Anne Frank is probably the most famous Holocaust victim, known for the diary she wrote while hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex in Amsterdam. Despite how well-known her story is, too often I see one word being used to describe what happened to her that makes my blood boil: “died.”
The official Anne Frank website notes on its timeline that she “dies from exhaustion” in 1945. Wikipedia blandly reports, “Anne Frank and her sister Margot were transferred from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (presumably of typhus) a few months later.”
Really? They died there?
Nobody simply “died” in any of the “camps.” They were murdered. Even if they weren’t gassed or their bodies weren’t stuffed into the crematoria, they were murdered. Keeping people underfed such that they die of starvation is murder. Keeping people in conditions that spread disease that leads to their death is murder. Even those who managed to escape and hide but still perished from disease or exposure were murdered. These were not passive events with no one to blame.
Anne Frank’s death was a direct result of the brutal conditions she faced in the death camps. They weren’t just “concentration” camps. Death was planned systemically, and the outcome was not accidental. It was premeditated first-degree murder.
