On the morning of August 4, 1944, German and Dutch police raided the hidden annex behind Otto Frank’s business office at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. Eight people who had lived in concealment for more than two years were arrested and deported to concentration camps. Among them were Anne Frank, her sister Margot, their mother Edith, and their father Otto. Within nine months, seven of the eight were dead.
Otto survived. When he returned to Amsterdam, he discovered something that would transform his daughter’s private words into one of the most powerful testimonies of the Holocaust. The Frank family had fled Germany in 1933 after Hitler came to power. Otto, a businessman from Frankfurt, moved his wife and two daughters to Amsterdam, hoping the Netherlands would remain neutral as it had during the First World War.
For several years they built a new life. Otto established a business selling pectin and spices. Anne and Margot attended school, learned Dutch, and made friends. On May 10, 1940, German forces invaded the Netherlands, and within days the country surrendered.
The occupation brought systematic persecution of Dutch Jews. By 1942, deportations to concentration camps had begun. On July 5, 1942, Margot Frank received a call-up notice ordering her to report for a German work camp. The family knew what that meant.
The next day they went into hiding in the annex behind Otto’s office. They were joined by the van Pels family—Hermann, Auguste, and their teenage son Peter—and later by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist. Four of Otto’s employees knew about the hidden residence and provided food, supplies, and news from the outside world. For twenty-five months, the eight people lived in near total silence during working hours, moving only when the office below was empty.
Anne, who was thirteen when the family went into hiding, began keeping a diary. She wrote about the fear, the boredom, the arguments, and the small moments of hope. She documented her changing relationships with her parents, her growing affection for Peter van Pels, and her reflections on identity, on war, and on what it meant to be Jewish in a world that wanted Jews dead. On July 15, 1944, less than three weeks before the raid, she wrote that despite everything, she still believed people were truly good at heart.
The betrayal came without warning. On that August morning, SS officer Karl Silberbauer and several Dutch policemen climbed the stairs to the annex. Historians still debate who informed the authorities. Some theories point to Willem van Maaren, a warehouse employee who may have noticed irregularities.
Others suggest an anonymous phone call tipped off the SD. The betrayer’s identity has never been definitively proven. What is known is that someone told the authorities exactly where to find the hidden families. The eight residents were arrested and taken to SD headquarters in Amsterdam for interrogation.
Two days later they were transferred to the Westerbork transit camp in the northeastern Netherlands, a former refugee camp converted into a processing center for deportations to the east. The Franks, the van Pelses, and Pfeffer were held there for nearly a month. Survivors later recalled that the family tried to stay together and that Anne remained hopeful even as trains carrying hundreds of Jews departed weekly for Poland. On September 3, 1944, the eight were loaded onto the last transport to leave Westerbork for Auschwitz.
The train carried 1,019 people and took three days to reach the camp. Upon arrival on September 6, the selection process began immediately. SS doctors separated those deemed fit for labor from those sent directly to the gas chambers. Of the 1,019 people on that transport, 549 were murdered within hours.
Otto Frank was selected for labor and assigned to the men’s barracks. Edith, Margot, and Anne were also selected for labor and sent to the women’s section. Hermann van Pels was gassed on arrival. Auguste van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer were separated from the group and sent to different camps.
Otto would later describe Auschwitz as a place where the living became numbers, where identity dissolved into survival. He hauled stones and dug trenches under constant threat of violence. He saw his wife and daughters only at a distance, across the barbed wire that divided the men’s and women’s sections. In late October 1944, the SS began selecting women for transport to labor camps in Germany.
Anne and Margot were chosen and sent to Bergen-Belsen. Edith remained at Auschwitz. She died there on January 6, 1945, weakened by starvation and illness. She was forty-four.
Witnesses later told Otto that she had stopped eating, saving what little food she received for her daughters, not knowing they had already been taken away. At Bergen-Belsen, conditions were catastrophic. The camp, originally intended for a few thousand prisoners, was overwhelmed by tens of thousands transferred from camps in the east as the Soviets advanced. There was no running water, no sanitation, and almost no food.
Typhus spread rapidly. Anne and Margot were among thousands who contracted the disease. In late February or early March 1945, both sisters died within days of each other. Margot was nineteen.
Anne was fifteen. Their bodies were buried in one of the camp’s mass graves, their exact location unknown. Otto survived Auschwitz. On January 27, 1945, Soviet forces liberated the camp.
Otto was among the few thousand prisoners still alive, severely weakened by months of forced labor, malnutrition, and illness. During his recovery, he searched desperately for information about his family. The journey back to Amsterdam took months. Transportation across war-torn Europe was chaotic.
He traveled east to Chernovtsy, then north to Odessa on the Black Sea, where he waited weeks for a ship. In May 1945, he finally boarded a vessel bound for Marseilles. From there he traveled by train through France and Belgium, reaching Amsterdam in early June 1945, more than four months after liberation. Otto returned to the home of Miep and Jan Gies, two of the employees who had helped hide the family.
Miep had been more than an employee. She had been a lifeline during the hiding, bringing food, books, and news from the outside world. After the arrest, she had been questioned by the Gestapo but not arrested. When Otto appeared at their door, gaunt and hollow-eyed, Miep broke down.
She had not known whether he had survived. Miep and Jan insisted he stay with them as long as he needed. Otto was certain his daughters were alive somewhere. He spent weeks searching for information, writing letters to aid organizations and the Red Cross, checking lists of survivors published in newspapers.
Slowly the truth emerged. In July 1945, Otto received confirmation that Edith had died at Auschwitz in January. Then a Dutch woman named Janny Brilleslijper, who had been imprisoned at Bergen-Belsen and had known the Frank sisters there, returned to Amsterdam. She sought out Otto and told him what he had been dreading.
Both girls had died of typhus shortly before the camp’s liberation by British forces on April 15, 1945. The news devastated Otto. In letters written during this period, he described an emptiness nothing could fill. He was fifty-six years old, alone, and faced with the question of why he had survived when his entire family had not.
It was during these weeks of grief that Miep gave Otto something she had been keeping since the arrest. After the raid, Miep and another helper, Bep Voskuijl, had returned to the annex. The police had taken valuables and documents but left papers scattered on the floor. Among them were Anne’s diary, a red-and-white checkered autograph book she had received for her thirteenth birthday, and loose sheets of paper on which she had written additional stories and observations.
Miep gathered all the papers, intending to return them to Anne when she came back. She had not read them, fearing it would be an invasion of Anne’s privacy. When she learned that Anne was dead, she brought them to Otto. Her hands shook as she handed them over.
She said simply, “Here is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you. ”
Otto looked at the familiar handwriting and could not speak. When he finally began to read, he was overwhelmed. He later said he had no idea Anne had been writing so extensively, or that her thoughts had been so mature and introspective.
He read about her frustrations with her mother, her affection for her father, her fears and hopes, her observations about human nature. He read passages where Anne wrote about wanting to be a writer, where she reflected on what it meant to be a young Jewish girl in hiding, where she described her longing for freedom. Anne had written on April 5, 1944, that she wanted to go on living even after her death. She had hoped her diary would be published someday.
Otto decided to honor that wish. He combined Anne’s original diary entries with the revised versions she had begun in early 1944, omitting some passages he considered too private. Finding a publisher took time. Several rejected the manuscript, questioning whether there was an audience for a young girl’s diary.
Otto persisted. Finally, in 1947, the Dutch publisher Contact agreed to release the book, largely through the advocacy of historian Jan Romein, who had written a powerful essay about the manuscript. The book was published on June 25, 1947, under the title Het Achterhuis—The Secret Annex. The first edition printed 3,000 copies.
The diary’s readership grew steadily. The German translation appeared in 1950, the French in 1950, and the English translation, The Diary of a Young Girl, was published in the United States in 1952 with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1955, a play adaptation opened on Broadway, winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best play. Otto attended the premiere.
In 1959, a film adaptation directed by George Stevens was released, reaching millions of viewers worldwide and winning three Academy Awards. Otto devoted the rest of his life to preserving his daughter’s legacy. He corresponded personally with readers around the world, traveled extensively giving lectures and interviews, and fought legal battles against those who claimed the diary was a forgery. In court, he successfully defended its authenticity, providing access to the original documents for handwriting and forensic analysis.
One of his most significant efforts was the preservation of the annex itself. By the mid-1950s, the building at 263 Prinsengracht had fallen into disrepair and was slated for demolition. In 1957, the Anne Frank Foundation was established to acquire and restore the property. On May 3, 1960, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands officially opened the Anne Frank House to the public as a museum.
Visitors could walk through the annex, climb the stairs behind the bookcase that concealed the entrance, and stand in the space where Anne had written her diary. Pencil marks on a door frame showed where Otto had measured his daughter’s heights. Otto remarried in 1953 to Elfriede Geiringer, a fellow Auschwitz survivor whose husband and son had been murdered on the same transport that brought the Frank family to the camp. They moved to Basel, Switzerland, where they lived quietly.
In his later years, Otto spoke often about the guilt survivors felt. He acknowledged that he would never fully understand why he had survived Auschwitz when his wife and daughters had not, but he believed his survival gave him a responsibility to speak for those who could not. Otto died in Basel on August 19, 1980, at the age of ninety-one. At his request, part of his ashes were scattered at the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where Edith had died and where he had spent the darkest months of his life.
In the decades since, Anne’s diary has been translated into more than seventy languages and has sold tens of millions of copies. The Anne Frank House attracts over a million visitors each year. Otto’s decision to publish the diary ensured that Anne’s voice would not be silenced by her death.
He transformed private grief into a public testament, a tool for education, and a call to action.