From 1939 to 1945, a great war known as World War II raged in Europe. A German man by the name of Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany and then the dictator of Germany, fighting to gain control of all of Europe and exterminate anyone whom he considered to not be an Aryan German, a member of the so-called master race he fabricated, which he believed to be superior to all other races in Europe. While this was happening, two Jewish families in Holland, the Franks and the Van Daans, were hiding in the attic of a building in Amsterdam from the Nazis, the Germans working under Hitler and his officials in government. The reason they were hiding was that the Nazis were persecuting Jews, separating them from the rest of society, sending them to concentration camps and work camps, working them to death, and killing them using poison gas if they still survived. To avoid this, the Franks and Van Daans hid in the attic, never coming out, and receiving help from those outside who were willing to help them. This family stayed in those att
ic rooms for about 3 years, and during that time, the relationships between them grew tense. In The Diary of Anne Frank, Acts I and II, the family comes to the Secret Annex, as the attic is referred to, and learns what they have to do while living in the Annex: stay completely silent while there are people below the attic working, and do their normal activities while there are no other people in the building. As the play unfolds, the close-quarters quality of the Annex causes those inside to go on edge, and as more events take place, the characters truly begin to show how the stay has affected them psychologically. At the middle and final parts of the play, they begin to suspect that someone is going to disclose their whereabouts, and at the end of the play, the Green Police, the Nazi police force, finds them and takes them to concentration camps, where all except Mr. Frank, the head of the Frank family, die. This story shows the tragic tale of a family during World War II and the Holocaust and shows how cruel the Nazis really were.