Anne Frank
Anne Frank
Anne Frank (1929-1945), a young Jewish girl, her sister, and her parents moved to the Netherlands from Germany after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power there in 1933 and made life increasingly difficult for Jews. In 1942, Frank and her family went into hiding in a secret apartment behind her father’s business in German-occupied Amsterdam. The Franks were discovered in 1944 and sent to concentration camps; only Anne’s father survived. Anne Frank’s diary of her family’s time in hiding, first published in 1947, has been translated into almost 70 languages and is one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust.
Who Was Anne Frank?
Anne Frank was born Annelies Marie Frank in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 12, 1929, to Edith Hollander Frank (1900-45) and Otto Frank (1889-1980), a prosperous businessman. Less than four years later, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany and he and his Nazi government instituted a series of measures aimed at persecuting Germany’s Jewish citizens.
By the fall of 1933, Otto Frank moved to Amsterdam, where he established a small but successful company that produced a gelling substance used to make jam. After staying behind in Germany with her grandmother in the city of Aachen, Anne joined her parents and sister Margot (1926-45) in the Dutch capital in February 1934. In 1935, Anne started school in Amsterdam and earned a reputation as an energetic, popular girl.
In May 1940, the Germans, who had entered World War II in September of the previous year, invaded the Netherlands and quickly made life increasingly restrictive and dangerous for Jewish people there. Between the summer of 1942 and September 1944, the Nazis and their Dutch collaborators deported more than 100,000 Jews in Holland to extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Anne Frank’s Family Goes into Hiding
Margot Frank received a letter ordering her to report to a work camp in Germany in July 1942. Anne Frank’s family went into hiding in an attic apartment behind Otto Frank’s business, located at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam, on July 6, 1942. In an effort to avoid detection, the family left a false trail suggesting they’d fled to Switzerland.
A week after they had gone into hiding, the Franks were joined by Otto’s business associate Hermann van Pels (1898-1944), along with his wife Auguste (1900-45) and their son Peter (1926-45), who were also Jewish. A small group of Otto Frank’s employees, including his Austrian-born secretary, Miep Gies (1909-2010), risked their own lives to smuggle food, supplies and news of the outside world into the secret apartment, whose entrance was situated behind a movable bookcase. In November 1942, the Franks and Van Pels were joined by Fritz Pfeffer (1889-1944), Miep Gies’ Jewish dentist.
Life for the eight people in the small apartment, which Anne Frank referred to as the Secret Annex, was tense. The group lived in constant fear of being discovered and could never go outside. They had to remain quiet during daytime in order to avoid detection by the people working in the warehouse below. Anne passed the time, in part, by chronicling her observations and feelings in a diary she had received for her 13th birthday, a month before her family went into hiding.
Addressing her diary entries to an imaginary friend she called Kitty, Anne Frank wrote about life in hiding, including her impressions of the other inhabitants of the Secret Annex, her feelings of loneliness and her frustration over the lack of privacy. While she detailed typical teenage issues such as crushes on boys, arguments with her mother and resentments toward her sister, Frank also displayed keen insight and maturity when she wrote about the war, humanity and her own identity. She also penned short stories and essays during her time in hiding.
Anne Frank's Death
On August 4, 1944, after 25 months in hiding, Anne Frank and the seven others in the Secret Annex were discovered by the Gestapo, the German secret state police, who had learned about the hiding place from an anonymous tipster (who has never been definitively identified).
After their arrest, the Franks, Van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer were sent by the Gestapo to Westerbork, a holding camp in the northern Netherlands. From there, in September 1944, the group was transported by freight train to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination and concentration camp complex in German-occupied Poland. Anne and Margot Frank were spared immediate death in the Auschwitz gas chambers and instead were sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northern Germany. In February 1945, the Frank sisters died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen; their bodies were thrown into a mass grave. Several weeks later, on April 15, 1945, British forces liberated the camp.
Edith Frank died of starvation at Auschwitz in January 1945. Hermann van Pels died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz soon after his arrival there in 1944; his wife is believed to have likely died at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic in the spring of 1945. Peter van Pels died at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria in May 1945. Fritz Pfeffer died from illness in late December 1944 at the Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany. Anne Frank’s father, Otto, was the only member of the group to survive; he was liberated from Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945.
Anne Frank’s Diary
When Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam following his release from Auschwitz, Miep Gies gave him five notebooks and some 300 loose papers containing Anne’s writings. Gies had recovered the materials from the Secret Annex shortly after the Franks’ arrest by the Nazis and had hidden them in her desk. (Margot Frank also kept a diary, but it was never found.) Otto Frank knew that Anne wanted to become an author or journalist, and had hoped her wartime writings would one day be published. Anne had even been inspired to edit her diary for posterity after hearing a March 1944 radio broadcast from an exiled Dutch government official who urged the Dutch people to keep journals and letters that would help provide a record of what life was like under the Nazis.
After his daughter’s writings were returned to him, Otto Frank helped compile them into a manuscript that was published in the Netherlands in 1947 under the title “Het Acheterhuis” (“Rear Annex”). Although U.S. publishers initially rejected the work as too depressing and dull, it was eventually published in America in 1952 as “The Diary of a Young Girl.” The book, which went on to sell tens of millions of copies worldwide, has been labeled a testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit. It is required reading at schools around the globe and has been adapted for the stage and screen. The annex where she wrote it, known as the “Anne Frank House,” has a museum dedicated to her life and is open to the public.
Anne Frank Quotes
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
“I know what I want, I have a goal, an opinion, I have a religion and love. Let me be myself and then I am satisfied. I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage.”
“Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!”
“What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.”
“I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.
Who Betrayed Anne Frank?
On August 4, 1944, police in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam raided a warehouse and arrested eight Jews who were hiding in an annex disguised behind a bookcase. Among those captured was Anne Frank, a 15-year-old schoolgirl who had spent over two years living in the cramped safehouse with her parents and older sister.
The diary Frank kept during her confinement is now considered one of the most important accounts of the Holocaust, but the circumstances of her arrest have always been cloaked in mystery.
It is believed that an anonymous tip helped guide the Nazis to the secret annex, yet despite decades of investigations, the identity of the informant has never been proven.
Copies of Anne Frank’s diaries on display at the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands. (Credit: ADE JOHNSON/epa/Corbis)
Investigators began taking a fresh look at the case in 2016, hoping to provide new answers. A 20-person team for the Anne Frank House was led, in part, by two retired FBI officials; former special agent Vince Pankoke, and behavioral scientist Roger Depue. As The New York Times reported, they hoped to bring new technology, including forensic accounting, computer modeling and even crowd sourcing research, to examine existing evidence such as Anne Frank’s diary and the Amsterdam building where the Franks hid.
Meanwhile, in 2018, a new book claimed to offer evidence that Anne Frank and her family were betrayed by a Jewish woman who was executed after World War II for collaborating with the Nazis.
Multiple Suspects Named in Frank Family's Betrayal
Anne Frank’s father Otto—the only member of the family to survive their subsequent deportation to the concentration camps—was among the first to assert that a betrayal had led to their capture. The group’s hideout was located inside a warehouse he had once owned, and they were aided by several of his employees as well as other Dutch sympathizers.
Shortly after World War II ended, Otto Frank suggested that the culprit was Willem van Maaren, a warehouse employee who was not in on the secret. Van Maaren was later the subject of multiple investigations related to the betrayal—including one by famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal—but he always maintained his innocence, and none of the cases ever produced any evidence against him.
In the years since Anne Frank’s diary was published, investigators and historians have proposed several other potential informants. These include Lena Hartog, the wife of one of the warehouse employees; and Nelly Voskuijl, the sister of one of the Franks’ helpers.
In 2002, meanwhile, author Carol Ann Lee argued the informant was Tonny Ahlers, a Dutch Nazi sympathizer who had previously been a business associate of Otto Frank. Ahlers’ own son endorsed the theory that his father was the culprit, but a subsequent investigation by Dutch authorities found no hard evidence of his involvement.
Was Anne Frank's Family Betrayed by a Fellow Jew?
In a 2018 book, The Backyard of the Secret Annex, Gerard Kremer, the son of a member of the Dutch resistance of the same name, argues that a Jewish woman, Ans van Dijk, was responsible for the Franks' capture. Kremer's father was an acquaintance of Van Dijk in Amsterdam and Kremer writes that in early August 1944, his father overheard Van Dijk speaking about Prinsengracht, where the Franks were hiding, in Nazi offices. That same week, the Franks were arrested—while Van Dijk was away in the Hague.The involvement of Van Dijk, who was executed in 1948 after admitting to collaborating in the capture of 145 people, had been previously claimed. But, the Anne Frank House museum and research center were unable to confirm Van Dijk's involvement after its own investigation.
Anne Frank in 1940. (Credit: Collectie Anne Frank Stichting Amsterdam)
Among other theories the Anne Frank House investigated was a 2016 report that suggests no one was, in fact, responsible for leaking to the Nazis. Instead, the group’s arrest could have been a tragic accident. That report, written by senior historian Gertjan Broek, argued that the German Security Service might have simply stumbled upon the eight Jews while raiding the premises to search for fraudulent food-ration cards.
Nevertheless, researchers do not rule out the potential that Frank and the others were the victims of a betrayal. “Clearly,” the museum’s report concludes, “the last word about that fateful summer day in 1944 has not yet been said.”
Anne-frank-diary-symbol-holocaust
Usually, the upper floors of the office building at 263 Prinsengracht were silent. But on August 4, 1944, they came to terrible life. Miep Gies never forgot the sounds. “I could hear the sounds of our friends’ feet,” she wrote in her 1988 memoir. “I could tell from their footsteps that they were coming down like beaten dogs.”
Hours later, when she got up the courage, Gies went upstairs. She had helped her friends, the Frank family, live out of sight in the middle of Amsterdam for two years, bringing them the essentials of life as they hid from the persecution of Europe’s Jews. Now, the attic was trashed, ransacked by German police.
Then she saw it: a red checkered diary and years’ worth of papers strewn across the floor. Miep got on her hands and knees and gathered up the writing, then locked it in a drawer to wait for its author's return.
Anne Frank never came back. Within months of the arrest, the fifteen-year-old died of starvation and disease at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. But her diary outlived her.
Today, it is the Holocaust’s best-known and most widely read document, and its author is seen as a symbol of the 1 million Jewish children who were murdered during the Holocaust. The Diary of a Young Girl has sold more than 30 million copies, is required reading in many schools, and has been translated into more than 70 languages. The building where she hid draws over a million visitors each year. But how did the diary go from a pile of discarded papers to an international publishing phenomenon that still shapes modern historical memory?
A Chronicle of Life During the Holocaust
This photo is one of the last pictures taken of Anne Frank in 1941. The following summer, as Nazi oppression grew worse, the Franks went into hiding.
Archivio GBB/Contrasto/Redux
Anne Frank received her diary as a gift on her thirteenth birthday in 1942. At first, it was her place to record observations about friends and school and her innermost thoughts. But when she and her family went into hiding the month after the diary began, it became a war document.
Inside the “secret annex,” as she called it, Anne documented her daily life, writing about herself, her family and the other people in hiding, Hermann and Auguste van Pels, their son Peter, and dentist Fritz Pfeffer. She wrote about their protectors’ efforts to smuggle in the essentials of life at great risk. And she increasingly thought about her work as a potential book.
In March 1944, Anne heard a radio broadcast from the Dutch minister for education, art and science, who was in exile in London along with other members of the Dutch government. “History cannot be written on the basis of official decisions and documents alone,” he said. “What we really need are ordinary documents—a diary, letters.” Anne wrote about the broadcast in her diary and decided to edit and rewrite it with an aim for publication.
By the time of her capture, Anne had rewritten much of her diary. Since both versions of the diary survive, so do Anne’s shrewd edits. She edited for content, length and clarity and made a list of suggested pseudonyms for the people in her life. “The differences between Anne’s initial efforts and her revisions vary from trivial to profound,” writes critic Francine Prose, “and deepen our respect for her as a writer.” Anne also wrote and rewrote essays and works of fiction. Her future as a writer was snuffed out when she was betrayed, deported and murdered.
Seven of the eight people in hiding died before the end of the war. The only survivor was Anne’s father, Otto Frank. When news finally came that Anne and her sister Margot had died, Gies gathered up the papers she had kept locked in the drawer since the Frank family’s arrest. “Here is your daughter Anne’s legacy to you,” she told Otto, placing the diary in front of him.
That legacy shocked Anne’s father. As he read Anne’s words, he realized that he had not really known his daughter. “The Anne that appeared before me was very different from the daughter I had lost,” he recalled. “I had had no idea of the depth of her thoughts and feelings.”
He began to translate the diary into German, sharing extracts with friends and family members. Otto made his own edits for content and clarity and excluded passages about conflict between Anne and her mother, Edith, and some sexual content. They encouraged him to publish.
But most publishers at the time were not interested in buying books about World War II—a war everyone wanted to leave behind. After a long struggle to find a home for the book, Frank eventually secured a publisher and the diary was released in 1947. The work was a combination of both of Anne’s diaries—the one she kept for private and the one she intended for publication. Its title, Het Achterhuis (The House Behind), had been chosen by Anne herself.
After Proving a Huge Success in Europe, an American Editor Takes a Chance On the Diary
Anne's diary given to her by her parents for her 13th birthday.
R.Stonehouse/Camera Press/Redux
Despite worries that readers would not want to be reminded of the war, the book was enormously successful in Europe. Soon, it was flying off the shelves in the Netherlands and was joined by translations into French and German. But it faced an uphill battle in the United States. An advance copy of the French edition had been submitted to Doubleday, but rejected for an English translation deal. Then, editor Judith Jones discovered the book in a pile of rejects while her boss was at lunch.
“I read it all day,” she told the Jewish Chronicle in 2016. “When my boss returned, I told him, ‘We have to publish this book.’ He said, ‘What? That book by that kid?’” At the time, publishers thought that readers did not want to confront the Holocaust. But Jones felt that the book would find a strong market in the United States. The first American edition was published in 1952 with a foreword by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
A gushing review from author Meyer Levin stoked national interest in the book. Days later, the book had gone into its second printing. The book was subsequently turned into a play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who had written the screenplays of It’s a Wonderful Life, The Thin Man and other Hollywood classics. Their play was a smash hit, won a Pulitzer prize, and was adapted into a 1959 film that won three Academy Awards and was nominated for Best Picture. However, the play and film both downplayed the Franks’ Jewishness and focused on her brief romance with Peter van Pels.
Anne’s last words in the beloved play and film were her most famous quote, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Those words, however, come before the end of the diary, and were written as part of a larger passage exploring the nature of good and evil and grappling with the horror she saw unfolding around her.
Anne Frank as a Symbol of the Holocaust
Anne Frank’s story quickly became part of school curricula around the world, with the diary becoming required reading in many school districts. For most readers, The Diary of a Young Girl is the only in-depth work they read on the Holocaust. But the work's fame is a double-edged sword: the diary does not show the aftermath of Anne's life in hiding—imprisonment, deportation, genocide—the horrors experienced by around six million Jews.
Anne’s story is also not representative: Only a small percentage of Jews went into hiding. The vast majority who did were betrayed, discovered and killed. Those who survived relied on non-Jews to support and protect them.
Although she was only 13 when she began documenting her wartime experiences, Anne Frank's diary was hardly the work of a naive writer. “I know I can write,” she wrote in April 1944. “but…it remains to be seen whether I really have talent.” An astute author and editor, Anne Frank’s carefully chosen words helped shape her legacy.
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