A teenager, a hidden room and a diary that would move the world
It was the moment that the eight occupants of the secret apartment built inside an Amsterdam warehouse building had been dreading.
On the morning of August 4, 1944, Gestapo officers stormed the secret annexe and arrested 15-year-old Anne Frank, her older sister Margot and her parents Otto and Edith, along with another family and a friend.
The arrests brought to an abrupt end the Frank family’s two years in hiding, during which time the teenager had written her now world-famous diary – and ultimately led to her death in a Nazi concentration camp.
But who betrayed the family to the Nazis has never been proved.
Anne was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in June 1929 but she lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam having moved there with her family at the age of four when Adolf Hitler gained control over Germany.
By May 1940, the Franks were trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands.
As persecution of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the Franks went into hiding in secret rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Anne’s father had a business.
They hid there for two years and one month, helped by four members of staff who brought them food and news from the outside world. During that time Anne kept a diary, writing in it regularly about her relationships with other members of her family and the differences in their personalities, but also her belief in God and how she defined human nature. After the Gestapo raid, the four Dutch helpers were also arrested, with two being sent to a prison camp.
Two others, including Otto Frank’s secretary Miep Gies, were questioned but released. Gies returned to the annexe and gathered up the family’s belongings, including Anne’s diary.
In September the group was deported to Auschwitz, in a gruelling three-day rail journey. There, Otto Frank was separated from his family.
Of the 1,019 passengers, 549 – including all children younger than 15 – were sent directly to the gas chambers. Anne was one of the youngest to be spared.
By day, the women were used as slave labour and Anne was forced to haul rocks and dig rolls of sod; by night, they were crammed into overcrowded barracks.
In October Anne and Margot were selected to be sent to the Bergen-belsen concentration camp. Edith was left behind and died of starvation.
In early 1945 the camp was hit by a typhus epidemic. Due to the chaotic conditions there it is not known exactly when or how Anne or Margot died but it is believed they fell victim to typhus.
Gena Turgel, a survivor of Bergen Belsen, said: “Her bed was around the corner from me. She was delirious, terrible, burning up.”
Otto Frank was the only family member to survive. He returned to Amsterdam after the war, where Miep Gies gave him Anne’s diary.
He later commented: “For me it was a revelation. I had no idea of the depth of her thoughts and feelings...she had kept all these feelings to herself.”
Noting her repeated wish to be an author, Frank had it published in the Netherlands in 1947.
It has since been translated into more than 70 languages.