1938 pogroms

The 1938 pogroms are recalled in Anne Frank’s diary as a turning point in the family’s experience of danger: her maternal uncles fled Germany, while her grandmother came to live with them. The recollection connects persecution in Germany to the later restrictions and threats that shaped Jewish life in the Netherlands, and to Anne’s continuing, complicated attachment to the country that had taken her family in.

Family Flight and Refuge

Anne describes the family’s anxiety as extending beyond their immediate household: relatives in Germany were suffering under Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws. After the 1938 pogroms, her mother’s two brothers escaped Germany and found refuge in North America. Their flight made persecution a direct family reality, not a distant political report.

Anne’s elderly grandmother, then seventy-three, came to live with the family. She remained part of Anne’s personal history in the Netherlands: when Anne’s birthday was celebrated in 1942, a candle was lit for her grandmother, who had died in January of that year. The brief memorial gesture carries the earlier crisis into the family’s later life, binding public persecution to loss and remembrance at home.

From German Persecution to Occupation

Anne places the pogroms within a sequence of worsening conditions. After May 1940, she writes, the war, the Dutch capitulation, and the arrival of German forces brought trouble for Jews in the Netherlands. A list of restrictions records how policy entered ordinary routines: Jews had to wear a yellow star, surrender bicycles, shop only during specified hours, attend Jewish schools, and obey curfews, among many other prohibitions. The accumulating rules narrowed everyday freedom even as life continued.

That tightening context eventually shaped the Frank family’s own flight into hiding. They had planned to go into hiding on July 16, 1942, but Margot’s call-up notice forced them to leave ten days earlier. Their hiding place was in Otto Frank’s office building. The earlier story of relatives escaping Germany thus stands beside a later, distinct family response to persecution in the Netherlands: concealment within a city where ordinary movement and public life had been progressively restricted.

Jewish Identity and Dutch Belonging

The diary returns to the meaning of Jewish identity under threat. During the family’s confinement, Anne describes the Jews as chained to one place, without rights but burdened with obligations, and insists that the time should come when they could again be people, not merely Jews. Her words frame identity as both an imposed classification and a bond that persecution cannot simply erase.

In a later reflection, Anne records the disturbing claim that German Jews who had immigrated to Holland before the war and were deported to Poland should not be allowed to return after Hitler’s defeat. The prospect unsettles her understanding of refuge: a country that had once taken people in might deny them belonging even after the immediate danger passed. Yet Anne also states that she loves Holland. She had hoped it would become a fatherland after she lost her own, and she still hoped that it might. The 1938 pogroms therefore remain more than a family memory: they form part of the history behind a persistent question in the diary—whether safety and home can survive the forces that make Jewish identity a reason for exclusion.