Anne Frank was fifteen years old when she died in the Holocaust, but for decades the world believed she had survived until March 1945, just weeks before the liberation of the camp where she perished. Research conducted by the Anne Frank House in 2015 established that she and her sister Margot actually died in February 1945, long before Allied forces reached Bergen-Belsen. The correction changed the final chapter of a story already known around the world: the story of a Jewish girl who spent two years in hiding and left behind a diary that would be read by millions. Annelies Marie Frank was born in June 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank.
As anti-Semitism intensified across Germany in the 1930s, the family decided to leave, settling in the Netherlands with Anne and her older sister Margot. In Amsterdam, Anne attended a Montessori school while Margot attended a public school. Even as a child, Anne was a devoted writer. A friend from that period recalled that she wrote constantly, though she kept her work private, rarely revealing what it contained.
The household encouraged reading; Otto maintained a library at home. The family tried to leave Europe for the United States, then for Britain, but could not secure the necessary papers. When war broke out in September 1939, the Franks were still in the Netherlands, and they remained there when German forces occupied the country in May 1940. Restrictions on the Jewish community came quickly.
Anne and Margot were forced into Jewish schools, Otto lost his business, and every member of the family had to wear the yellow Star of David and obey strict curfews. They attempted to emigrate to the United States once more, but their application was rejected again. In desperation, Otto and his Jewish business partners prepared a hiding place behind his former company at Prinsengracht 263. It was a multi-story annex whose entrance would be concealed behind a bookshelf.
To convince the authorities that the family had fled abroad, they left their apartment in disarray and Otto placed a note suggesting they had gone to Switzerland. On July 6, 1942, one day after Margot received an order to report to a German work camp, the family went into hiding. They were soon joined by Otto’s business partner, his wife and son, and later a dentist. In total, eight Jews lived in the secret annex.
Before entering hiding, Anne left belongings with a neighbor: their cat, a tea set, a book, and a tin of marbles. Around that time she was given a diary as a birthday gift. She wrote in it on the very first day, expressing her hope that it would be a great source of comfort and support. In later entries she called writing her escape, noting in March 1944 that she would absolutely suffocate without the ability to record her thoughts and feelings.
Most of her entries were addressed to an imaginary friend named Kitty, and through them she wrote about segregation, discrimination, and the daily reality of confinement. Life in the annex was difficult and tense. The eight inhabitants had to remain silent during the day so workers in the warehouse below would not hear them. They whispered, moved carefully, and avoided flushing the toilet at certain hours.
Anne grew close to Peter, the son of her father’s business partner, sharing her first kiss with him, though she questioned in her diary whether her feelings were genuine or merely a product of their circumstances. Her relationship with Margot improved. In January 1944, Anne wrote that Margot had become a real friend, no longer treating her as a little baby. The helpers who supplied food and news from the outside risked their own lives to keep the group informed about the war, even as supplies grew harder to obtain.
When the Dutch education minister, in exile in London, appealed for citizens to keep wartime diaries, Anne began rewriting her own journal under the title The Secret Annex. She never finished it. On August 4, 1944, the hiding place was discovered. All eight Jews were arrested, along with two of their helpers.
To this day the exact circumstances of the discovery remain unclear. The group was taken to the Westerbork transit camp, then sent to Auschwitz in occupied Poland. Upon arrival, the prisoners had their heads shaved and identification numbers tattooed on their arms. Because the camp was divided by gender, Anne, Margot, and Edith were separated from Otto.
The women were assigned heavy labor, hauling stones and grass mats, a punishment reserved for prisoners who had been in hiding and were therefore treated as criminals. Of the 1,049 Jews who arrived with the Frank family, 549 were sent straight to the gas chambers. Anne and her family were spared that fate, though Anne assumed her father had been killed. On one occasion Anne obtained extra bread and shared it with her mother and sister.
The bread was spoiled, and all three contracted scabies, requiring treatment in the infirmary. The conditions there were grim, with rodents common. Edith gave portions of her own rations to her daughters to keep their strength up. Because of the scabies, Anne was removed from a scheduled transfer to a labor camp.
Margot and Edith remained with her. Later that month, Anne and Margot were assigned to Bergen-Belsen. Edith was not selected and remained at Auschwitz, where she died of starvation in January 1945, three weeks before the Red Army arrived. At Bergen-Belsen, the sisters discovered that most of the prisoners were Dutch.
The camp had no gas chambers, but prisoners died from overwork, disease, and starvation. Food was scarce and sanitation was appalling. In early 1945, both girls contracted typhus during a massive epidemic. They died within days of each other, among the 17,000 prisoners who perished in the outbreak.
After British forces liberated the camp, it was burned to prevent further spread of disease. Anne and Margot were buried in unmarked graves alongside countless others. Of the eight people who hid in the secret annex, only Otto Frank survived the war. When he learned that the others had not made it, he returned to the Netherlands and stayed with two of the helpers for seven years.
One of them had recovered Anne’s diary and papers from the annex and kept them safe, hoping she would one day return to finish them. Otto was given the diary, and a friend persuaded him to publish it. In June 1947, three thousand copies of The Secret Annex were released. The book, eventually known as The Diary of Anne Frank, has since been printed more than twenty million times.
Anne had once expressed an interest in becoming a journalist or writer; she never lived to see her work reach readers, but her words endured far beyond what she could have imagined. Reading the diary, Otto discovered a side of his daughter he had never known. He later said he had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings. He revealed that he had always gotten along better with Anne than with Margot, while Margot had been closer to their mother.
Anne’s relationship with Edith had been strained; her early entries were harsh toward her mother, but after revising her journal she recognized that she had been unfair and began treating Edith with more respect. Otto devoted much of his life to sharing his daughter’s words, but he also spent years defending their authenticity. In the 1950s and 1970s, he took legal action against Holocaust deniers who claimed the diary was a forgery. He continued telling Anne’s story until his death in 1980.
The building at Prinsengracht 263, saved from demolition, became a museum in 1960. Who betrayed the Frank family remains unknown, though several theories have persisted: a member of the Dutch National Socialist Movement, the stockroom manager who was unusually inquisitive and distrusted by those in hiding, or, according to one account, a young woman whose sister helped the Jews and whose collaborator’s voice was described by an SS officer as that of a young woman on the phone. Only weeks before her capture, Anne wrote that she felt the suffering of millions, yet looking up at the sky she believed that everything would change for the better, that cruelty would end, and that peace and tranquility would return.
She did not live to see that peace, but her diary carried her conviction beyond the war and into the present.