On June 12, 1942, a young girl received a diary for her thirteenth birthday. The gift arrived during one of the most turbulent and bloody chapters of modern history, a time when Jewish families across Europe faced daily threats of arrest, deportation, and death.
The girl was Anne Frank, a German Jewish teenager who had fled Frankfurt with her family in 1933 and was now trapped in occupied Amsterdam. While she wrote down her experiences, she could never have imagined that her private notebook would become one of the most famous literary works the world has ever seen.
Her story would unfold alongside that of Eva Schloss, another refugee who arrived in Amsterdam as a child. The two girls shared strikingly similar fates, yet their lives would end in very different ways.
Anne was born on June 12, 1929, three years after her sister Margot. Her father's family had lived in Frankfurt for seven generations. Her mother, Edith Hollander, also came from a Jewish family. Otto Frank, Anne's father, was a German Jew who had fought in World War I and received the Iron Cross.
Their life in Germany was ordinary. Anne played in the street, attended birthday parties, and enjoyed a very normal childhood. That changed in 1933, when the Nazi Party took power and antisemitic persecution began immediately.
The Nuremberg Laws made life increasingly difficult for German Jewish families. Books by Jewish authors were burned in public squares. Writers, scientists, and artists fled the country. Some 1,600 refugees went to the Netherlands, 12,000 to France, 1,200 to Spain, and 3,000 to Czechoslovakia.
The Franks chose the Netherlands and arrived in Amsterdam in 1934. Otto knew people in the city and went ahead to find work and start a business. Anne and Margot enrolled in Dutch schools and seemed to adapt well. Anne grew up as a Dutch girl of the 1930s, loved reading, and was a talkative student who often got into trouble with her teachers.
Throughout the 1930s, Hitler made several territorial gains in Europe, including the annexation of Austria in 1938. Eva Schloss, a child living in Vienna at the time, was born in 1929 and had an older brother three years her senior. Their happy family life ended suddenly when the Nazis arrived.
Eva's family fled first to Belgium before settling in Amsterdam. She found the city beautiful and its people welcoming to refugees. She returned to school, got a bicycle, and felt the family was together again. Life seemed to be returning to some kind of normal.
The years before 1940 were peaceful in Amsterdam. The Franks moved to Merwedeplein, a modern square where local children came to play after school. One day a small girl approached Eva, introduced herself, and said she was Anne Frank. They were both eleven when they met.
Eva was more boyish and loved playing with boys and doing bicycle tricks. Anne was more mature, interested in clothes, hairstyles, movie stars, and boys. Anne's family came from Germany and she could not yet speak much Dutch, so she took Eva to her apartment to meet her family.
Neither girl could have understood how their lives would soon become intertwined. Their ideal life in Amsterdam was about to be turned upside down. Their families had chosen the Netherlands partly because it had remained neutral in World War I and seemed to offer a refuge for Jewish people.
In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands. The Nazi war machine broke Dutch resistance in four days. After the occupation, life initially seemed almost normal, but fear of what might come next lingered.
Within weeks and months, measures against Jewish residents took effect. Jews were declared unwanted and told to stay out. They were barred from parks, cinemas, public transport, theaters, and swimming pools. Jewish children had to leave their schools and wear a yellow star.
Then arrests began, especially of young men. Going out to shop became frightening. Many people disappeared in 1941, and many were arrested. The harassment and persecution became unbearable.
In July 1942, about 10,000 young people received call-up notices for deportation to Germany to work in factories. Eva's brother Heinz, then sixteen, Anne, Margot, and many of their friends received these notices. Many parents sent their children, but some of those children never ended up working in German factories. They were sent to Mauthausen and killed there.
The next chapter was a tragedy beyond comparison for Eva and Anne. Their lives would play out against the backdrop of war and genocide. The Nazi regime's seizure of Germany in 1933 and later occupations had forced large Jewish populations to flee persecution. The Netherlands was one of many countries that took in Jews from persecuted areas of Europe.
Unlike World War I, when the Netherlands remained neutral, the country found itself under Nazi occupation in 1940. Once again, Jews who had fled persecution found themselves persecuted. Life became increasingly difficult for both Eva and Anne, and the call-up notices sent to older siblings would lead to irreversible consequences.
This was when Otto Frank and many other parents decided not to send their children away, but to go into hiding instead. Otto's workplace was a warehouse with rooms above it. The annex was largely unused, an empty space. Such annexes were common in Amsterdam, with many staircases and back rooms that could be easily concealed.
Otto began making plans in 1942 so that if an emergency arose, the family would hide. The order came sooner than expected. After Eva's brother received his notice, her father, like Otto Frank, decided hiding was the only option. Without a prepared hiding place, Eva's family had to find an alternative arrangement that would split them apart.
The family had to separate because no one wanted to take in a family of four. Eva went with her mother and father to a different hiding place. Anne Frank and her family entered their hiding place at 263 Prinsengracht on July 6, 1942.
A few weeks later, the Van Pels family joined them. Herman van Pels was Otto Frank's business partner. His wife Auguste and their son Peter joined the Franks in the annex. The last person to enter the hiding place was Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist from Berlin who had emigrated to the Netherlands after Kristallnacht in 1938.
Eight people were hiding in a limited number of rooms. Anne's relationships with them were shaped largely by the fact that she was thirteen, then fourteen, a young teenager with a very lively personality. She felt trapped. She was more inclined to go outside, so sitting still all day was very difficult for her. She missed her father, her brother, and her friends.
The struggle for freedom dominates the diary. Living conditions in the secret annex were extremely cramped. Anne was forced to share a room with Fritz Pfeffer, whom she refers to in her diary as Dr. Dussel. She found comfort in her writing.
Her book was partly an act of catharsis, as it is for many teenagers, but she was also driven by a radio broadcast she happened to hear on the BBC World Service. Listening to the BBC was forbidden, but people did it anyway. A Dutch official in exile said that anyone who could write a diary about what happened during the occupation should do so because it was very important for the future.
The first entries in the hiding place reflect a sense of adventure and excitement. Soon, however, boredom and tedium took over. Fear followed when they heard air raids. Reading the diary, one encounters all these scenes and emotions, especially regarding Anne's relationships with the others.
She loved her father. Her relationship with her mother was somewhat difficult. Her relationship with her sister Margot was intermittent and complicated. During those two years, she also fell in love with Peter, the boy in the secret annex. Toward the end of the diary, she grew beyond him and focused more on her personal philosophy, on how difficult it is to hold onto ideals when everything around her collapses.
The Germans searched houses and apartments because they wanted to catch every Jew. People had hiding places within hiding places. Resistance members built hiding spots where people could go when the Nazis came at night to search for them.
Otto succeeded in securing a loyal group of employees to help the Franks hide. They were Miep Gies, office manager Jo Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and Otto's secretary Bep Voskuijl. These four employees of Otto Frank's company made it possible for the eight to stay there for twenty-five months. They provided food, drinks, and books, which were very important to Anne.
Caring for eight people for more than two years was an incredible burden of responsibility. They chose to risk their lives to save the lives of others. Throughout their time in the annex, the eight often followed radio broadcasts to hear about the progress of the war. They were relieved to learn that on June 6, 1944, Allied forces landed in Normandy.
By the end of June, more than 800,000 Allied soldiers had entered occupied France, which, together with Russian forces in the east, would create a two-front war for the Nazis. This was the beginning of the end of World War II. The invasion was a tremendous source of encouragement for Anne and everyone in hiding. They could see light at the end of the tunnel. Otto listened to news of the advance and traced it on a small map of Normandy hanging on the annex wall.
Eva, however, did not hear about the Normandy landings or the Allied advance. She and her mother Elfriede, along with her father and brother Heinz, had been betrayed and captured in May 1944. They were betrayed by a Dutch nurse who pretended to be a member of the resistance but was actually working with the Nazis.
Unlike Eva Schloss and her family, the identity of the person who betrayed the Frank family remains a complete mystery to this day. There was a phone call on the morning of August 4, 1944. A woman's voice reportedly said that Jews were hiding at 263 Prinsengracht.
The Franks, the Van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer were all going about their constrained daily routine when Dutch police and Gestapo officer Karl Silberbauer entered the office and ordered the employees at gunpoint to open a bookcase. They knew from the anonymous tip exactly what was happening in the building.
They went up to the annex and arrested everyone, including two of their helpers, Jo Kleiman and Victor Kugler. Miep Gies managed to avoid arrest. She knew the authorities would soon come to clear the annex, so she saved what she could. Then she found Anne's diary.
Knowing Anne was an aspiring writer, she placed it safely in her desk drawer. The diary stayed there, dormant, waiting to be reunited with its owner. Eva was arrested on May 11, 1944, her fifteenth birthday. They were preparing to eat breakfast when they heard knocking at the door. Gestapo forces broke in and arrested Eva and her mother, taking them to Gestapo headquarters.
They were first sent to Westerbork, a transit camp, and were immediately placed on a list and transported to Auschwitz. Auschwitz was where Eva and her family were held for the duration of the war. After their arrest, the Frank family would follow Eva's route to Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands and then east to Auschwitz.
Anne and Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen. There was no food. They were largely abandoned. The camp was full of disease. One can imagine the combination of despair, cold, hunger, and illness. Surviving in Bergen-Belsen was nearly impossible.
Anne and Margot's health deteriorated rapidly in Bergen-Belsen. In March 1945, a typhus epidemic spread through the camp. Although no records exist, it is believed this is why Margot Frank died first and then Anne two days later. The real tragedy is that just a few weeks later, Bergen-Belsen would be liberated by British forces.
Eva and her mother Elfriede, along with Otto Frank, who were all still in Auschwitz, would each find themselves seeing the final days and feeling relief when Russian forces liberated the camp. The three could not have expected at the time how their lives would become inexplicably linked, not only to each other but to Anne Frank and the legacy she would leave behind.
The lives and experiences of Anne Frank and Eva Schloss mirrored each other throughout the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Both were forced into hiding, both were betrayed, arrested, and sent to concentration camps. There the similarities end.
Like Anne Frank, Eva's father and brother died tragically. Anne and her sister Margot died in Bergen-Belsen weeks before liberation. Despite the deaths of her father Erich and brother Heinz, Eva and her mother survived the horrors of Auschwitz alongside Otto Frank, Anne's father.
As Allied forces advanced from the west and the east, World War II ended. Eva and her mother were liberated by the Russians on January 27, 1945. Otto Frank was liberated with them at Auschwitz and made the same journey they did. They saw him several times, though there were several hundred people there.
It took Otto five months to return to Amsterdam. The Germans were fighting hard in Poland, so the Russians took survivors away from Auschwitz. The only way to travel was eastward, always in cattle trucks, until they ended up in Odessa, where they waited for the war to end.
They were eager to return to Amsterdam and waited in Odessa for a troop transport ship. It eventually came, and they went to Marseille, then continued through France to Belgium, and finally back to Amsterdam. From the end of January until June, they were traveling almost constantly.
Otto knew his wife Edith had died but still believed there was some hope for his daughters Anne and Margot. He did not know about his daughters. He always said he had great hope that they were alive. Eva and her mother also held out hope for Erich and Heinz.
Eva, her mother, Otto Frank, and hundreds of others sailed from Odessa in Ukraine to Marseille in southern France. From Marseille, they traveled north to Amsterdam. They arrived in June 1945, six months after being liberated from Auschwitz.
The Amsterdam they returned to was not the same place they had left the year before. The Nazi threat was gone, but the occupation had left its mark. The previous year had been the Hunger Winter, because the Germans took everything the Dutch produced to feed their own people. Many thousands of Dutch people starved to death.
They were not received well, not because people did not want them back, but because the Dutch had suffered too and did not really know what to do with more people who needed help. Returning to Amsterdam, Otto Frank discovered that his family's home on Merwedeplein was no longer available. He could not return to his own apartment because other people had moved in. He had nowhere to go.
Survivors returning felt as if they had arrived from another planet. Otto moved in with Miep Gies, one of the helpers, who still lived close to Merwedeplein. Eva and her mother, however, found their apartment still available to move into. They were lucky because when they came to Amsterdam, their furnished apartment was owned by a Christian who returned it to them. They waited for news of their family.
Finding shelter with Miep Gies, Otto Frank did not yet know the fate of his daughters. The idea of being reunited with them kept his hopes alive. He went to Central Station every day, where people arrived from wherever they had been, any camp they had gone to, in order to search for them, to learn their fate or whereabouts.
He visited everyone connected to Anne or Margot and tried to find out if they knew anything. There were lists of people who had gone to different camps. He placed an advertisement in a newspaper seeking news of his daughters. The family still keeps that advertisement.
He was then introduced to two women who had been in Bergen-Belsen in the same barracks as the Frank girls. Otto Frank came to tell Eva and her mother that he had heard his daughters had died in Bergen-Belsen. Eva and her mother were also living in hope of finding Erich and Heinz, but they would receive the same kind of news Otto did.
In July, they received a notice from the Red Cross that Eva's father and brother had died in Mauthausen, days before the American army arrived to liberate that camp. Edith Frank, after witnessing the transfer of her children from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, died in January 1945. Anne and Margot were to die within days of each other, with Anne having to witness the death of her older sister.
Of the eight people who had hidden in the annex at 263 Prinsengracht, only one survived. That was Otto Frank. When he first came to tell Eva and her mother that the girls had died, he seemed as if he could not continue his life. He returned to tell Miep. Miep went to the drawer where she had kept Anne's diary and said to him, "Here, Mr. Frank. Here is your daughter's legacy."
Miep had entered the secret annex after those in hiding had been arrested and taken away. She was able to save much of the diary papers. She knew that within two days everything would be taken away. She kept them with her even after the war. When she learned Anne would not return, she gave these papers, the notebook pages, to Anne's father. Miep never read them. They were Anne's private diary.
Otto went into another room and read it quietly. He came out pale and said, "Miep, I never knew my daughter." Otto and Elfriede began to see each other more, offering support through their shared experiences and losses. Eva was one of the first people to hear Otto read excerpts from Anne's diary.
A few days later he brought the diary, opened it, examined the package very carefully, and read some sentences, but he always burst into tears. He could not read it all at once and it took him three weeks to finish it. He told Eva and her mother about it.
He remained conflicted for a long time about whether to publish it. Anne had wanted to become a writer, a published writer. But at the end of the day, it was a private diary. She had written things that might not be suitable for others to read. She had not been very kind to her mother.
Everyone told him he should publish it, especially a history teacher who told him it was his duty. Otto made more and more visits to Eva and her mother. During these meetings, Eva began to see Otto's philosophy, which would become the driving force of his life's work.
Otto came often. Eva's mother prepared meals for him. He was very lonely. They talked a great deal, and he told Eva that he, who had truly lost everyone, held no hatred. He said that if you hate, you will be very miserable. Otto Frank devoted the rest of his life to the diary.
What is remarkable is that he was able to do so in a very particular way, not only as a memorial to what happened and how his family suffered, but as a message to younger generations to build a new future. Otto would find global recognition would come first from America, first through a successful Broadway play, then an Academy Award-winning film, "The Diary of Anne Frank," which seemed fitting for her legacy.
Otto Frank lost everything. The hope he carried on his epic return journey to Amsterdam soon evaporated when he heard the devastating news of the deaths of his daughters, Anne and Margot. At the same time, Otto was given the diary that Miep Gies had kept.
Eva Schloss and her mother witnessed the rise of what would become one of the most respected literary works in the world, one of the most tragic stories in the world, and the creation of a symbol of hope and equality in the face of persecution. Eva knew Otto and her mother loved each other, but had no idea how close they were.
Eva described herself as a difficult teenager. She did not want to do any housework. She was very stubborn and very unhappy. Otto came and talked with her and helped her a great deal. When she finished school, she did not know what to do with herself. Otto and her mother decided she should become a photographer. She did not really care what she would do, but she agreed.
Otto said it would be good for her to travel abroad for a year, which she did in London. Otto came to visit her often and kept an eye on her. He had taken on something of a surrogate father role. Otto and Elfriede grew closer over time and married in 1953. Eva received the news while staying in London. Otto told her that he and her mother had fallen in love. They remained married for twenty-seven years, longer than either had been married to their first spouses.
Otto had already decided that Anne's diary should be published. He showed it to a few people and listened to their opinions. Then a professor named Jan Romein from the University of Amsterdam read it and published an article in the newspaper Het Parool saying that everyone should read this diary. That article led to the first publication on June 25, 1947.
A third of the diary had already been removed, for two reasons. First, Otto wanted to preserve the memory of his late wife and the others in hiding from some of the unkind things Anne had said about them. Second, the publisher itself considered some of the things Anne wrote about to be unsuitable.
When the diary was first published, it did not have a major impact. It was a book much like many others dealing with the occupation of the Netherlands. When the Dutch book came out, Otto gave it to everyone who had known Anne. He was very generous because he wanted everyone to read it.
It was published at a time when people were focused on the future. They wanted to forget what had happened in the Netherlands between 1940 and 1945. They had suffered greatly and wanted to forget. In Europe, people did not really want to talk about what had happened, about Auschwitz or anything like that. The diary does not really talk about that either.
So it was only after the mid-1950s that the diary achieved great success. It was published in America in 1952. It was very difficult to find an American publisher as well, because people said, "Who is interested in the diary of a little girl?" The publisher who took it on in America was Doubleday. They took a risk because no one really knew whether there was any interest.
It took an article by the novelist Meyer Levin to make the book truly famous. Meyer Levin became a friend of Otto's and loved the diary. He wrote a major article in The New York Times about how remarkable it was, and it immediately became a bestseller in America.
The play was adapted by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and opened at the Cort Theatre on Broadway on October 5, 1955, with Susan Strasberg in the title role. The production grew and its popularity increased, helped in part by the attendance of many Hollywood stars of the time. Eva witnessed its immediate success.
The play was a great success in New York first, then in London, then it was translated. It was performed in Germany. Then a film was made. The film was released in 1959 and received great critical and commercial acclaim. The film was directed by George Stevens, and the screenplay was also written by Goodrich and Hackett. Millie Perkins starred as Anne Frank. Shelley Winters won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Auguste van Pels.
The world wanted to know more about Anne Frank, and Otto was eager to tell her story and continue spreading her philosophy. Many Americans came to Amsterdam and always knocked on the door of the house, wanting to see where Anne had hidden.
It was wonderful to think of preserving the hiding place, but not as a museum. Otto's vision was that Anne's legacy was to bring people together. The foundation dates back to 1957 with the aim of buying the house and opening it to the public, so it took three years to prepare.
Otto invested his time and energy to bring together people from around the world to attend international student conferences. The Anne Frank House was initially a study center for young people. People from all over the world gathered and held conferences to talk about what they could do to change the world.
The essential feature of the house is its emptiness, a deliberate decision by Otto Frank that the place should remain empty. It represents the absence of Anne Frank. The success of the play and the film, and the opening of the house, led to a spread in readers of the original diary.
As people read the diary, especially young people, they connected strongly with Anne and began writing to Otto Frank. They saw him in the diary as a very caring person. Having known Otto for twenty-seven years, Eva could see he was truly a humanitarian. Anne's stay with him for two years helped her become the person she was.
The entry point when reading the diary is usually your own life. When people are inspired by Anne Frank, it is not because their lives resemble hers in any way. This applies to virtually everyone. It is about a book that was able to inspire people even though their lives are completely different from hers. Through it, of course, the world learns about what happened. That is, of course, very important.
We have her diary as a kind of silent messenger for someone who no longer exists, and who no longer exists because of what happened to her. So we have to explain to young people how dangerous it is to be prejudiced against other human beings.
In preserving the memory of his daughter and the persecution she suffered, Otto, through unified design, was able to elevate Anne Frank from a young, talented writer and victim of a series of terrible events into not just a face, but a symbol of the Holocaust. She also became an acceptable, forgiving figure, and her themes of equality became universal topics that all human beings can relate to.
Her ideas evolved into Otto's philosophy, which still stands today through the Anne Frank Foundation and the Anne Frank House, reaching millions of people around the world. Behind the global popularity of her story lies the diary of a young girl, an individual with her own aspirations and thoughts, who happened to fall into extraordinary and tragic circumstances.