On the morning of August 4, 1944, Dutch police officers led by an SS officer named Karl Silberbauer arrived at a canal-side warehouse at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. A tip-off had brought them there: Jews were hiding in the upstairs rooms. Silberbauer and his men went up and found a doorway hidden behind a revolving bookcase. Behind it, in rooms that had been occupied for 761 days, they discovered eight people who had tried to vanish from Nazi-occupied Europe.
They arrested them on the spot. Silberbauer confiscated their money and valuables and scattered the papers and notebooks he found lying around. Among those scattered papers was a diary kept by a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne Frank. The story of how Anne Frank came to be in that hidden annex, and how her diary survived the raid that ended her life in hiding, begins more than a decade earlier and more than four hundred kilometers away.
Annelies Marie Frank was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank. She had a sister, Margot, three years older. The girls spent a happy childhood playing almost daily in the garden with the children of their neighborhood. The Franks were liberal Jews living in an assimilated community on the outskirts of Frankfurt, surrounded by Jewish and non-Jewish families of various religions.
Their world changed dramatically on January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, was appointed chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. The new regime moved quickly to restrict the civil and human rights of Jewish citizens and established the first concentration camps, imprisoning political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others it classified as dangerous. Facing business problems and rising antisemitism, Otto Frank decided in 1933 to leave Germany. In September of that year he founded a franchise in Amsterdam for the Opekta company, which traded in pectin, a gelling agent used for making jam.
The rest of the family followed soon after. The Franks were among three hundred thousand Jews who fled Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939. They settled in quickly in Amsterdam. The girls enrolled in Dutch schools, made new friends, and despite initial problems with the language, became excellent students, especially Margot.
For their parents the situation was harder. Otto worked long hours to get his company going and to build a new life for his family. His financial position improved in 1938, when he started a second company, Pectacon, a wholesaler of herbs and spices. Watching Nazi Germany’s aggressive expansion with growing concern, he even considered setting up a business in Great Britain and moving there, but that plan never worked out.
On September 1, 1939, the Second World War began. Anne Frank was ten years old when Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940. The criminal regime the family had fled in 1933 finally caught up with them in the country that had become their home and given them freedom to live their own lives. The Dutch surrender followed on May 15, after the Luftwaffe used paratroopers to seize tactical points across the country, the heavy bombardment of Rotterdam destroyed the entire historic center of that city, and the Germans threatened to destroy Utrecht the same way.
Once the Netherlands was fully occupied, the Nazis quickly introduced anti-Jewish laws and regulations designed to exclude Jewish people from society and restrict their livelihood. Jewish civil servants were fired. Jewish businesses and Jewish people themselves had to be registered. Jews could no longer visit parks, cinemas, or non-Jewish shops.
Many places became off-limits to Anne, and she could no longer attend the same school: Jewish children were now required to attend separate Jewish schools. New laws barred Jews from running their own businesses, and Otto Frank was forced to give up his companies. He had, however, managed to transfer control to his employees soon enough to keep them out of Nazi hands. The situation worsened in 1941, when Jewish men were arrested in raids and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Among them were friends and acquaintances of the Franks, and reports of their deaths soon followed. Otto understood how critical the situation had become and tried to emigrate to the United States and Cuba, but he could never obtain the necessary documents. In the spring of 1942, anticipating the deportation of his own family, Otto Frank began preparing a hiding place in an empty part of his business premises at Prinsengracht 263. On April 29, 1942, regulations were announced forcing Jews to wear a yellow badge in the form of the Star of David as a means of identification.
The rules came into effect on May 5, and anyone caught without the badge was arrested and detained for six weeks. The systematic deportation of Dutch Jews to the death camps began that summer. Transports regularly left the transit camps of Westerbork and Vught. Of the 140,000 Jews who had lived in the Netherlands when the war began, 107,000 — including small children — were deported, mostly to Auschwitz and Sobibor, by September 1944.
Only 5,000 of them returned after the war. Before going into hiding, the Frank family enjoyed one last happy moment. On June 12, 1942, Anne celebrated her thirteenth birthday and received a diary. It was a red-checked autograph book she had pointed out to her father in a shop window.
In it she would record her feelings and thoughts during the difficult times that were to come. Less than one month later, on July 5, 1942, Margot received a call-up order to report for a so-called labor camp in Nazi Germany. Knowing what had happened to friends and acquaintances who had been sent to such camps and never returned, the Franks did not hesitate. The next morning they went into hiding.
The family moved into the secret annex behind Otto’s office building, a three-story space entered through a revolving bookcase. There they would spend 761 days. After seven days they were joined by the Van Pels family: Hermann, Auguste, and their sixteen-year-old son Peter, from whom Anne would later receive her first kiss. In November they were joined by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and family friend.
Eight people in all now lived in the concealed rooms, completely dependent on six helpers — employees and friends of Anne’s father who provided food, clothing, and everything necessary between 1942 and 1944. Thanks to Anne’s diary, we know in remarkable detail how the eight people lived for more than two years in that cramped space. Silence was essential, especially from 8:30 in the morning, when the men working in the warehouse below the annex began their workday. Any sound could arouse suspicion.
The mornings were devoted to reading and studying and preparing for the lunch break. At 12:30, when the warehouse workers left for lunch at home, a few of the helpers came up to the annex to share lunch with those in hiding. Miep Gies usually stayed in the office to keep watch. The people in hiding could see other faces and listen to Radio Oranje, a program broadcast by the BBC in which Queen Wilhelmina — who had escaped from the invading German troops on May 13, 1940, and traveled to England — spoke thirty-four times during the course of the war.
In the afternoon, some of the people in hiding took a nap, while Anne wrote or studied. Then they had coffee, prepared dinner, and at 5:30, when the warehouse workers went home, they could at last leave the annex and spread out through the building. They cooked dinner and took turns using the bathroom, just as they had in the morning before the workers started their day. The situation grew more dangerous after September 1942, when special units of Dutch collaborators were formed to hunt for Jews in hiding.
An estimated 25,000 Jews went into hiding in the Netherlands. Two thirds of them survived. One third were betrayed and discovered. The eight people in the secret annex belonged to that latter group.
To this day, no one knows for certain why the police raid came on August 4, 1944. But come it did. After the arrests, the people from the annex were taken to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam. Two of the helpers gathered up the scattered papers and notebooks before the Nazis emptied the hiding place by order.
Among those papers was Anne’s diary, which survived. From the prison in Amsterdam, the eight were sent to the Westerbork transit camp. There they were placed in the prison barracks, with men and women separated. Otto worked during the day, but in the evenings he could be with Edith, Margot, and Anne.
After a few weeks, they were loaded onto a train. Theirs was the last transport to leave Westerbork for Auschwitz-Birkenau, the extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. The journey took three horrible days. Anne and more than a thousand others were packed closely together in cattle wagons, with little food, little water, and only a barrel for a toilet.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Nazi doctors examined the prisoners to decide who could do heavy forced labor and who could not. Around 350 people from Anne’s transport were taken immediately to the gas chambers and murdered. Otto was sent to a camp for men. Anne, Margot, and Edith were sent to the labor camp for women.
After the war, survivors would describe the three of them as an inseparable trio. In early November 1944, Anne and Margot were deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Their parents stayed behind at Auschwitz. Edith Frank died of weakness and disease on January 6, 1945, three weeks before the Red Army liberated the camp.
At Bergen-Belsen, Anne reunited with her friend Nanette Blitz, who survived the Holocaust and later described Anne as bald, emaciated, and shivering. Blitz said that Anne did not wish to live any longer, because she believed both her parents were dead. But Anne also told her friend that she hoped one day to write a book based on her diary when the war ended. Conditions at Bergen-Belsen were terrible.
There was no water for washing and hardly enough for drinking and cooking. Between January and March 1945, prisoners from other camps were sent on death marches to Bergen-Belsen. About a third of the prisoners who arrived in those transports were already dead; almost 80 percent of the rest had to be fetched by truck from the station because they were too weak and sick to walk. On one occasion, of a transport of 1,900 inmates, more than 500 arrived dead.
The prisoners received almost no food during the marches, and there was no food when they arrived either. The camp was so overcrowded that during the freezing winter months, prisoners had to sleep sitting up on the floor, sharing only 200 blankets among tens of thousands of people. Due to starvation, thirst, and the outbreak of typhus epidemics, the average daily mortality rate was between 250 and 300 prisoners. In these terrible conditions, Anne and Margot contracted typhus as well.
Gena Turgel, a survivor who worked in the camp hospital and knew Anne, remembered seeing her in her final days. Anne, Turgel recalled, was delirious, terrible, and burning up. Turgel brought her water with which to wash. But Anne and her sister did not survive.
Margot fell from her bunk in her weakened state and was killed by the shock. Anne died one day later. Both died in February 1945 from the effects of typhus — Margot first, Anne shortly afterward. It was initially believed that the sisters died only a few weeks before the camp’s liberation on April 15, 1945, but it was later revealed that they may have died as early as February.
One person from the secret annex survived. Otto Frank was liberated on January 27, 1945, when Soviet forces entered Auschwitz. On his way back to the Netherlands, he learned that his wife Edith had died, but he hoped that Anne and Margot had somehow survived. He returned to the liberated Netherlands on June 3, 1945, nine days before what would have been Anne’s sixteenth birthday.
All hope was lost one month later, when he learned of the deaths of his daughters. Miep Gies, one of the helpers, had kept Anne’s diary and now passed it to Otto. It took him a long time to find the courage to read it. When he did, he was astonished by her writing.
He read about Anne’s dreams of becoming a writer and a journalist, and her intention to publish the stories of their life in the secret annex after the war ended. In the end, Anne’s dreams came true. The first three thousand copies of her book, The Secret Annex, were published in 1947. Since then it has been translated into more than seventy languages.
People all over the world came to know Anne’s story. In 1960, the hiding place that for two years had been home to eight people trying to survive the atrocities of the Nazi regime became a museum: the Anne Frank House. Today, visitors can still see Anne’s room, its walls brightened with the picture postcards and movie stars she collected, and her original diary and other manuscripts, which she wrote until her arrest.
Anne Frank — a teenage girl who perished in a death camp and whose only crime was that she was a Jew — became a symbol that would live on, forever reminding the world of the dangers of discrimination, racism, and hatred toward one another.
