On August 4, 1944, the carefully maintained sanctuary that had sheltered Anne Frank and seven other Jewish individuals for over two years was shattered. German Security Police, accompanied by Dutch police officers, stormed the Secret Annex at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, arresting Anne, her parents Otto and Edith, her sister Margot, the van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer. This devastating moment marked the end of their remarkable period in hiding and would ultimately lead to one of history's most powerful and enduring testimonies of the Holocaust.
The arrest came just three months before the liberation of Amsterdam, making it all the more tragic. Someone had betrayed their location to the authorities, though the identity of the informant remains a subject of investigation and debate to this day. What followed would be a journey through Nazi concentration camps that would claim the lives of all but one of the Secret Annex's inhabitants.
Two Years of Concealment
The Frank family had gone into hiding in July 1942, when Margot received a call-up notice for a German labor camp. Otto Frank, who had prepared the Secret Annex as a hiding place behind his business, moved his family into the concealed rooms along with Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their teenage son Peter. Later, Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and friend of the family, joined them as the eighth resident.
For 25 months, these eight individuals lived in cramped quarters, dependent entirely on a small group of helpers including Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, Bep Voskuijl, and Miep Gies. They survived on rations, lived in constant fear of discovery, and maintained absolute silence during business hours. During this time, Anne chronicled their experiences in her now-famous diary, creating an intimate portrait of life in hiding that would later touch millions of readers worldwide.
The Final Journey
Following their arrest, the eight inhabitants of the Secret Annex were first taken to Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, where they spent a month before being placed on what would be the final transport to Auschwitz concentration camp. The journey in a cattle car took three days, during which 1,019 people were packed into the train without adequate food, water, or sanitation.
At Auschwitz, the men and women were separated. Otto Frank would be the only one of the eight to survive the war. Anne and Margot were later transported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died of typhus in early 1945, just weeks before the camp's liberation by British forces.
A Legacy Preserved
The tragedy of the Secret Annex arrests took on profound historical significance when Miep Gies, one of the family's helpers, retrieved Anne's diary from the hiding place after the arrest. She preserved it throughout the war and returned it to Otto Frank upon his return from the camps. Otto's decision to publish Anne's diary fulfilled her dream of becoming a writer and gave voice to the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.