Tag Archives: Basel

The Forgotten Tragedy of Anne and Margot Frank

I am a member of several history websites receiving daily notifications about events that happened in history this day. Today, I received a notification of the anniversary of the 1945 death of Anne Frank at Bergen Belsen.

I don’t know how they came to that conclusion, because the exact date of Anne and Margot Frank’s deaths is not known. But this is that forgotten tragedy of their deaths their families like Otto Frank and the girls’ Aunt Leni Frank Elias did not have a date where they could remember the death of the two girls, and maybe light a candle for them. Nor would they have had a date where they could say a specific prayer.

Luckily, Leni Frank-Elias moved to Basel in Switzerland in the 1930s together with her husband and sons Stephan and Bernhard (Bernd) aka Buddy.

Anne Frank, clearly, was very fond of her cousin Bernhard.

Buddy (Bernd), was born in Frankfurt in 1925 and grew up in Basel. After his international career as an ice clown and actor, he became the President of the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel.

In a letter to Alice Fran dated 13 January 1941, Anne Frank wrote:

«I’m at the rink every spare minute. (…) I’m taking skating classes regularly now, where we’re learning how to dance and jump and everything else. (…) I hope that I’ll learn to skate as well as Bernd someday. (…) Bernd, maybe we can skate as a pair together someday, but I know I’d have to train very hard to get to be as good as you are.»

On 3 June 1942, Anne writes a birthday letter to her cousin Buddy. This is the last direct contact between the two cousins. One month later, on 6 July, the Franks leave their apartment in Merwedeplein in Amsterdam and go into hiding in the secret annexe, which had been prepared for them months before.

It is a tragedy that Anne and Margot Frank’s family and friends were even denied the date of their death.

Source

https://www.thepeoplehistory.com/march12th.html

https://www.annefrank.ch/en

Basel massacre

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The Basel massacre of Jews took place on 9 January 1349, as part of the Black Death persecutions of 1348–1350.

Following the spread of the Black Death through the surrounding countryside of Savoy and subsequently Basel, the Jews were accused of having poisoned the wells, because they suffered a lower mortality rate than the local gentiles from the pestilence.

The Black Death, which is estimated to have killed between 75 and 200 million people in the middle of the fourteenth century, arrived in central and western Europe in 1348. The pandemic spread through Savoy and soon began to kill people in the city of Basel.

Convinced that the Jews of the city were dying of the disease less frequently than the Christians, the local population soon began to accuse the Jews of poisoning the wells. Although accurate statistical evidence is lacking, numerous theories have been put forward to explain why Jews may have appeared to have suffered less from the disease. While one of these is based on the simple observation that Christians were less likely to see Jewish victims due to the fact they were buried in separate cemeteries, another suggests that strict Jewish dietary rituals meant that Jewish homes were much less appealing to the rats that are believed to have carried the plague.

Under pressure from the powerful guilds, many of whom had obtained confessions from local Jews under torture, the City Fathers responded with extraordinary ruthlessness. Having separated children from their parents, the adult Jews were a specially constructed wooden barn on an island in the Rhine. Here they were shackled together and the structure set on fire, leaving the victims to burn alive. The surviving children were forcefully converted to Christianity, while Jews were banned from the city for 200 years.

The Black Death itself continued to ravage Europe for around another four years, killing between 30 and 60 per cent of the entire population of the continent.

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