This book was created and published on StoryJumper™

©2010 StoryJumper, Inc.   All rights reserved.

Publish your own children's book: 

www.storyjumper.com

A~ Anne Frank

     Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her parents were Edith and Otto; Margot was 

her sister. Otto served for Germany in World War 1 which is odd because the Germans turned around 

and started killing Jews after the war. The family moved to the Netherlands in the early 1930s; 

Germany invaded in 1940. The Franks, van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer went into hiding in the Secret Annex, 

located in Amsterdam, in May 1940. They lived there for 2 years before they were captured in 1944. 

The families had the help of Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kuglar, and Bep Voskuijl.   When they 

were captured, they were taken to a concentration camp, then shortly after Auschwitz. Margot and 

Anne were then taken to Bergen- Belsen in late 1944. The day the group was found, Otto Frank had 

been out of the Secret Annex on an errand, so he was the only survivor.

D~ The Diary

Anne Frank was given a diary for her 13th birthday which came right before she had to go into 

hiding. She wrote in it often. She wrote to an imaginary friend named Kitty. Later on she heard a 

radio announcement asking for people to save their diaries. She heard this and started to rewrite 

her diary alongside naming it the Secret Annex. After she was arrested, one of the helpers, Miep, 

found it in the hiding place with the pages torn out. Miep took the diary and hid it in hopes of 

seeing Anne again. When she found out that Anne was dead, she gave the diary to Otto Frank, 

Anne's father. Otto later got it published. The diary has been made into a play and a movie, and 

the book has been published in over 60 languages. Many people have been inspired by it. 

F~ "A Funeral"

This poem struck me because it describes what the camp was like 

and how they couldn't do much about it- not even honor the 

other's deaths. The poem is additionally extremely visual and 

descriptive. In my mind, I see a coffin surrounded by smoke, but 

the sunrays are able to penetrate through it onto the coffin in a 

majestic way. I think of one person in the middle of a bunch of 

bodies lying on the ground- even like a war was happening and 

there's only one survivor. Another thing the poem says is "You, 

homeless handful of ashes" which shows me that the people were 

dirty and worn out like ashes are. When it says "homeless", it 

makes me think that the people had no one to go back to 

because they were dead in another camp or died in the war. 

Because it is talking about a funeral, you can also think of it as 

that the dead bodies are cremated, but have no where to be sent 

to. This is one of my favorite lines. The other two would be 

"Human body turned into smoke, Blown through the smokestack 

of history." The reason I like these lines is that it is stating that 

even though the people are dead, we know about how they were 

treated and maybe even who they are because of how they died. 

Overall, the poem makes me sad and disappointed that people 

would be treated in that way, but moreover that people would be 

the ones treating others like that. Society shouldn't be that way. 

"A Funeral"

By: M.J., a Warsaw ghetto poet

The coffin – a crematorium furnace,

Lid – transparent, made of air,

Human body turned into smoke,

Blown through the smokestack of history.

How shall I honor your passing,

Walk in your funeral procession?

You, homeless handful of ashes

Between the earth and heaven.

How to cast a green garland

On the grave dug high in the air –

An ark of the world’s four corners

Under the invader’s fire.

Your coffin, which is not,

Will not slide from roaring cannons,

And only the column of air

Illumines your death with sunrays.

And here is such a great silence

On earth, like a trampled banner,

In the mourning smoke of corpses,

In the crucified outcry.

G~ Genocide

    Genocide is the pre-planned extermination of a specific group. The Holocaust is one example of 

a genocide where millions of Jews- along with others- were killed by the Nazis (as seen in the 

picture). Another genocide that has taken place in the world is the Armenian Genocide that took 

place in 1915 and 1916 by the Ottoman Empire. At the time there were two and a half million 

Armenians living in the area and one and half million were murdered. Armenians honor on April 

24 because that is the day that 300 Armenian leaders were rounded up and killed.

    Yet another time genocide has ocurred in world history was in Rwanda. In 1994, there were 

three ethnic groups: the Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa. The Hutu was the major group and blamed the 

Tutsi for all of Rwanda's problems. A plane was shot down carrying the president, who was Hutu, 

in April. The Hutu started planning how to kill the Tutsi and killed all of their major leaders. After 

the plane was shot, over three-fourths of the population, or 800,000 Tutsi were killed. Alongside 

this, some Hutu were killed because they opposed what was happening. People around the world 

knew what was happening, but they did nothing to stop it.

The picture on the top left is of men standing 

around a wagon full of bodies. It makes me 

feel really terrible for the soldiers who 

discovered the camps because they already 

were having to see war; now they had to see 

a camp full of people dead. The picture is sad. 

You would hope that society and people 

wouldn't and couldn't be that cruel. On the 

top right, there are children standing behind a 

barbed wire fence. The image shown makes 

the people in control look really terrible 

because children shouldn't be treated that 

way. For the bottom picture, I don't know how 

the people in control could walk by that pile 

everyday and live with themselves. We're 

probably only looking at a small part of the 

destruction in this image, and it's already 

sickening to know that people in society could 

do this.

H~ Holocaust

M~Miep Gies

Miep Gies was born in Austria. When she was little, her parents sent her to the 

Netherlands to recover from tuberculosis and malnutrition during the war. She 

stayed with her foster family because she loved the country so much. They moved to 

Amsterdam in 1922. She helped the people living in the Secret Annex. 

N~ Nazis

The Nazis were led by Hitler (in front in the picture). They were extremely anti-semitic and 

blamed Jews for everything wrong with Germany. Soon this group started trying to find ways to 

get rid of the Jews. They placed many laws on the Jews restricting their rights called the 

Nuremberg Laws. Later on in May 1940, they invaded countries including the Netherlands causing 

World War 2 to break out. After the war, the Allies found the concentration camps. They didn't 

realize what the Nazis had been doing to the Jews and other minorities; the Allies didn't know 

that mass extermination was happening within Germany and millions were being killed. Hitler 

died early in 1945 and later in the year some Nazis were put on trial for war crimes.

O~ Otto Frank

Otto Frank was the father of Anne Frank. During World 

War 1, Otto served for Germany who later turned against 

him. He opened Opekta and Pectacon which produced and 

ingredient for jam. Otto married Edith Frank in 1925; 

Margot was born a year later. In 1929, Anne was born. 

Towards the end of the 1930s, Otto started preparing the 

Secret Annex just in case it would be needed. He and his 

family went into hiding in 1942. In 1944, Otto was out of 

the house when his family was found and arrested. He 

was the only survivor in the Secret Annex. Because his 

family was killed off, Miep Gies, his assistant, gave him 

the diary; he published it in 1947.

You've previewed 10 of 16 pages.

To read more: