Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager whose diary became the conscience of the Holocaust, was murdered by the Nazi regime not in a single act of violence but through a calculated system of starvation, disease and neglect that consumed her in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945, only weeks before British forces liberated the site.
The world knows her name, but the precise manner of her death has long been overshadowed by the fame of the diary she kept while hiding in a concealed annex in Amsterdam. Newly compiled accounts from survivors and liberators confirm that Anne and her older sister Margot died of typhus, a disease born of filth, overcrowding and the near-total deprivation of food and water that defined daily existence in the camp.
Anne was 15 years old. Margot was 19. Their mother, Edith Frank, had already perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 6, 1945, three weeks before Soviet troops reached that camp.
Their father, Otto Frank, the only member of the family to survive, would not learn of his daughters’ fate until a month after his return to the Netherlands in June 1945.
The road to Bergen-Belsen began on August 4, 1944, when Dutch police officers under the command of SS officer Karl Silberbauer raided the secret annex at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. The eight people who had hidden there for 761 days were arrested. To this day, no one knows for certain who betrayed them.
Anne, her parents and her sister were taken first to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, then to the Westerbork transit camp. In early September 1944, they were placed on what would be the last train to leave Westerbork for Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland. More than a thousand people were packed into cattle wagons for a journey of three days with little food, almost no water and a single barrel serving as a toilet.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Nazi doctors conducted selections to determine who could perform heavy forced labor and who would be sent immediately to the gas chambers. Approximately 350 people from Anne’s transport were murdered with Zyklon B within hours of stepping off the train.
Anne, Margot and Edith were separated from Otto and sent to the women’s labor camp. Survivors later described the three as inseparable. Otto would never see his wife or daughters again.
In early November 1944, Anne and Margot were deported to Bergen-Belsen. Their mother remained behind at Auschwitz, where she died of weakness and disease.
Bergen-Belsen was not designed as an extermination camp in the manner of Auschwitz or Sobibor. It was a place where human beings were allowed to die slowly. Sanitary conditions were catastrophic.
There was no water for washing and barely enough for drinking or cooking. Tens of thousands of prisoners shared only 200 blankets during the freezing winter months, forcing them to sleep sitting upright on the floor.
Between January and March 1945, as prisoners from other camps were forced onto death marches westward, the situation deteriorated beyond description. About one-third of the prisoners arriving in those transports were already dead. Of those still alive, nearly 80 percent were too weak and sick to walk and had to be collected from the railway station by truck.
On one occasion, of a transport of 1,900 inmates, more than 500 arrived dead.
Starvation, thirst and recurring typhus epidemics produced an average daily mortality rate of between 250 and 300 prisoners. It was in these conditions that Anne and Margot contracted typhus. Gena Turgel, a survivor who worked in the camp hospital and knew Anne, later recalled seeing her delirious, burning with fever, and brought her water with which to wash.
The help came too late.
Margot, in her weakened state, fell from her bunk and was killed by the shock of the fall. Anne died one day later. Both deaths occurred in February 1945.
For decades it was believed the sisters had died in March, but later research by the Anne Frank House and testimony from survivors established that February was the more likely month.
Nanette Blitz, a school friend of Anne who survived the Holocaust, encountered her at Bergen-Belsen and described her as bald, emaciated and shivering. She said Anne told her she did not wish to live any longer because she believed both her parents were dead. Yet even then, Anne spoke of her hope to one day publish a book based on her diary once the war ended.
That hope was realized by her father. Miep Gies, one of the six helpers who had supplied the hidden families with food, clothing and news for more than two years, had gathered up Anne’s papers after the arrest and kept them in a drawer, unread. She handed them to Otto Frank after he returned to Amsterdam on June 3, 1945, nine days before what would have been Anne’s 16th birthday.
Otto had spent the intervening months searching for his daughters. He learned of Edith’s death during his journey home but clung to the hope that Anne and Margot had survived. That hope collapsed one month later when he received confirmation of their deaths.
It was only then that he found the courage to read the diary, and he was astonished by what he found.
Anne had written of her ambition to become a writer and journalist, and of her intention to publish her accounts of life in the secret annex after the war. The first 3,000 copies of her book were published in 1947 under the title “Secret Annex.” It has since been translated into more than 70 languages, and in 1960 the hiding place that sheltered eight people for two years became a museum, the Anne Frank House.
Visitors today can walk through the cramped rooms, see the picture postcards and movie star photographs Anne pasted on her wall, and view the original diary and manuscripts she wrote until her arrest. The revolving bookcase that concealed the entrance to the annex still stands, a silent witness to the 761 days the families spent in hiding.
The Franks had fled Germany in 1933 after Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, joining some 300,000 Jews who left the country between 1933 and 1939. They settled in Amsterdam, where Otto founded a business trading in pectin and later herbs and spices. Anne and Margot enrolled in Dutch schools, made friends and became excellent students.
That life ended on May 10, 1940, when Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. The Luftwaffe used paratroopers to seize tactical points and bombed Rotterdam so heavily that its entire historic center was destroyed. Facing the threat of the same fate for Utrecht, Dutch forces surrendered one day later.
The 15,000 Jews who had fled Germany for the Netherlands found themselves once again under Nazi domination.
Anti-Jewish laws followed swiftly. Jewish civil servants were dismissed. Jewish businesses and individuals were forced to register.
Parks, cinemas and non-Jewish shops were placed off-limits. Jewish children were required to attend separate schools. In 1941, Jewish men were seized in raids and deported to Mauthausen; among them were friends and acquaintances of the Franks, and reports of their deaths soon followed.
On April 29, 1942, Jews in the Netherlands were ordered to wear a yellow Star of David. Those caught without it after May 5 faced arrest and six weeks of detention. The systematic deportation of Dutch Jews to the death camps began that summer.
Of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands at the start of the war, 107,000 were deported, most to Auschwitz and Sobibor, by September 1944. Only 5,000 returned.
Otto Frank had anticipated the danger. In the spring of 1942, he prepared a hiding place in an empty section of his business premises at Prinsengracht 263. On July 5, 1942, Margot received a call-up to report for a so-called labor camp in Germany.
The family knew what such orders meant. The next morning, they went into hiding.
They were joined a week later by Hermann, Auguste and Peter van Pels, and in November by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and family friend. Six helpers, employees and friends of Otto, provided food, clothing and everything else the eight people needed. The helpers included Miep Gies and her husband Jan, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, Bep Voskuijl and her father Johannes Voskuijl.
Silence governed their days. From 8:30 in the morning, when warehouse workers began their shifts below the annex, any sound could betray them. Mornings were devoted to reading and study.
At 12:30, when the workers went home for lunch, helpers came upstairs to eat with those in hiding. In the afternoons, Anne wrote or studied. At 5:30, when the warehouse emptied, the families could move freely through the building, cook dinner and take turns using the bathroom.
Anne’s diary, which she received for her 13th birthday on June 12, 1942, less than a month before going into hiding, records the tensions, fears, arguments and small joys of those two years. She wrote of her growing feelings for Peter van Pels and received her first kiss in the annex. She wrote of her dreams of becoming a writer.
She wrote of her belief, despite everything, in the fundamental goodness of people.
An estimated 25,000 Jews went into hiding in the Netherlands. Two-thirds survived. One-third were betrayed and discovered.
The eight people in the secret annex belonged to the latter group. After September 1942, special units of Dutch collaborators began actively hunting for hidden Jews, making the risk of discovery greater with every passing month.
After the arrest, the residents were sent to Westerbork and then, on the last transport to leave for Auschwitz, to the extermination camp. Otto was separated from his family and sent to a men’s camp. He was liberated by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945, when they entered Auschwitz.
He made his way back to the Netherlands, arriving on June 3, 1945.
Anne Frank’s only crime was that she was Jewish. She was murdered by a regime that industrialized hatred and turned human beings into numbers. Her diary survived because helpers gathered it from the floor of the ransacked annex.
Her voice survived because her father found the strength to read it and to share it with the world.
Today the Anne Frank House receives more than a million visitors each year. Her diary remains one of the most widely read books on the planet. It stands as both a testament to a young girl’s talent and courage and an indictment of the hatred that killed her.
Anne Frank did not live to write the book she dreamed of. But the book she left behind has done what she hoped it would: it has reminded generation after generation of the dangers of discrimination, racism and hatred toward one another.