Anne Frank was fifteen years old when she died in the Holocaust, but for decades the world believed she had perished in March 1945, only weeks before the Allies liberated the camp where she was held. Research conducted in 2015 by the Anne Frank House established a different truth: she and her sister Margot had actually died in February 1945, long before freedom arrived. By then, they had already endured two years in hiding and months inside some of the most brutal camps the Nazi system produced. Annelies Marie Frank was born in June 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank.
She had an older sister, Margot. As anti-Semitism intensified across 1930s Germany, the family decided to leave, relocating to the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, Anne attended a Montessori school while Margot went to a public school. Even as a young girl, Anne was already a devoted writer, though she was shy about her work and kept it hidden from others.
The Frank household encouraged reading, and Otto kept a library at home. As conditions in Europe deteriorated, the Franks tried to emigrate to the United States or Britain, but their attempts failed. They were still in the Netherlands when war broke out in September 1939, and they remained there when the Germans invaded in May 1940. Occupation brought swift restrictions on the Jewish community.
Anne and Margot were forced into Jewish schools, their father lost his business, and the entire family had to wear the yellow star and obey strict curfews. Once again they sought to flee to the United States, and once again they were refused. In desperation, Otto Frank, together with his Jewish business partner and associates, prepared a hiding place behind his former firm. The hideout was located at Prinsengracht 263, a multi-story space that would become the family’s entire world.
To cover their tracks, the Franks left their apartment deliberately messy to suggest a hasty departure, and Otto left a note implying they had gone to Switzerland. The family officially went into hiding in July 1942, only one day after Margot received an order to report to a German work camp. In total, eight Jews sheltered in the annex: Anne, Margot, their parents, the business partner and his wife and son, and later a dentist. Remarkably, they remained undiscovered for two years, with the entrance to their hiding place concealed behind a bookshelf.
Before going into hiding, Anne had given a neighbor some belongings for safekeeping, including the family cat, a tea set, a book, and a tin of marbles, small remnants of a childhood cut short. Around that time, Anne received a diary as a birthday gift, a diary that would later become one of the most famous documents of the war. In it she recorded her daily life, short stories, and quotations from other writers. On the day she received it, she wrote that she hoped it would be a great source of comfort and support.
In March 1944, she wrote that being able to put down all her thoughts and feelings was the nicest part, adding that otherwise she would absolutely suffocate. The diary was not a hobby; it was, in many ways, her only escape from the cramped annex. Most entries were addressed to an imaginary friend named Kitty, through whom she voiced the pain of segregation and discrimination. Life in hiding was difficult.
The eight residents had to remain silent at all times and never venture outside, for fear of alerting the workers in the warehouse below. During the day they whispered, moved quietly, and even avoided flushing the toilet at certain hours. Tension was common. The business partner’s son, Peter, was close to Anne in age, and she shared her first kiss with him, though in her diary she questioned whether her feelings were genuine or simply a product of their forced circumstances.
Her relationship with Margot improved. In January 1944, Anne wrote that Margot was much nicer and no longer thought of her as a little baby who didn’t count. The helpers on the outside supplied food, which grew increasingly difficult to obtain, and brought updates on the war, all while taking enormous risks themselves. When Anne heard that the Dutch Minister of Education, living in exile in London, was asking people to keep wartime diaries, she began rewriting her own entries under the title The Secret Annex.
She would not live to finish it. On August 4, 1944, all eight people in hiding were discovered and arrested. Two of their helpers were also taken. To this day, the circumstances of their discovery remain uncertain.
The group was sent first to the Westerbork transit camp and then on to Auschwitz in occupied Poland. Of the two arrested helpers, one escaped and the other was released. Those who remained free discovered papers left behind, including Anne’s diary, and kept them safe in the hope that she would one day return and complete her work. At Auschwitz, Anne and the others had their heads shaved and received tattooed numbers on their arms.
They were stripped of their clothes, their dignity, and their identities, reduced to numbers in a genocide. Because the camp was divided by gender, Anne, Margot, and Edith were soon separated from Otto. The women were assigned hard labor, forced to haul heavy stones and grass mats, a punishment imposed on those considered criminals for having been in hiding. Of the 1,049 Jews who arrived with them, 549 were sent directly to the gas chambers.
Anne’s family was spared that fate, though Anne believed her father had been killed. On one occasion, Anne obtained extra bread and shared it with her mother and sister. The bread was bad, and all three became infected with scabies and were sent to an infirmary. The conditions there were dark, and rodents were common.
Edith shared her own rations with her daughters to give them strength. Because of the infection, a scheduled transfer to another labor camp was canceled for Anne, and Margot and Edith remained with her. Later that month, however, the sisters were transferred to Bergen-Belsen. Edith was not chosen to go and died of starvation at Auschwitz in January 1945, only three weeks before the Red Army liberated the camp.
At Bergen-Belsen, the sisters found that most prisoners were Dutch. The camp was abysmal, with little food and unsanitary conditions, and both contracted typhus. Unlike Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen had no gas chambers; people died from overwork, disease, and starvation. In early 1945, Anne and Margot perished, along with seventeen thousand others, in the typhus epidemic.
After the British liberated the camp, it was burned to prevent further spread of disease. The sisters were buried in an unknown location, among so many others lost to history. Of the eight who had hidden in the secret annex, only Otto Frank survived to return home. After learning that none of the others had made it, he remained in the Netherlands with two of his former helpers.
One of them returned Anne’s diary, which had been saved all that time. A friend convinced Otto that the diary should be published, and in June 1947, three thousand copies of The Secret Annex were released. The book eventually became known as The Diary of Anne Frank and has since been printed over twenty million times. Anne had at times expressed interest in becoming a journalist or a writer.
That ambition never came to pass, but her work lived on. As Otto read his daughter’s diary, he discovered a side of her he had never known. He admitted he had not realized the depth of her thoughts and feelings. He had always gotten along better with Anne than with Margot, but Margot had been closer to their mother.
Anne’s relationship with Edith had been difficult, as her own entries showed, though after revising her diary she recognized she had been too harsh and began treating her mother with more respect. Otto made sharing his daughter’s writing his life’s work. He also spent years challenging people who claimed the diary was a forgery, taking legal action in the 1950s and 1970s against Holocaust deniers. He continued telling Anne’s story until his death in 1980.
The Anne Frank House, with the secret annex in the back, was scheduled for demolition after the war, but was saved and became a museum in 1960. The identity of the person who betrayed the Frank family has never been confirmed with certainty. Several theories exist. According to Otto Frank’s biographer, the informant may have been Tony Ahlers, a member of the National Socialist Movement in Holland.
Another suspect was stockroom manager Willem van Maaren, a man the group in hiding did not trust. One theory is more troubling than the others. According to a biography of the helper Bep Voskuijl, her sister Nelly had collaborated with the Germans and disapproved of her family’s efforts to aid Jews. The SS officer who received the tip by phone call allegedly said the informant’s voice was that of a young woman.
Only weeks before her capture, Anne wrote in her diary the words: “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. ” She never lived to see that peace. But her recorded voice, written in hiding, survived the war and continues to reach readers around the world.