Anne Frank and the Secret Annex: Hiding in Amsterdam 1942–44

Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who spent more than two years hiding from the Nazis in the Secret Annex, a set of concealed rooms behind her father’s business at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. From 6 July 1942 until their arrest on 4 August 1944, eight people lived there with the help of a few trusted employees. The diary Anne kept during those years became one of the most widely read books in the world and a lasting witness to the Holocaust.

Background

Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on 12 June 1929, the second daughter of Otto and Edith Frank; her sister Margot was born in 1926. After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and antisemitic measures began, Otto Frank moved to Amsterdam to run a company selling pectin, a gelling agent for making jam. The rest of the family followed, and Anne arrived in early 1934.

The family lived a settled life until Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. The occupiers introduced anti-Jewish laws step by step, similar to the Nuremberg Laws in Germany. Jews had to register, were excluded from many professions and public places, and from May 1942 had to wear a yellow star. Jewish children were moved to separate schools. Otto Frank formally handed his businesses to non-Jewish colleagues and began to prepare a hiding place in the rear part of his company’s building on the Prinsengracht canal.

Going into hiding

On her thirteenth birthday, 12 June 1942, Anne received a red-and-white checked autograph book, which she began to use as a diary. On 5 July 1942 Margot received a call-up to report for a so-called labour camp in Germany. The family went into hiding the next morning, 6 July, earlier than planned.

The Secret Annex, in Dutch Het Achterhuis, occupied the upper floors of the back house behind the offices and warehouse. Its entrance was later concealed behind a movable bookcase built by Johan Voskuijl, the father of one of the helpers. On 13 July 1942 the Franks were joined by Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their son Peter, and on 16 November 1942 by the dentist Fritz Pfeffer. In her diary Anne gave them pseudonyms, calling the van Pels family “van Daan” and Pfeffer “Dussel”.

Life in the Annex

Eight people shared a few small rooms. During working hours they had to stay almost silent so that warehouse staff would not hear them, and they could never go outside. They passed the time reading, studying and listening to the BBC and Radio Oranje on a radio. Food grew scarcer as the war went on, and there were tensions and quarrels, which Anne recorded frankly.

The helpers were essential. Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler and Bep Voskuijl, all employees of Otto Frank, along with Miep’s husband Jan Gies, obtained food with false or black-market ration cards, brought news and books, and kept the secret at great risk to themselves.

Anne wrote her diary as letters, mostly addressed to an imaginary friend called “Kitty”. On 28 March 1944 she heard a radio broadcast from London in which Gerrit Bolkestein, the Dutch education minister in exile, said that diaries and letters would be collected after the war. Anne then began rewriting her entries on loose sheets with a view to publishing a book called Het Achterhuis. Among her best-known reflections, written on 15 July 1944, is her statement that “in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart”. Her last entry is dated 1 August 1944.

Arrest and deportation

On the morning of 4 August 1944 the Annex was raided by a unit of the German Security Police led by SS-Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer, together with Dutch police officers. All eight people in hiding were arrested, along with Kleiman and Kugler. Who, if anyone, betrayed them remains unknown.

The eight were taken to the Westerbork transit camp and on 3 September 1944 were put on the last train from Westerbork to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Hermann van Pels was murdered there in the autumn of 1944. Edith Frank died in Auschwitz in January 1945. Anne and Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen in Germany in late October or early November 1944, where they died of typhus in the overcrowded camp, most likely in February 1945. Fritz Pfeffer died at Neuengamme in December 1944, Auguste van Pels died in Germany or Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1945, and Peter van Pels died at Mauthausen in May 1945.

Otto Frank was the only one of the eight to survive. He was liberated when Soviet troops reached Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. Kugler and Kleiman both survived imprisonment.

How the diary reached the world

After the arrest Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl gathered Anne’s papers from the Annex. Miep kept them unread and gave them to Otto Frank in the summer of 1945, when it was confirmed that his daughters had died. Otto put together a version from Anne’s original diary and her rewritten text, leaving out some passages. It was published in Dutch on 25 June 1947 as Het Achterhuis. English editions followed in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl.

A stage adaptation by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett opened on Broadway in 1955 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and a Hollywood film followed in 1959. The building at Prinsengracht 263, saved from demolition, opened as the Anne Frank House museum in 1960. In 1986 the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation published a critical edition that confirmed the diary’s authenticity through forensic tests on paper, ink and handwriting. The diary has been translated into more than 70 languages and in 2009 was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Myths and facts

• Myth: the diary is a forgery. Fact: this claim, spread by Holocaust deniers, was disproved by forensic investigation and rejected in court cases in Germany and the Netherlands.
• Myth: Anne died just days before liberation. Fact: Bergen-Belsen was liberated by British troops on 15 April 1945; research by the Anne Frank House indicates Anne and Margot probably died in February, about two months earlier.
• Myth: the betrayer has been identified. Fact: several theories exist, but none has been proved.

Timeline

• 1929, 12 June: Anne Frank is born in Frankfurt am Main.
• 1934, February: Anne joins her family in Amsterdam.
• 1942, 12 June: Anne receives the autograph book she uses as a diary.
• 1942, 6 July: The Frank family goes into hiding in the Secret Annex.
• 1944, 4 August: The eight people in hiding are arrested.
• 1944, 3 September: They are deported from Westerbork to Auschwitz.
• 1945, February (probably): Anne and Margot die at Bergen-Belsen.
• 1947, 25 June: The diary is published in Amsterdam as Het Achterhuis.
• 1960, 3 May: The Anne Frank House opens as a museum.

Why it matters

Anne Frank’s diary gives a personal voice to the roughly six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, among them about 100,000 Jews from the Netherlands. Her honest, lively writing about fear, family life and growing up has made her story a starting point for millions of readers learning about the Holocaust, and the Secret Annex is one of the most visited memorial sites in Europe. Her life ended at Bergen-Belsen only about two months before the camp was liberated.