The Holocaust

This is Anne Frank. During the Second World War, she and millions of people in the Jewish faith tried to hide from the Nazi party of Germany led by Adolf Hitler. He wanted the Jewish faith and the Jewish people to be gone and killed lot of them. This was called the Holocaust. Anne hid with family and friends in a secret attic accessed behind a bookcase for a long time. Anne wrote a (now) very famous diary about her time there. After some time her family was sadly discovered though and Anne died after being taken to work in a camp. She was only 15.

Anne was a typical girl who loved shoes and film stars however and a very exciting day for her in the attic came when the attic owner 'Miep' gave her some red high heeled shoes one day. She wrote about it in her diary on August 10th 1943, just over a year before she was discovered hiding. Those red shoes gave Anne a lovely moment at a scary time, she will have tried them on and softly walked around imagining herself as a film star herself.

Everyday, people all over the world remember and see what happened to people like Anne in the Second World War on a daily basis.

Below is a photo of a memorial to the Holocaust by the side of the Danube in Hungary.

These shoes belonged to a woman called Gisele Friedman who was imprisoned at Auschwitz concentration camp in early 1945 near to the end of the war. She was made to march along with 10,000 other inmates for miles and was transported to Belsen camp where the inmates who had also survived were eventually liberated by British troops on April 15th 1945. These shoes would have been walked a long way and protected Gisele’s feet at an extremely frightening time.

There are lots of memories of this horrible time for all Jewish people and many places where they and others are remembered have large collections of their shoes which were taken away from them. It is very sad to think about all their owners and why the shoes had to be thrown away