AMSTERDAM — The world’s most famous diarist, Anne Frank, died not in a gas chamber but in the squalor of a typhus-ravaged concentration camp, her body broken by starvation and disease just weeks before Allied forces liberated the camp where she perished, according to historical accounts of her final days.
Annelies Marie Frank, born June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, would have turned 16 on June 12, 1945. Instead, she died in February 1945 at Bergen-Belsen, her life extinguished by the systematic brutality of the Nazi regime that had hunted her family across borders for more than a decade.
Her death came after 761 days in hiding, after a betrayal that remains unexplained to this day, and after a three-day journey in a cattle wagon to Auschwitz-Birkenau that she would never forget and from which she would never fully recover.
The story of how Anne Frank died is inseparable from the story of how she lived — in a cramped secret annex behind a revolving bookcase at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam, where eight people clung to life and hope while the machinery of genocide ground on outside their walls.
The Nazi invasion of the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, shattered the relative safety the Frank family had found after fleeing Germany in 1933. The Luftwaffe’s paratroopers seized tactical points while heavy aerial bombardment reduced Rotterdam’s historic center to rubble on May 14. The Dutch surrendered the following day.
What followed was a relentless campaign of anti-Jewish legislation designed to exclude Jews from every facet of society. Jewish civil servants were fired. Jewish businesses were registered and then seized.
Parks, cinemas, and non-Jewish shops became off-limits. Jewish children were forced into separate schools.
Otto Frank, Anne’s father, had anticipated the catastrophe. He transferred control of his companies to his employees to keep them out of Nazi hands. He tried desperately to emigrate to the United States and Cuba but could never obtain the necessary documents.
In the spring of 1942, he began preparing a hiding place in an empty part of his business premises.
On April 29, 1942, regulations forcing Jews to wear a yellow Star of David were announced. Those caught without the badge faced arrest and six weeks of detention. The systematic deportation of Dutch Jews to death camps began that summer.
Of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands at the start of the war, 107,000 were deported to Auschwitz and Sobibor by September 1944. Only 5,000 returned.
Anne’s 13th birthday on June 12, 1942, was probably the last happy moment for the Frank family. She received a diary — a red-and-white checkered notebook she had pointed out to her father in a shop window days earlier. In it, she would document her innermost thoughts during the darkest chapter of human history.
Less than one month later, on July 5, 1942, Margot Frank received a call-up to report for a so-called labor camp in Nazi Germany. The family knew what such notices meant. Friends and acquaintances who had been sent to those camps had never returned.
The next morning, the Franks went into hiding. They would spend 761 days in the secret annex.
Seven days later, they were joined by Hermann, Auguste, and 16-year-old Peter Van Pels. In November, Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and family friend, arrived. Eight people in a three-story space entered through a revolving bookcase.
They depended entirely on six helpers — employees and friends of Otto Frank — who provided food, clothing, and everything necessary between 1942 and 1944. Miep Gies, one of those helpers, would later preserve Anne’s diary and return it to Otto after the war.
Silence was mandatory, especially from 8:30 AM when warehouse workers below began their day. Any sound could betray them. Mornings were devoted to reading and studying.
At 12:30 PM, when workers went home for lunch, helpers came up to eat with those in hiding.
The people in hiding listened to “Radio Oranje,” a BBC program featuring Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, who had escaped to England on May 13, 1940. She spoke 34 times during the war, her voice a lifeline to the occupied Netherlands.
In the afternoons, Anne wrote. She studied. She dreamed of becoming a writer and journalist.
At 5:30 PM, when warehouse workers left, the eight could move freely through the building, cook dinner, and take turns using the bathroom.
The situation grew more dangerous after September 1942, when special units of Dutch collaborators began hunting for hiding Jews. 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.
On August 4, 1944, Dutch police officers headed by SS officer Karl Silberbauer raided Prinsengracht 263 after receiving a tip-off. The hiding place was discovered. Otto, Edith, Margot, Anne, the Van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer were arrested.
Silberbauer confiscated their valuables and money, scattering papers and notebooks across the floor. After the prisoners were taken to Gestapo headquarters, two helpers gathered the documents before the annex was emptied by Nazi order. Anne’s diary survived.
From Amsterdam, the eight were sent to the Westerbork transit camp. Men and women were separated. Otto worked during the day but could spend evenings with Edith, Margot, and Anne.
After a few weeks, they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Their train was the last to leave Westerbork for the extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. The journey took three horrific days. Anne and over a thousand others were packed into cattle wagons with little food and water and only a barrel for a toilet.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Nazi doctors conducted selections to determine who could perform heavy forced labor. Around 350 people from Anne’s transport were immediately taken to the gas chambers and murdered.
Otto was sent to a men’s camp. Anne, Margot, and Edith were sent to the women’s labor camp. Survivors later described them as an inseparable trio.
Otto would never see his wife or daughters again.
In early November 1944, Anne and Margot were deported to Bergen-Belsen. Their parents remained at Auschwitz. Edith Frank died of weakness and disease on January 6, 1945, three weeks before the Red Army liberated the camp.
At Bergen-Belsen, Anne reunited with her friend Nanette Blitz, who survived the Holocaust. Blitz described Anne as “bald, emaciated, and shivering.” She said Anne did not wish to live any longer, believing both her parents were dead.
Yet Anne also told Blitz she hoped to one day write a book based on her diary when the war ended.
Conditions at Bergen-Belsen were catastrophic. Sanitary facilities were nonexistent. There was no water for washing and hardly enough for drinking and cooking.
Between January and March 1945, as prisoners arrived from death marches out of other camps, about one-third were already dead. Almost 80 percent of the rest had to be carried by truck from the station, too weak and sick to walk.
On one occasion, out of a transport of 1,900 inmates, over 500 arrived dead. Prisoners received almost no food during the death marches and no food upon arrival. The camp was so overcrowded that during the freezing winter months, prisoners slept sitting upright on the floor, sharing only 200 blankets among tens of thousands.
Starvation, thirst, and typhus epidemics killed between 250 and 300 prisoners daily.
In these conditions, Anne and Margot contracted typhus. Gena Turgel, a Bergen-Belsen survivor who worked in the camp hospital, remembered seeing Anne. In her words, Anne was “delirious, terrible and burning up.”
Turgel brought her water to wash with.
Margot fell from her bunk in her weakened state and was killed by the shock. Anne died one day later. Both died in February 1945 from typhus — Margot first, Anne shortly afterward.
It was initially believed the sisters died a few weeks before the camp’s liberation on April 15, 1945. Later research revealed they may have died as early as February.
Anne and Margot are among the millions of victims sentenced to death by starvation, thirst, illness, mistreatment, or extermination with Zyklon B gas.
One person from the secret annex survived. Otto Frank was liberated on January 27, 1945, when Soviet forces entered Auschwitz. On his journey back to the Netherlands, he learned his wife Edith had died but held hope that Anne and Margot had somehow survived.
He returned to the liberated Netherlands on June 3, 1945 — nine days before what would have been Anne’s 16th birthday. One month later, all hope was lost when he learned of his daughters’ deaths.
Miep Gies gave Otto Anne’s diary. After finding the courage to read it, he was astonished by her writing. He read of her dreams to become a writer and journalist, and her intention to publish her stories about life in the secret annex after the war.
Anne’s dreams came true. The first 3,000 copies of her book, “Secret Annex,” were published in 1947. Since then, it has been translated into over 70 languages.
In 1960, the hiding place that sheltered eight people for two years became a museum: the Anne Frank House.
Today, visitors can see Anne’s room, its walls still brightened with the picture postcards and movie star photos she collected. They can view her original diary and manuscripts, written until her arrest.
Anne Frank, a teenage girl whose only “sin” was being Jewish, has become a symbol that will live forever — a reminder of the dangers of discrimination, racism, and hatred.
Her diary ends on August 1, 1944, three days before her arrest. In one of her final entries, she wrote: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
Those words, written in a hidden room by a girl who would die in a concentration camp, remain among the most powerful ever penned. They stand as both testament and indictment — a declaration of hope from a victim of the most systematic hatred the world has ever known.
The exact location of Anne and Margot Frank’s graves is unknown. They were buried in mass graves at Bergen-Belsen, their bodies among the tens of thousands interred without ceremony or marker.
But their memory endures. Every year, more than one million people visit the Anne Frank House. They climb the narrow stairs behind the revolving bookcase.
They stand in the small room where a girl wrote her heart out while the world outside descended into madness.
They read her words. They remember.
And they confront the question her diary poses to every generation: What would we have done? What will we do now?