On the morning of August 4th, 1944, a Dutch detective sergeant named Abraham Capper arrived at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam with several members of the German security police. They did not search the building room by room. They walked directly to the bookcase that concealed the entrance to the Secret Annex, pulled it aside, and found eight people who had been hiding there for 761 days. Someone had told them exactly where to look.
The identity of that person remains the most investigated and unresolved mystery in the Anne Frank story. It is a question that haunted Otto Frank for the rest of his life, and it cuts to the heart of how ordinary people behave under extreme oppression. The answer, whoever it was, sent eight people into the machinery of the Holocaust. The girl who wrote the diary had recorded her fears, her dreams, her crushes, and her desperate hope that the world would one day be good again.
By the time the bookcase was pulled aside, Anne Frank was 15 years old. She had spent more than two years in those cramped, silent rooms behind the bookcase, and her words would eventually be read by hundreds of millions of people in more than 70 languages. But her story did not end when she picked up her pen, nor did it end when the German police dragged her from her hiding place. It ended in the mud and typhus of Bergen-Belsen in the early spring of 1945, just weeks before the war itself came to a close.
And even then, the story of the Frank family was far from over. Otto Heinrich Frank was born on May 12th, 1889, in Frankfurt am Main, into a wealthy, assimilated German banking family. The household was cultured, educated, and deeply patriotic. Otto and his three siblings, Robert, Herbert, and Helene, grew up surrounded by books and music, secure in the belief that they were part of German society in every meaningful way.
Otto served as a lieutenant in the German army during the First World War, seeing action on the Western Front at the Battle of the Somme. He was proud of that service. Germany was his country, and he believed in it. It would take the full force of National Socialism to strip that belief away.
After the war, Otto returned to Frankfurt and tried to rebuild the family banking business, which had suffered badly during the economic chaos of the Weimar years. On May 12th, 1925, his own 36th birthday, he married Edith Holländer in Aachen. The couple had two daughters: Margot Betty Frank, born on February 16th, 1926, and Annelies Marie Frank, born on June 12th, 1929. By the early 1930s, with Hitler’s National Socialist Party rising rapidly in German politics, Otto recognized the danger gathering around his family.
He was methodical and careful, not given to panic, but clear-eyed about what the political temperature meant for Jewish families. When Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30th, 1933, Otto had already been exploring options outside Germany. He moved first to Amsterdam, establishing a business dealing in pectin, used in jam making, and later a spice and herb trading company called Opekta. Edith and the girls followed in late 1933, settling into an apartment on Merwedeplein in Amsterdam’s River Quarter.
For several years, life in Amsterdam was stable, even pleasant. The girls attended school, made friends, learned Dutch, and Otto’s business grew. But Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands on May 10th, 1940, and the net began to close around Amsterdam’s Jewish community with terrible efficiency. By the summer of 1942, with deportations accelerating and Jewish families disappearing from the streets with numbing regularity, Otto had been quietly preparing a hiding place.
He had taken several trusted employees at his Prinsengracht 263 office into his confidence, and together they had outfitted a set of rooms at the back of the building’s upper floors, hidden behind a movable bookcase. On July 6th, 1942, one day after Margot received a call-up notice to report for a so-called labor camp, the Frank family slipped away from their apartment early in the morning and disappeared into what Anne would later call the Secret Annex. They were joined a week later by Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their son Peter, and in November 1942 by a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer. For the next 761 days, eight people lived in those rooms, depending entirely on the bravery of a small circle of helpers outside.
The helpers of Prinsengracht 263 were ordinary Dutch men and women who chose, at enormous personal risk and with full knowledge of what discovery would mean, to protect eight people for more than two years. Miep Gies, born Hermine Santrouschitz in Vienna on February 15th, 1909, had come to Amsterdam as a child in 1920, sent by her struggling family to be fostered by a Dutch family in a program for malnourished Austrian children. The arrangement was meant to be temporary. It became permanent.
She found work at Otto Frank’s pectin business and became one of his most trusted employees. When Otto told her in 1942 that he intended to go into hiding with his family, she did not hesitate. She later recalled that she felt it was simply the human thing to do. She resisted being called a hero, saying that calling her a hero placed her on a pedestal that implicitly excused everyone else who had not done what she did.
She wanted people to understand that she was an ordinary woman who made a choice, and that ordinary people were capable of making the same choice. During the two years and one month of hiding, Miep came to the building every day. She brought food, news from the outside world, and comfort. She navigated the black market to supplement rationed supplies, and she ran the business on the floors below as if nothing unusual was happening.
Her husband, Jan Gies, born in Amsterdam on July 18th, 1905, was a social worker with the municipality whose work brought him into contact with the Dutch resistance and gave him access to resources and contacts that proved invaluable. The couple had married on July 16th, 1941, with Otto Frank as a witness. Johannes Kleiman, born on August 17th, 1896, was an accountant, one of Otto’s earliest and most trusted business colleagues, and knew about the hiding plan from the very beginning. He managed the business affairs, coordinated with suppliers, and maintained the fiction of normal commercial activity, despite suffering from chronic stomach complaints.
Victor Kugler, known in Anne’s diary as Mr. Kraler, was born on June 5th, 1900 in Hohenelbe in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had joined Otto’s company in the 1930s and rose to business partner and company director. It was Kugler who took the most direct role in the day-to-day management of the business during the hiding period, presenting a face of normality while concealing eight people in the back rooms.
Bep Voskuijl, born Elisabeth Voskuijl on July 5th, 1919, was the youngest helper, a 23-year-old secretary who had known the Frank family since the early days of the company. She was deeply devoted to the Franks, but young and frightened, and the two years of hiding took a severe psychological toll on her. Her father, Johan Voskuijl, was the warehouse manager at the Prinsengracht building, also knew about the annex, and kept the secret. He developed stomach cancer during the hiding period and died in November 1945 without seeing justice done for what had happened to the Frank family.
On August 4th, 1944, when the security police arrived, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler were arrested along with the eight residents of the annex. Kleiman was taken to the Amstel Veem Scheepvaart prison, then transferred to the Amersfoort concentration camp, where his chronic stomach condition deteriorated so badly that he was released on medical grounds in September 1944. He returned to Amsterdam and resumed his role at Otto’s company, remaining in close contact with Otto for the rest of his life. He died on January 28th, 1959 of a stroke, at his desk in the very building where he had helped hide eight people for two years.
He was 62 years old. Kugler was taken first to prison, then to a labor camp in Zwolle. In April 1945, as Allied forces advanced, he was being marched to Germany with other prisoners when he managed to escape and make his way back to Amsterdam. Unlike Kleiman, the weight of his memories made Amsterdam feel impossible.
In 1955 he emigrated to Canada, settling in Toronto, where he lived out his life working for a time in the printing industry. He died in Toronto on December 14th, 1981, at 81 years old. The eight people arrested that morning were first taken to the Euterpestraat, headquarters of the security service in Amsterdam, where they were held briefly and interrogated. They were then transferred to the Huis van Bewaring, a Dutch house of detention, and from there to the Westerbork transit camp in the northeastern Netherlands, arriving around August 8th, 1944.
Westerbork had been established by the Dutch government before the war as a reception center for Jewish refugees, mostly German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. With bitter irony, the Nazis took over this camp designed as a refuge and turned it into the principal transit point from which more than 100,000 Dutch Jews were shipped east to the extermination camps. At Westerbork, the annex residents were housed in the punishment barracks, a designation reserved for Jews who had been caught in hiding and therefore considered to have broken the law. Conditions were harsh, but by the standards of what was coming, still relatively livable.
Survivors who encountered the family there later recalled that Edith, Margot, and Anne appeared physically well but clearly frightened about what lay ahead. Otto worked in the metalworking shop. Anne, by at least one account, seemed remarkably composed, as if the relief of no longer having to hide had temporarily outweighed the terror of what came next. The transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz departed on September 3rd, 1944.
It was the last transport of Jews from the Netherlands to Auschwitz. The cattle cars carried more than a thousand people, and the journey took three days. When the train arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on September 5th, 1944, the selection process began immediately on the platform. Of more than a thousand people on that transport, approximately 500 were sent directly to the gas chambers within hours of arrival.
Men were separated from women and children. Otto went with the men. Edith, Margot, and Anne went with the women. They never saw each other again.
The central rupture of the Frank family story occurred in that moment. Three of its four members were still alive, but the family as a living unit had ceased to exist. Edith Frank, born Edith Holländer on January 16th, 1900 in Aachen, was the youngest of four children in a prosperous family. Her father ran a successful scrap metal business.
She was raised in a traditionally Jewish household, considerably more observant in her faith than the more secular Frank family she married into. Anne’s diary famously contains sharp and sometimes painful observations about her mother, whom the teenage Anne found overly critical, emotionally cool, and insufficiently understanding. Historians have pointed out that this portrait was written by an adolescent in the pressure cooker of extreme confinement, and was inevitably partial. Edith was a woman in her early forties who had lost her home, her freedom, her social world, and much of her sense of the future, while trying to maintain stability for her family in an impossibly small space.
At Birkenau, in late October 1944, Margot and Anne were selected for transport to Bergen-Belsen, while Edith was kept behind. With her daughters gone, her will to survive collapsed. Surviving prisoners who knew her later described how she gave away her food rations so that others might survive. She stopped eating, stopped caring for herself, and gradually withdrew from the world.
Edith Frank died at Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 6th, 1945, less than three weeks before Soviet forces liberated the camp. She was 44 years old. She never knew her husband had survived, never knew what would become of her daughters, never knew her younger daughter’s diary would one day be read by the entire world. Margot Frank, the older daughter, born in Frankfurt on February 16th, 1926, appears in Anne’s diary as conscientious, studious, obedient, and good-natured, a foil to Anne’s more turbulent personality.
What is less well known is how central her deportation notice was to the entire story. It was the receipt of her call-up order on July 5th, 1942, demanding that she report to a labor camp, that prompted Otto to move the family into hiding one day earlier than originally planned. Margot had expressed a wish to become a midwife or a nurse, and was studying Hebrew with a view toward emigrating to Palestine. During the two years in the annex she kept her own diary, which has never been found and is presumed lost.
Margot was transferred to Bergen-Belsen with Anne in late October 1944. Bergen-Belsen was by then in a state of catastrophic collapse, overwhelmed by tens of thousands of prisoners transferred from other camps as the German Empire contracted. Starvation, typhus, dysentery, and other diseases were rampant. Bodies piled up because there was neither space nor resources to bury them.
Margot died first, the exact date uncertain but believed to be late February or very early March 1945. She had fallen from her bunk in a feverish delirium caused by typhus, and the fall either killed her outright or hastened her death by days. Anne died shortly after, most likely in early March 1945 of the same disease. She was 15 years old.
The British Army liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15th, 1945, just weeks after the Frank sisters died. Had they survived a little longer, they would have been free. Hanneli Goslar, Anne’s best friend from Amsterdam, had been at Bergen-Belsen, separated from Anne’s section by a wire fence. Sometime in the late winter of 1945, when both girls were already severely weakened, someone told Hanneli that Anne was on the other side of the fence.
Hanneli came and called out. Anne came. The two friends spoke through the wire. Anne told Hanneli that her parents were dead, that she had nothing, that she had lost all hope.
She did not know that Otto was alive. Hanneli threw a package of food over the fence toward Anne, but it was intercepted by another prisoner. A second package reached Anne. It was the last time anyone who knew Anne Frank as a person saw her alive.
Hanneli Goslar survived, emigrated to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and later Israel, trained as a nurse, and became an important witness to Anne’s story. She died in Jerusalem on October 28th, 2022, at 93 years old. Another witness to the sisters’ final days was Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper, a Dutch Jewish woman and resistance worker imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen. She later provided one of the most important eyewitness accounts of the sisters’ final weeks, describing their terrible deterioration from typhus, their close physical proximity as they faced death, and the fact that Margot died first and Anne shortly after, apparently without knowing her sister had gone.
Janny survived the liberation and later worked as an artist, remaining active in Holocaust commemoration in the Netherlands until her death in 2003. Otto Frank was 55 years old when he arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on September 5th or 6th, 1944. He had been separated from his wife and daughters almost immediately. In the months that followed, as Allied forces pressed closer from both east and west, he endured the brutal conditions of the camp, put to work, surviving the selections, and managing through a combination of resilience, luck, and the protection of fellow prisoners to avoid the gas chambers.
When Soviet forces began their advance in January 1945, the SS conducted forced marches of prisoners westward, the death marches that killed thousands of already weakened prisoners. Otto Frank was too ill to walk. He was left behind in the camp’s infirmary. On January 27th, 1945, Soviet soldiers entered Auschwitz and liberated the remaining prisoners.
Otto Frank walked out as a free man, one of approximately 6,000 surviving prisoners found at the camp. He was emaciated, ill, and completely alone. The journey back to Amsterdam was long and circuitous. He traveled first through Soviet-controlled territory, making his way to Odessa on the Black Sea, then by ship to Marseille in southern France, and finally north toward the Netherlands, traveling by whatever transport was available in the chaotic weeks after liberation.
Along the way he encountered Rosa de Winter, a Dutch survivor of Auschwitz who had been with Edith during her final weeks and was able to tell Otto something of what his wife had experienced. He arrived back in Amsterdam on June 3rd, 1945. Almost immediately, the weight of what had happened began to become clear. He learned that Edith had died.
He learned that Margot and Anne had been transferred to Bergen-Belsen. For a brief period he held onto hope that they might have survived, but word eventually reached him that both his daughters had died of typhus, likely in February or March of 1945. The Red Cross officially confirmed their deaths in July 1945. He moved in with Miep and Jan Gies in their apartment on Hunzestraat.
He had no home, no family, and no clear sense of what the rest of his life was meant to look like. He was 56 years old. Then Miep Gies came to him and placed in his hands the loose sheets of paper and the red and white checked diary that she had gathered from the floor of the annex the day after the arrest. She had kept them safe, unread, hoping to return them to Anne herself.
Now she gave them to Otto. He began to read. What he discovered was a daughter he had known and yet, in some ways, had never fully known. Anne had written with a depth, intelligence, and emotional sophistication that astonished him.
She had recorded not just the daily reality of hiding, the boredom, the fear, the tension, the small joys, but her own evolving inner life, her doubts, her ambitions, her love of nature and writing, her complex feelings about her mother, her romantic awakening with Peter van Pels. Otto read the diary weeping. He later recalled that he had not known how much Anne had observed, how deeply she had thought, how clearly she had seen the world around her. Anne had harbored a dream of becoming a writer.
In March 1944 she had heard a Dutch government radio broadcast in which a minister called for ordinary citizens to preserve their wartime diaries and letters for the historical record. She took this seriously and began rewriting and editing her own entries. It was this revised version, along with the original diary, that formed the basis for what would eventually become one of the most read books in human history. Otto began showing the diary to friends and colleagues.
People who read it were uniformly astonished. The Amsterdam historian Jan Romein read it at a friend’s suggestion and was so moved that in April 1946 he published an article about it in the Dutch newspaper Het Parool, titled “A Child’s Voice. ” The response was significant. Publishers began approaching Otto.
He was initially hesitant. Anne had written privately, and some of her observations were sharp and personal. Some material about her developing sexuality and her early romantic feelings was deeply intimate. Otto edited the diary before publication, removing passages he felt were too personal or too hurtful to living individuals, and combining material from both Anne’s original diary and her revised version.
He has been criticized for these decisions by some scholars, but his first priority was to honor his daughter’s wish to be published while protecting the privacy of people who were still alive. The diary was first published in the Netherlands in June 1947 under the title Het Achterhuis, which translates as The Secret Annex or The Back House. The initial print run was small, but word spread. German publishers approached Otto, a development that filled him with complicated feelings given that Germany was the country whose ideology had murdered his family.
He agreed to German publication in 1950, recognizing that reaching German readers was precisely the kind of reckoning the book needed to provoke. The German edition sold exceptionally well. The English language edition appeared in the United States in 1952, published by Doubleday under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, with an introduction by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. It became a bestseller.
In 1955, a stage adaptation by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett opened on Broadway, ran for more than 700 performances, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A film adaptation followed in 1959. Suddenly Anne Frank was a cultural phenomenon. Her story was translated into more than 70 languages, the diary sold over 30 million copies, and her name was recognized in every corner of the world.
Otto navigated all of this with extraordinary care. He saw the diary not primarily as a monument to Anne’s memory, but as an instrument for education and tolerance. He responded personally to thousands of letters from readers around the world, especially young readers. He corresponded with schoolchildren in Japan, the United States, Brazil, and Israel.
He did not present himself as a victim but as a witness. In 1952, Otto moved to Basel, Switzerland, where his sister Helene and his mother Alice were living. That same year he married Elfriede Geiringer, known as Fritzi, a Holocaust survivor who had been Edith Frank’s close friend in Auschwitz’s final days. Fritzi had survived Auschwitz with her daughter Eva.
Her son Heinz had died at Mauthausen, the same camp where Peter van Pels had died. Fritzi and Otto had both lost spouses and children. Otto later said that Fritzi had given him back the capacity to live. The other residents of the annex had their own fates.
Hermann van Pels, born on March 31st, 1898 in Gehrde in Lower Saxony, was a butcher and spice merchant who had come to know Otto through the spice trade, becoming a business partner and employee. In Anne’s diary he appears as opinionated, argumentative, and prone to dominating conversations, a heavy smoker who had periodic fierce arguments with his wife, but also capable of humor and warmth. He was arrested and transported to Auschwitz, and is believed to have been gassed there in October or November 1944 after being selected as unable to work. He was 46 years old.
Auguste van Pels, born on September 29th, 1900 in Buer, was in many ways Hermann’s opposite, theatrical, vain about her appearance by the standards of life in hiding, and given to dramatic complaints. Anne captured her with a sharp eye. After the arrest, Auguste survived Auschwitz and was transferred through several other camps, including Belsen and Buchenwald. She was eventually transported to Theresienstadt.
The exact date and place of her death are uncertain, some accounts placing it in April or May 1945. If she died in May, she may have been alive when the camp was liberated in early May 1945, dying in the chaos and disease of the post-liberation period. Peter van Pels, born on November 8th, 1926 in Osnabrück, was 16 when he moved into the annex. Shy and introverted, he initially clashed with Anne but gradually became one of the most important emotional connections in her life.
Their developing relationship, the long conversations in the small room under the eaves, their fears and dreams, their first kiss, is one of the most tender and recognizable coming-of-age stories ever told. Peter survived the death march from Auschwitz that Otto was too ill to undertake. He ended up at Mauthausen, one of the harshest camps in the Nazi system, where prisoners were worked to death in stone quarries. Peter van Pels died at Mauthausen on May 5th, 1945.
He was 18 years old. The camp was liberated by American forces the day after his death. Fritz Pfeffer, the eighth and final resident, was a German-born dentist who joined the hiding group in November 1942. Anne gave him the pseudonym Albert Dussel, which translates roughly as Albert Idiot, a reflection of her less than favorable impression of the man required to share her small room.
In real life, Pfeffer was a more sympathetic figure. He was a 54-year-old man separated from his non-Jewish partner, Charlotte Kaletta, whom he had been unable to marry under Nazi racial laws, and who was desperately worried about her safety. After the arrest he was transported to Westerbork, then Auschwitz, then Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, where he died on December 20th, 1944. He was 55 years old.
Charlotte Kaletta survived the war and spent years afterward working to restore his reputation against the unflattering portrait in Anne’s diary. She died in 1985. Karl Josef Silberbauer, the Austrian-born detective who led the raid on the annex, disappeared back into Austrian society after the war. He returned to the Vienna police force, apparently cleared during the initial denazification processes, and continued working as a policeman.
It was the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal who tracked him down in 1963, nearly 20 years after the raid. When Wiesenthal revealed his identity, it caused a public sensation. Silberbauer was temporarily suspended while an investigation was conducted. He admitted freely that he had carried out the raid and arrested the eight residents.
He expressed no remorse and seemed genuinely surprised by the attention. He was eventually cleared of criminal charges, in part because his role had been that of a subordinate officer following instructions. He was reinstated to the Vienna police force and died in 1972, never having stood trial for his role in the Frank family’s arrest and deportation. The extended Frank family also carried their own stories.
Alice Frank-Stern, Otto’s mother, born on March 20th, 1865, had emigrated to Basel in the 1930s and survived the war in relative safety. After the war, Otto began translating Anne’s diary into German for her benefit, making her one of the first people outside the immediate circle to read and understand its significance. She died on March 20th, 1953, her 88th birthday. Helene Frank Elias, Otto’s younger sister, known as Lenny, had married Erich Elias in 1921, and they had moved to Basel in the 1930s.
It was through Erich’s Swiss business contacts that Otto had been able to establish his Amsterdam operations. Erich died in 1950. Lenny remained in Basel in close contact with Otto throughout her life, and died on February 16th, 1986 at 92. Buddy Elias, Lenny’s son, born on May 24th, 1925 in Frankfurt, was Anne’s closest cousin.
Anne’s letters to him, written before the family went into hiding, are full of warmth and the easy intimacy of children who have grown up together as almost siblings. Buddy moved to Basel with his family in the 1930s and pursued a career as an ice skater and actor. After Otto died in 1980, Buddy became president of the Anne Frank Fonds, the foundation Otto had established to manage the diary’s rights and use the proceeds for educational purposes. He was the last living person who had known Anne Frank as a child, as a cousin, as a playful girl before the war consumed everything.
Buddy Elias died on June 15th, 2015 in Basel, at 89 years old. Robert Frank, Otto’s older brother, born in 1886, had emigrated to England in the 1930s and survived the war in London, where he worked in finance. He died in 1953. Herbert Frank, born in 1891, had a darker fate.
He remained in Germany longer than the others and struggled to find viable options for emigration. He died in 1945 under conditions that remain somewhat unclear, but clearly involved the deprivations and dangers of the wartime period for a Jewish man attempting to survive in Nazi-controlled territory. Eva Schloss, born Eva Geiringer on May 11th, 1929 in Vienna, had been a close childhood friend of Anne’s in Amsterdam, neighbors on the Merwedeplein. She and her mother Fritzi survived Auschwitz together, but her brother Heinz and father Erich did not.
When Fritzi and Otto Frank married in 1952, Eva became in effect Otto’s stepdaughter. She has spent much of her adult life as a Holocaust educator, giving hundreds of talks and writing her memoirs, drawing on her personal friendship with Anne to make the story immediate and human. She remains active as of this writing. The question of who betrayed the Secret Annex has never been resolved.
The first person seriously investigated was Willem Gerard van Maaren, the warehouse manager who had replaced Johan Voskuijl when Voskuijl became ill in 1943. He had noticed things suggesting the building was not as empty as it was supposed to be at night, and had asked questions that made the helpers nervous. The Dutch State Criminal Investigation Department conducted two post-war investigations, in 1948 and 1963, but neither produced sufficient evidence to charge him. The case was closed in 1964.
Van Maaren denied any involvement until his death in 1971. In the early 21st century, the Anne Frank House commissioned a team of investigators led by retired FBI agent Vince Pankoke to take a fresh look at the evidence, using modern investigative methods including artificial intelligence tools to analyze historical documents. The team worked for several years and published its conclusions in 2022 in a book titled The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. The primary conclusion was startling: the most likely betrayer was a Jewish notary named Arnold van den Bergh, alleged to have been a member of the Amsterdam Jewish Council and to have passed addresses of hidden Jews to the Nazi authorities in exchange for protection for his own family.
The theory was not new. It had appeared in anonymous notes sent to Otto Frank shortly after the war, which Otto had investigated and then set aside without pursuing publicly. The reaction to the book was fierce and divided. Some historians found the theory plausible.
Others argued the evidence was circumstantial, that the use of AI had not been as rigorous as claimed, and that publishing an accusation against a Jewish victim without conclusive proof risked causing harm to his descendants. The Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies issued a pointed critique arguing the methods were flawed. The controversy has not been resolved. The identity of the betrayer remains officially unknown.
The Anne Frank House at Prinsengracht 263 was saved from demolition in the 1950s by a group of Amsterdam citizens who recognized its historical significance. Otto was deeply involved in the preservation effort, though he rarely visited the house itself after the war. He found it too painful. The museum opened on May 3rd, 1960, with the preserved rooms of the Secret Annex at its heart.
Otto gave a speech at the opening, one of the few times he was present in the physical space where his daughter had hidden. The bookcase still stands exactly as it stood in 1942. The rooms are stripped of furniture at Otto’s request, to preserve a sense of emptiness that speaks more powerfully than any reconstruction could. The pencil marks on the door frame where Otto measured his daughters’ heights are still visible.
The broader story of the Netherlands’ wartime history is essential context. Approximately 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands before the war. Approximately 75% were murdered, a higher percentage than in any other Western European country. France, Belgium, and Denmark all lost far lower proportions.
Historians point to the efficiency of Dutch civil registration and record keeping, which made it easier for the Germans to identify Jewish residents, and to the relative geographical isolation of the Netherlands, bordered on three sides by German-held territory and the North Sea. Anne Frank was one of approximately 107,000 Dutch Jews deported to concentration and extermination camps, of whom fewer than 5,000 returned. Her story is exceptional only in that she left a record. In 2020, the Dutch government formally apologized for the role of the Dutch state and its civil servants in the deportation of Dutch Jews during the Holocaust.
The diary has faced persistent attacks from Holocaust deniers who claimed it was a forgery. These claims were systematically disproved by scientific investigations of the handwriting, paper, and ink, which confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt that the diary was authentic, the handwriting that of a single person who changed as the writer aged. The Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation published an exhaustive critical edition of the diary in 1986 that definitively established its authenticity. In 2015, the Anne Frank Fonds made a controversial decision to add Otto Frank as a co-author of the diary in certain versions, a move intended to extend the copyright term under Dutch and European law.
The decision was widely criticized by scholars who felt it was legally questionable and ethically dubious. Otto Frank died on August 19th, 1980 in Birsfelden, near Basel, Switzerland. He was 91 years old. He had survived Auschwitz, outlived his captors, seen his daughter’s diary become one of the most influential books in human history, and spent 35 years after the war as the world’s most devoted guardian of her legacy.
He had also, by his own account, spent those years gradually coming to understand a daughter he had not fully known during her lifetime. His wife Fritzi survived him, dying on October 11th, 1998 in London at 84. Miep Gies lived to 100. She gave interviews, visited schools, spoke at commemorations, and in 1987 published her memoir Anne Frank Remembered.
She received numerous honors, including the Dutch Resistance Memorial Cross, the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Yad Vashem Righteous Among the Nations designation. Jan Gies died on January 26th, 1993. Miep died on January 11th, 2010 in Hoorn, Netherlands. In her final years she was clear that she felt grateful above all that the diary had found its way into the world.
The story of what happened to Anne Frank’s family after the war is not a simple story with a clear shape. It is a web of individual trajectories, some ending in tragedy, some in quiet survival, some in remarkable public purpose. It is a story about grief and memory and the uses of testimony. It is a story about how a document can become larger than its author, and how that process, while sometimes distorting, can also carry something true and irreducible into the future.
Anne Frank asked in her diary whether the world would one day become good again. She did not live to find out. But the people who survived her, the father who read her diary weeping and decided to share it with the world, the helpers who kept faith with their hidden friends, the cousins and friends who grew old carrying her memory, all of them are part of the answer.
Not a complete answer, not a comfortable answer, but an answer that refuses to give up.
