judge is expected to decide where the Anne Frank archive collection will be kept after a long legal dispute over ownership.
By H. Nelson Goodson
June 24, 2013
Amsterdam, Netherlands - A long legal dispute expected to be decided by Wednesday in a Dutch court over where 10,000 documents, photos and letters about the plight of Anne Frank (Annelies "Anne" Marie Frank age 15) should remain in Amsterdam or be returned to Switzerland, according to Reuters citing a Dutch court source. Anne Frank born in Frankfurt Weimer Germany was a young Jewish girl that hid along with her family in a small back room hidden crawl space where her father worked in 1942 for two years in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The Nazis were enforcing Hitler's final solution campaign that included the massive relocation of Jewish people to concentration death camps. She lost her German citizenship in 1941.
The Frank family was betrayed and the Nazis discover their hiding place. The Frank's were detained and sent to separate concentration camps. Anne and her sister, Margot were eventually sent to Bergen-Belsen consentration camp where she ultimately died of typhus in March of 1945.
Her father Otto Frank was the only survivor who went back to Amsterdam and discovered that Anne's diary survived the war. He published it "The Diary of a Young Girl" in Dutch in 1947, in 1952 was published in English and later translated to numerous languages. The diary was the basis of several films and plays.
The diary was given to Anne on her 13th birthday and details her life experiences in written notes from June 12, 1942 to August 1, 1945.
She wrote a personal diary during her plight, which was published by her father detailing her accounts about the suffering she and her family endured under Nazi occupation and the inhumane treatment of Jewish people during World War II.
The legal dispute resulted from the Anne Frank House, an Amsterdam Museum refusing to return the archive collection to the Anne Frank Fonds, a Basel-base foundation created by Otto Frank, her father in Switzerland. Her father was the only survivor in the Frank's family. The documents detailing the life of Anne Frank include letters from relatives and are being reviewed by a Dutch judge who will determine ownership of some of the documents, which were loan to the Anne Frank House in 2007 by Buddy Elias, president of the Anne Frank Fonds. The disputed documents have become known as the Elias-Frank family archive historical documents.
The Anne Frank Muesum in Amsterdam makes an estimated $18 million dollars (14M euros) and attracts over one million visitors a year. The Anne Frank Foundation wants to display the documents in a Frankfurt Jewish Museum.
Película en español "El Diario de Anne Frank" video
The Diary of a Young Girl (English version) video
