Comenius Project

COMENIUS PROJECT THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL BY ANNE FRANK

MARTA TARRÉS CODINA 1ST “BATXILLERAT” 2008 – 2009 IES JOAN BRUDIEU ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

INDEX Page 2 – 3 …...………………………………… Historical and social context of the book 4 – 5 ……..…… Study of the country and the city where the novel is developed 5 – 6 ...……………………………..………………. Habits and Jewish inheritance 6 – 7 ...……………………………………………….………... Analyses of the book - Summary - Characters 7 ………………………………………. Personal opinion of a passage of the book

8 ………………………………………………..……….. Bibliography and webgrapy

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ENGLISH Comenius Project 1. Historical and social context of the book The Second World War was a conflict made at international scale that took place from 1939 to 1945. The precedents were the Nazi policy that looked the expansion of a new fascist political order in Europe making German becomes a world-wide power. Hitler mobilized the German people to his favor. After achieving power in Germany, Hitler kept on annexing European countries to the third Reich. Hitler consolidated his alliance with Italy and made a pact of no aggression with the U.S.S.R. On the 1st September of 1939 the German army started the invasion of Poland and on the 3rd September Great Britain and France stated the War in Germany. On the 10th May Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium and occupied Paris. France was divided in an occupated zone and another one in a supposed way free but that depended on Berlin. It was necessary to carry out the invasion of Great Britain for which Hitler didn’t won the War, but as it wasn’t possible for him and he decided to postpone it; at the same time the island was been subjected to bombardments. In the Balkans Hitler achieved the alliance of Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria and occupied Yugoslavia and Greece. With the fall of the Balkans under Nazi forces, Great Britain lost its last point of support in the continent. Then Hitler sorted the invasion from the U.S.S.R. without previous declaration of war (1941) that Romania, Italy, Slovakia and Hungary collaborated in.

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The Russian army, with equipment really inferior to its rival, handed over terrain very quickly. On 2 October the offensive started against Moscow, but the climatic conditions hampered the development of the strategy of Hitler and the Germans halted the battle. On the contrary, Stalin started an offensive with better equipped troops, who retrieved a part of the lost terrain. The 7 of December of 1941 Japan,

ally

launched

a

of

Germany

surprise

attack

against the American base of Pearl-Harbour, now; the conflict had become a world-wide war that involved all continents. After retrieving some territories all over the world, in July 1943 the allies started the invasion of Italy that resulted in the fall of the fascist regime of Mussolini. After the conquest of Italy, and at the same time as the Soviet counteroffensive was being developed, the allies disembarked on the French coast of Normandy (6 June of 1944). The general advance of the allied troops on the oriental front was accompanied by an increase in the actions of resistance in the territories still occupied by the Germans. On the 12th January 1945, the U.S.S.R. started the invasion of Germany and after the capitulation of Berlin the German army signed the surrender in front of the North Americans, the British and the Soviets. The War was decided by the atomic

bombardment

in

Hiroshima

and

Nagasaki

in

August

1945.

On the 2nd September the Japanese government signed the capitulation in front of the United States.

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2. Study of the country and the city where the novel is developed Holland is in the north-west of Europe and in the north and in the west reaches with the North Sea, and borders Belgium in the south and Germany in the east.

Holland is a constitutional monarchy that is politically and socially characterized by allowing the marriage of people of the same sex, prostitution, euthanasia and the use of drugs. The language that is spoken in Holland is Dutch, although 70% of the population speaks also the English. Frequently the country is known as Holland, a very important historical region. The name of the country “Nederlanden” (low lands), is because a big part of the territory is under the level of the sea. Because of that, in 1953 after some strong floods, a great project called Delta Plan that joined the mouths of the Rin and the Mosa to avoid other floods was scouted. Amsterdam is the capital of the country and one of the most visited places by the tourists. The population uses the bicycle as the main form of transport. The most relevant places to visit in Amsterdam are the Van Gogh museum, the Rijksmuseum and Anne Frank house. The country is densely populated (16.570.000 inhabitants), and even though Amsterdam is the capital and the biggest city, the government is The Hague. Holland is known for windmills, clogs, tulips, bicycles and social tolerance. Rembrandt, Vincent Van Gogh or Piet Mondrian were Dutch.

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The cooking is characterized by the great consumption of bread and potatoes. One of the local dishes is the Erwtensoep, which in a basic way is a soup of chickpeas. Cheeses are also popular, Gouda, Edam and Leyden being the best.

3. Habits and Jewish inheritance The Judaism is the religious culture of the Jewish people. The most ancient of the three monotheist religions and one of the most ancient religious traditions that are practiced. Their doctrine is in the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. The Sabbath (xabat, Saturday) is the weekly rest and during the day any work has to be done. The holocaust was the genocide of the German Nazi government of several ethnic, religious, national and secular groups during the Second World War, mainly of Jews. For the Nazis, the Holocaust represented the "final solution to the question of the Jews". The number of Jewish victims is 6 million.

The biblical Hebrew word Shoa that means calamity is the Hebrew word to designate the Nazi Holocaust The persecution of the Jews in Holland (140.000 at the beginning of the war) started a bit after the invasion. Just 40.000 survived at the end of the war.

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The case of the Jew Anne Frank, who later would achieve at world-wide fame when her diary, written while she hid from the Germans, was found and published, is much known. Anne Frank was discovered and imprisoned in a concentration camp, where she died little before it was liberated.

4. Analyses of the book The book of “The Diary of a Young Girl”, is a narrative text and, because of this, a primary source. We can also say that is a historical text, because it explains some facts that took place between 1942 and 1944.

Summary Anne Frank herself explains the story and does it through a diary that her parents give her. She explains in the diary what the annex is like where they live, what the people sharing the annex are like, and how she spends the days there. She also explains her feelings and the fear that they have of being discovered. In the annex the hygiene was very difficult and food was scarce or sometimes bad. In the diary it is also seen that Anne gets along better with her father than with her mother.

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The diary finishes suddenly one day, but thanks to research that was made and to Anna’s father it is known how the story of Anne continued:

Characters On the 4th August of 1944 the police discovered the annexe because somebody had reported them. The police took Mr Kugler and Mr Kleiman to a prison in Amsterdam and then to a concentration camp also in Holland. Bep and Miep weren’t arrested. The eight people in the annexe were first taken to a prison, and then they were sent to Auschwitz Margot and Anne Frank were taken from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. A terrible illness attacked the prisoners there. They both died. Otto Frank was the only survivor. After Russian soldiers reached Auschwitz, ha was taken back to Amsterdam. In 1953, he moved to Switzerland, married again, and spent the rest of his life trying to share the message of his daughter’s diary with the rest of the world. He died in 1980.

5. Personal opinion of a passage of the book Page 41 Sunday, 16 of April 1944 I like this part because Anne explains her first kiss with Peter and she explains what it was like. 8

Bibliography and webgraphy Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl, Penguin Readers, Level 4, intermediate. Harlow, England, Pearson Education Limited, 2008. http://www.elcantodelbuho.org/index2.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland http://www.holland.com/es/cultural/

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