Anne Frank was one of more than a million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust. She was born Annelies Marie Frank on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, to husband and wife Otto and Edith Frank. For the first five years of her life, Anne lived with her parents and older sister, Margot, in an apartment on the outskirts of Frankfurt. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Otto Frank fled to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where he had business acquaintances. Otto was followed by the rest of the Franks, with Anne being the last member of the family to arrive in February 1934 having previously lived with her grandparents in Aachen.
The Germans occupied Amsterdam in May 1940. In July 1942, the German government and its Dutch allies began gathering Jews throughout the Netherlands at Westerbork, a transit camp near the Dutch city of Assen, not far from the border with Germany. From Westerbork, German officials drove Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor killing centers in German-occupied Poland.
During the first half of July, Anne and her family hid in an apartment that would later hide four Dutch Jews – Hermann, Auguste, Peter van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer. For two years, they lived in the secret attic of the apartment behind the office of the family-owned business on 263 Prinsengracht Street, which Anne calls the Secret Annex in her diary. Otto Frank’s friends and colleagues, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, Jan Gies, and Miep Gies had previously helped set up the hideout and infiltrated food and clothing into the Franks at significant risk of their own lives. On August 4, 1944, the Gestapo (German State Secret Police) discovered the hiding place after being leaked information from an unidentified Dutch caller.
On the same day, SS Gestapo officer Sergeant Karl Silberbauer and his two allied Dutch police arrested Frank’s family; The Gestapo sent them to Westerbork on 8 August. A month later, in September 1944, the SS and police officers placed Frank’s family and four others who had been hiding with them, on a train moving from Westerbork to Auschwitz, a concentration camp complex in German-occupied Poland. Chosen to manual labor because of their young age, Anne and her sister, Margot, were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle, in northern Germany in late October 1944.
The two brothers died of typhus in March 1945, only a few weeks before British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. SS officials also chose Anne’s parents to be manual laborers. Anne’s mother, Edith, died at Auschwitz in early January 1945. Only Anne’s father, Otto, survived the war. Soviet military forces liberated Otto at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.
While in hiding, Anne kept a diary in which she recorded her fears, hopes, and experiences. Found in a secret apartment after the family was arrested, the diary is kept by Miep Gies for Anne, the one who had helped hide the Franks. After the war, the diaries were published in multiple languages and used in thousands of high school and high school curricula in Europe and America. Anne Frank has become a symbol of the lost hope of the children who died in the Holocaust.