The story of Anne Frank did not end with her death in Bergen-Belsen in early 1945. It continued through her father, Otto, who survived Auschwitz and dedicated the rest of his life to sharing her diary with the world. It also continued through the helpers who risked everything to hide the family, the other residents of the Secret Annex, and the extended Frank family scattered across Europe.
Otto Frank was the only member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. Born in Frankfurt in 1889, he served as a lieutenant in the German army during World War I before building a business in Amsterdam. After the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, he prepared a hiding place in the back of his office building at Prinsengracht 263. The family went into hiding on July 6, 1942, and was joined by the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer. They remained hidden for 761 days until their arrest on August 4, 1944.
Otto was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in September 1944. He was separated from his wife and daughters upon arrival. When Soviet forces approached in January 1945, the SS evacuated prisoners on death marches, but Otto was too ill to walk and was left behind in the infirmary. He was liberated by Soviet soldiers on January 27, 1945. His journey back to Amsterdam was long and circuitous, and he arrived on June 3, 1945. He soon learned that his wife Edith had died and that his daughters had been transferred to Bergen-Belsen. The Red Cross confirmed their deaths in July 1945.
Miep Gies, one of the helpers, had gathered Anne’s diary and loose papers from the floor of the Annex after the arrest. She kept them unread, hoping to return them to Anne. After the war, she gave them to Otto. Reading the diary transformed his understanding of his younger daughter. Anne had written with a depth and intelligence that astonished him. She had revised her entries with an eye toward publication after hearing a Dutch government broadcast calling for citizens to preserve wartime diaries.
Edith Frank died at Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 6, 1945, less than three weeks before the camp was liberated. She was 44 years old. After her daughters were transferred to Bergen-Belsen in late October 1944, she stopped eating and gave away her food rations to others. She never knew that her husband had survived or that her daughter’s diary would one day be read around the world.
Margot Frank died at Bergen-Belsen in late February or early March 1945. She fell from her bunk in a feverish delirium caused by typhus, and the fall either killed her or hastened her death. Anne died shortly after, most likely in early March 1945. She was 15 years old. The British Army liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, just weeks after the sisters died.
Hermann van Pels was gassed at Auschwitz in October or November 1944 after being selected as unable to work. He was 46 years old. His wife Auguste survived Auschwitz and was transferred through several camps before dying at Theresienstadt in April or May 1945. Their son Peter survived the death march from Auschwitz but died at Mauthausen on May 5, 1945, the day before the camp was liberated. He was 18 years old.
Fritz Pfeffer, the dentist who shared a room with Anne, was transported to Neuengamme concentration camp, where he died on December 20, 1944. He was 55 years old. His partner Charlotte Kaletta survived the war and spent decades working to restore his reputation against the unflattering portrait in Anne’s diary.
The helpers of Prinsengracht 263 were ordinary Dutch citizens who chose to act with extraordinary courage. Miep Gies, born in Vienna in 1909, was the most visible of them. She brought food and news to the Annex daily and managed the logistics of keeping eight people hidden. After the arrest, she gathered Anne’s papers and kept them safe. She never read them, saying she was saving them for Anne. After the war, she became one of the most important living witnesses to the story. She published her memoir in 1987 and died in 2010 at the age of 100.
Her husband Jan Gies was also deeply involved in the resistance and provided crucial support through his contacts in the Dutch civil service. He died in 1993. Johannes Kleiman, who managed the business and knew about the hiding plan from the beginning, was arrested in August 1944 but released on medical grounds in September. He died in 1959 at his desk in the very building where he had helped hide the family. Victor Kugler, the business partner who presented a face of normality during the hiding period, escaped from a prisoner march in April 1945. He emigrated to Canada in 1955 and died in Toronto in 1981.
Bep Voskuijl, the youngest helper, was deeply devoted to the Franks but carried significant psychological trauma from the experience. She rarely spoke publicly about the war and died in 1983. Her father, Johan Voskuijl, worked as the warehouse manager and also knew about the Annex. He died in November 1945, not long after the war ended.
Otto Frank moved to Basel, Switzerland in 1952, where his mother and sister lived. That same year, he married Elfriede Geiringer, known as Fritzi, a Holocaust survivor who had been close to Edith in Auschwitz. Both had lost spouses and children. Their marriage was deeply loving, and Otto later said Fritzi gave him back the capacity to live.
The diary was first published in the Netherlands in June 1947 under the title Het Achterhuis. The initial print run was small, but word spread. A German edition appeared in 1950, and an English edition was published in the United States in 1952 with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. A Broadway play opened in 1955 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A film followed in 1959. The diary has since been translated into more than 70 languages and has sold tens of millions of copies.
Otto Frank established the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel in 1963 to manage the rights to the diary and use the proceeds for educational purposes. He responded personally to thousands of letters from readers around the world, especially young people. He spent considerable energy dealing with Holocaust deniers who claimed the diary was a forgery. Scientific investigations confirmed its authenticity, and the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation published a definitive critical edition in 1986.
Otto Frank died on August 19, 1980, in Birsfelden, Switzerland. He was 91 years old. He had spent 35 years as the guardian of his daughter’s legacy, using the diary as an instrument for education and tolerance. Fritzi survived him, dying in 1998.
The extended Frank family also carried the story forward. Otto’s mother Alice survived the war in Switzerland and died in 1953. His sister Helene, known as Lenny, lived in Basel and remained close to Otto until her death in 1986. His brother Robert emigrated to England and died in 1953. His brother Herbert died in 1945 under conditions that remain unclear.
Buddy Elias, Anne’s cousin and childhood playmate, became president of the Anne Frank Fonds after Otto’s death. He was the last living person who had known Anne as a child. He died in 2015 at the age of 89. Eva Schloss, Otto’s stepdaughter through his marriage to Fritzi, had been Anne’s childhood friend in Amsterdam. She survived Auschwitz and has spent decades as a Holocaust educator. She remains active as of this writing.
The identity of the person who betrayed the Secret Annex has never been definitively established. Several investigations have been conducted over the decades. In 2022, a cold case team led by retired FBI agent Vince Pankoke published a book suggesting that a Jewish notary named Arnold van den Bergh was the most likely betrayer. The theory was met with fierce criticism from historians who argued the evidence was circumstantial. The Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies issued a pointed critique of the investigation’s methods. The question remains unresolved.
The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam opened as a museum on May 3, 1960. The building at Prinsengracht 263 had been saved from demolition by a group of Amsterdam citizens. Otto Frank spoke at the opening ceremony, one of the few times he visited the space where his daughter had hidden. The museum preserves the rooms of the Annex, including the bookcase that concealed the entrance and the pencil marks on the door frame where Otto measured his daughters’ heights. It receives more than a million visitors per year.
The story of the Frank family is inseparable from the broader history of Dutch Jewry during the Holocaust. Approximately 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands before the war. About 75 percent were murdered, a higher proportion than in any other Western European country. The efficiency of Dutch record-keeping and civil administration made the Netherlands one of the most dangerous places for Jews attempting to evade detection. The Dutch government formally apologized for the state’s role in the deportation of Jews in 2020, 75 years after the end of the war.
Karl Josef Silberbauer, the Austrian detective who led the raid on the Annex, returned to the Vienna police force after the war. He was identified by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in 1963. He admitted carrying out the raid, expressed no remorse, and was cleared of criminal charges. He died in 1972 without ever standing trial for his role.
Hanneli Goslar, Anne’s best friend from Amsterdam, was one of the most important witnesses to Anne’s final days. She encountered Anne through a wire fence at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945. Anne told her that she had nothing left, no clothes, no food, and no hope. Hanneli threw packages of food over the fence. She survived the war, emigrated to Israel, and became a nurse. She died in Jerusalem in October 2022 at the age of 93.
Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper, a Dutch resistance worker imprisoned at Bergen-Belsen, provided one of the most significant eyewitness accounts of the Frank sisters’ final weeks. She described their deterioration from typhus and the fact that Margot died first, with Anne dying shortly after without apparently knowing her sister had gone.
The diary has been the subject of ongoing debate about how it should be used and understood. Some scholars have argued that its enormous popularity has distorted public understanding of the Holocaust by focusing on a single individual and presenting an ultimately hopeful frame. The famous line about believing people are really good at heart has been particularly debated. Critics note that Anne did not survive to maintain that belief. Otto Frank was sensitive to these concerns and consistently insisted that Anne’s story was one among six million, each of equal weight and tragedy.
The Anne Frank Fonds in Basel and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam operate as separate institutions with different mandates. The Fonds manages the diary’s rights and funds educational projects. The House preserves the physical site and develops educational materials. Both have contributed enormously to the transmission of the story, though they have sometimes had different approaches to questions of authority and interpretation.
The story of what happened to Anne Frank’s family after World War II is not a simple story with a clear shape. It is a web of individual trajectories, some ending in tragedy, some in quiet survival, some in remarkable public purpose. The people who survived carried the weight of what they had experienced and found different ways to bear it. Some testified publicly. Some remained silent. All of them lived with the knowledge of what had been lost.
The Secret Annex was a space of approximately 525 square feet. Eight people lived in it for more than two years. Five of them died in the Holocaust. The one survivor spent the rest of his very long life transforming his daughter’s diary into one of the world’s most powerful educational tools. The helpers who made the Annex possible lived out their post-war years carrying the experience of extraordinary moral courage and, in some cases, extraordinary trauma.
Anne Frank died never knowing that anyone outside her immediate circle would ever read her words. She had hoped to publish them someday and had revised them with a writer’s attention to craft. She died without knowing the fate of her parents, without knowing that Otto had survived, and without any inkling of the extraordinary posthumous life her words would take on.
The people who survived her, the father who read her diary weeping and decided to share it with the world, the helpers who kept faith with their hidden friends, the cousins and friends who grew old carrying her memory, all of them are part of the answer to the question Anne asked in her diary about whether the world would one day become good again. It is not a complete answer or a comfortable one, but it is an answer that refuses to give up.