Only Otto Frank returned—and published Anne's diary in 1947
Annelies Marie Frank (1929–1945) wrote in hiding under German occupation of the Netherlands. After Westerbork and Auschwitz, she and Margot died at Bergen-Belsen around February or March 1945; secretaries Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl had saved the notebook Otto later issued.
Anne Frank was a German-born Jewish diarist murdered in the Holocaust, posthumously famous for recording everyday life in hiding in occupied Amsterdam. Born 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt to Edith Holländer and Otto Heinrich Frank, with older sister Margot, she moved to Amsterdam in 1934 after Hitler's rise. By May 1940 German occupation trapped the family. Between 1933 and 1939 roughly three hundred thousand Jewish people left Germany; the Franks were part of that exodus. On her thirteenth birthday, 12 June 1942, she received a red-and-white checked autograph book with a small lock and began using it as a diary she addressed as Kitty. When Margot was summoned for a labour camp on 5 July, the family went into hiding the next morning in a three-storey space above the Opekta offices on the Prinsengracht, soon known as the Secret Annex. The Van Pels family joined them on 13 July, and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer arrived that November.
Arrest led through Westerbork to Auschwitz-Birkenau. On 1 November 1944 Anne and Margot were sent on to Bergen-Belsen, where they died a few months later, likely of typhus; Red Cross estimates place the deaths in early 1945. Otto alone survived, returning to Amsterdam to find the diary preserved by employees Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Honoring Anne's wish to be a writer, he published the diary in 1947.
A 22 July 1941 balcony film of a neighbors' wedding is the only known moving image of Anne alive. School years in Amsterdam—Margot excelling despite Dutch, Anne at a Montessori class—precede the sealed-off annex years the diary makes intimate. The private notebook became a world document because one parent lived and two secretaries refused to let paper burn.
Source: Anne Frank
