Anti-Semitism in the Netherlands

Anti-Semitism in the Netherlands appears in Anne Frank’s diary not as an abstract prejudice but as a force that shaped daily movement, public judgment, and the fragile ties between people in hiding and those helping them. Her entries trace a widening pressure: formal restrictions marked Jewish life, deportation made persecution an immediate reality, and reports of renewed hostility among Dutch people threatened the hope that the country might offer a home.

From family anxiety to imposed restrictions

The danger had roots before the German occupation of the Netherlands. Anne recalled that relatives in Germany suffered under Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws. After the 1938 pogroms, her two maternal uncles fled Germany for North America, while her elderly grandmother came to live with the family. The events elsewhere in Europe were therefore already part of the family’s private history before the occupation made restrictions a daily condition in Holland.

After May 1940, Anne wrote, the family’s freedom narrowed through a succession of decrees. Jews had to wear the yellow star and surrender their bicycles; they could not use streetcars or cars, and their shopping was restricted to specified hours. They were barred from public entertainment and sports, forbidden to visit Christians in their homes, and required to attend Jewish schools. Restrictions on movement also confined them to their homes at night. The cumulative effect was expressed in Anne’s friend Jacque’s fear of doing anything that might no longer be permitted: the rules made ordinary decisions uncertain, even as life continued around them.

Persecution reported from outside the hiding place

Once the family was in hiding, Anne’s knowledge of events beyond the building came partly through news brought by visitors. When Fritz Pfeffer arrived, he told the residents about friends and acquaintances who had been taken away. Anne recorded reports of military vehicles going from door to door, searches for Jewish residents, lists used to target particular homes, and rewards offered for people who were caught. These passages are reports received in concealment, not scenes Anne claims to have witnessed herself; their force in her diary comes from the way news from outside enters and alters the perceived safety of the hiding place.

Another entry describes people being removed from their homes with little opportunity to take possessions, families separated, and children returning from school to find their parents gone. Anne also noted that Dutch Christians feared the conscription of their sons for labor in Germany. This did not make the threats equivalent: the diary distinguishes the targeted persecution of Jews from the wider wartime fear, while showing how the war’s reach extended into other households too. The residents could call themselves fortunate to have shelter and food, but that relative safety sharpened their distress about people they could no longer help.

Hiding, Jewish identity, and collective survival

The Frank family’s move into hiding was brought forward when Margot received a call-up notice. The family had planned to leave on July 16, but began ten days earlier; their hiding place was in Otto Frank’s office building. This change in the family’s circumstances gives the restrictions and persecution a concrete consequence: the issue was no longer only where Jews could go or what they could do, but whether remaining at home was safe at all.

Anti-Semitism was also bound to Jewish identity as a category imposed from outside and a belonging Anne increasingly affirmed for herself. During Hanukkah, the residents exchanged small gifts and lit candles for only ten minutes because candles were scarce; Hermann van Pels made a wooden menorah. This modest observance sits beside the much broader danger recorded in the diary. Later, Anne reflected that Jews were chained to one place, deprived of rights, and burdened with obligations. She nevertheless placed hope in the survival of the Jewish people and wrote that they could never be only Dutch or English, but would always also be Jews. Her account holds coercive classification and chosen identification together rather than treating them as the same thing.

The return of hostility and the crisis of belonging

In May 1944, Anne recorded the news that anti-Semitism had appeared in circles where, she had been told, it had once seemed unthinkable. She understood how accusations could arise: Christians were said to blame Jews for revealing secrets to the Germans, betraying helpers, and bringing suffering upon them. Anne acknowledged that such accusations had a basis in cases where people had denounced helpers, but resisted turning individual acts under German pressure into grounds for collective blame. She asked whether Christians would necessarily have acted differently in the same position and challenged the expectation that Jews could withstand pressure that others might not.

A related report from underground circles disturbed her further: German Jews who had immigrated to Holland before the war and were then sent to Poland, it was said, should not be allowed to return after Hitler’s defeat, despite having been granted asylum. For Anne, this exposed a contradiction in the language of a war fought for freedom, truth, and justice. Even before the war was over, Jews could again be treated as lesser beings, and the conduct of one Jewish person could be made to reflect on all Jews. The diary records her confusion and grief at seeing judgment directed toward a population already subjected to extreme oppression.

Anne hoped the hostility would pass and that Dutch people would act according to what they knew to be just. She feared that if the threat were carried out, the few Jews still left in Holland would have to leave. Yet she also affirmed her love for Holland, the country she had hoped would become her homeland after the loss of her original one. The tension is not resolved: attachment to the country persists alongside the fear that it may turn away those who sought refuge there.

A helper’s suspicion and the diary as witness

The reported shift in public feeling reached into the relationship between the residents and their helpers. Miep came to Otto Frank, visibly upset, and asked whether they thought the helpers too had been affected by the current anti-Semitism. Otto was surprised and tried to reassure her, though Anne noted that some suspicion remained. Miep and the others were doing more errands and showing greater interest in the residents’ difficulties; Anne called them good and noble people. The episode makes clear that fear did not simply divide persecuted people from everyone outside: it could unsettle trust among those whose practical assistance made concealment possible.

Anne’s diary also has a particular place as testimony. Gerrit Bolkestein’s radio appeal for eyewitness accounts of suffering under the German occupation helped prompt her, in 1944, to plan a book based on her diary. She began revising it as well as keeping the original: the revised version could omit passages and add material from memory. The publication history further shaped what readers encountered. Otto Frank later selected from the original and revised diaries, and the first published version was shortened; passages about Anne’s sexuality and unflattering accounts of other residents were among the material omitted. The expanded definitive edition restored additional passages from the earlier versions. This history matters to the subject because the diary’s account of anti-Semitism is a situated, evolving record, not an omniscient survey: it distinguishes remembered experience, received reports, and Anne’s own interpretation as she tries to understand what persecution means for safety, justice, and belonging.