Anne Frank was only fifteen when she died in the Holocaust, and for decades, the world believed she had passed away in March 1945, just a few weeks before the Allies liberated the camp where she was held. Recent research, however, revealed a different truth. Anne died much earlier, in February 1945, long before any hope of rescue arrived. She was so close to surviving, yet still so far.
Annelies Marie Frank was born in June 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany. Her parents, Otto and Edith, also had an older daughter, Margot. As the Nazis rose to power and anti-Semitism spread across Germany, the family decided to move to the Netherlands. Anne and Margot attended separate schools.
Anne went to a Montessori school while Margot went to a public one. Even as a child, Anne was already a keen writer. According to a friend from that time, she wrote a great deal but stayed shy about it, hiding her work and never revealing what she had written. This habit likely came from her parents, who encouraged both daughters to read often and even kept a small library at home.
As the situation in Europe grew worse, the Franks tried to leave for the United States or the United Kingdom, but they were unsuccessful. When war broke out in September 1939, the family was still in the Netherlands. When the Germans invaded in May 1940, they were still there. Strict rules were soon placed on the Jewish community.
Anne and Margot were forced into Jewish schools, Otto lost his business, and all of them had to wear the yellow Star of David and obey strict curfews. The family once again tried to flee to America and were again denied. Desperate, Otto and his Jewish business partner and associates prepared a hiding place behind his firm. The hideout was located at Prinsengracht 263, a multi-story space that would soon become their entire world.
To cover their tracks, the family left their apartment messy, as if they had fled in a hurry. Otto even left a note suggesting they had gone to Switzerland. In July 1942, the family officially went into hiding, just one day after Anne’s sister was ordered to report to a German work camp. In total, eight Jews hid in the secret space: Anne, her sister, her parents, Otto’s business partner and his wife and son, and later a dentist.
Remarkably, they lived there in secret for two full years. The entrance was concealed behind a bookshelf. Before going into hiding, Anne had given her neighbor some belongings for safekeeping, including their cat, a tea set, a book, and a tin of marbles. Small objects.
The remnants of a childhood cut short. Around the same time, Anne received a diary as a birthday gift. It was one that would later become famous beyond anything she could have imagined. On the day she received it, she wrote inside: “I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.
” In another entry from March 1944, she wrote: “The nicest part is being able to write down all my thoughts and feelings. Otherwise, I’d absolutely suffocate. ” The diary was more than a hobby. It was her only escape from the cramped annex.
Most of her entries were addressed to an imaginary friend named Kitty. Through her, Anne frequently wrote about the segregation and discrimination the family faced. Life in hiding was not easy. She and the other seven had to remain silent at all times and never venture outside, so as not to alert the warehouse workers below.
During the day, they whispered, walked quietly, and even avoided flushing the toilet at certain hours. As expected, tension often ran high in such close quarters. Otto’s business partner had a son around Anne’s age, a boy named Peter. Anne shared her first kiss with him, but in her diary she questioned her feelings.
She wasn’t sure if they were real or simply a result of their forced circumstances. Her relationship with her sister also improved. In January 1944, Anne wrote: “Margot’s much nicer. She’s not nearly so catty these days and is becoming a real friend.
She no longer thinks of me as a little baby who doesn’t count. ”
The people helping them from the outside brought updates on the war and supplied food, which grew harder to find as time passed. They tried to keep everyone’s spirits high, fully aware of the enormous risks they were taking. When the Dutch Minister of Education, living in exile in London, asked people to keep diaries of the war, Anne began rewriting her diary, giving it the title “The Secret Annex.
” She would never finish it. On August 4, 1944, all eight people hiding in the annex were found and arrested. Two of their helpers were also arrested. To this day, it is not entirely known how they were discovered.
They were all sent to the Westerbork transit camp and then to Auschwitz in occupied Poland. Of the two helpers who were caught, one escaped and the other was released. Meanwhile, two other helpers found the papers left behind, including Anne’s diary, and kept them safe, hoping Anne would one day return to finish them. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Anne and the others had their heads shaved and tattoos with numbers pressed into their arms.
They were stripped of their clothes, their dignity, and their identities, reduced to numbers in a genocide. Because the camp was separated by gender, Anne, along with Margot and Edith, were separated from Otto. The women were given hard labor, forced to haul heavy stones and grass mats. This was considered punishment, because they had been in hiding and were therefore treated as criminals.
Of the 1,049 Jews who arrived at Auschwitz with the Frank family and their four friends, 549 were sent straight to the gas chambers. Anne and her family were spared for that moment, but Anne was certain her father had been killed. On one occasion, Anne obtained extra bread and shared it with her mother and sister. The bread was off, and the three of them became infected with scabies and were sent to an infirmary.
Conditions there were dark, and rodents were common. Edith shared her rations with her daughters to keep them stronger. Because of the scabies, a scheduled transfer for Anne to a different labor camp was canceled. Margot and Edith stayed behind with her.
Later that month, the sisters were sent to another camp: Bergen-Belsen. Edith was not chosen to go and later died from starvation in Auschwitz in January 1945, only three weeks before the Red Army liberated the camp. At Bergen-Belsen, Anne and Margot discovered that most prisoners there were Dutch. The camp was abysmal, with little food and unsanitary conditions.
Both sisters contracted typhus. Unlike Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen had no gas chambers. Instead, prisoners died from overwork, disease, and starvation. In early 1945, Anne and Margot died, along with 17,000 others, victims of the typhus epidemic.
After the British liberated the camp, it was burned down to stop the spread of disease. Anne and Margot were buried in an unknown grave, lost to history along with so many others. Of the eight Jews who hid in the secret annex, only the father, Otto Frank, survived. When he learned that none of the others had made it, he stayed for seven years with two of his associates in the Netherlands.
One of them gave him Anne’s diary, which he had kept safe all that time. A friend convinced Otto the diary should be published. In June 1947, three thousand copies were released. The book eventually became known as “The Diary of Anne Frank” and has been printed over twenty million times.
Anne had once expressed interest in becoming a journalist or writer. That never happened. But her work lives on in ways she never could have imagined. As Otto began reading his daughter’s diary, he discovered a side of Anne he had never known.
He later said: “I had no idea the depths of her thoughts and feelings. ”
Otto admitted he had always gotten along better with Anne than with Margot, but that Margot had been closer to their mother. Margot didn’t show her feelings as much and didn’t need much support, while Anne was prone to mood swings. Anne’s relationship with Edith had been strained, as shown in her diary.
But later, after revising her entries, Anne realized she had been too harsh on her mother and began treating her with more respect. Otto made sharing his daughter’s writing his life’s work. But he also had to devote much of his energy to the frustrating task of challenging people who claimed the diary was a forgery. He took legal action multiple times in the 1950s and 1970s against Holocaust deniers who spread accusations that the diary was not authentic.
Otto continued to tell his daughter’s story until his death in 1980. The Anne Frank House, with the secret annex in the back, was set to be destroyed after the war, but was saved and turned into a museum in 1960. It is still not known with certainty who betrayed the Frank family. Several theories exist.
According to Otto Frank’s biographer, it was a man named Tony Ahlers, a member of the National Socialist Movement in Holland. Another suspect was Willem van Maaren, a stockroom manager who was unusually inquisitive and not trusted by the people in hiding. One suspect is more shocking than the others. A biography of Bep Voskuijl, one of the helpers, revealed that Bep had a sister named Nelly who collaborated with the Germans and disapproved of her father and sister helping Jews.
Allegedly, the SS officer who received the tip-off by phone said the informant on the other end had “the voice of a young woman. ”
For years, it was believed that Anne and Margot died in March 1945, not long before the end of the war. But research conducted in 2015 by the Anne Frank House concluded that they actually died in February 1945, long before the Allies arrived. Though close to surviving, they were still so far.
Anne would never know how her story would endure. Only weeks before she and her family were captured, she wrote in her diary: “I feel the suffering of millions and yet when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more. ”
