Anne Frank

This biography traces the life of Anne Frank from her birth in Frankfurt in 1929 through her death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945, placing her famous diary in the broader context of her family history, the Nazi persecution of European Jews, and the fates of the people who surrounded her.

Anne was born on June 12, 1929, to Otto and Edith Holländer Frank, a middle-class Jewish couple in Frankfurt, Germany. Her father came from a banking family; her mother from a prosperous Aachen household that ran a metals and scrap business. Anne was a difficult infant, in contrast to her calm older sister, Margot, and she grew into a willful, charming child who demanded attention. Otto was an unusually involved father for the era, inventing moral tales about "Good Paula" and "Bad Paula" to teach his daughters right from wrong. The 1929 stock market crash devastated the family bank, and the resulting economic collapse fueled the rise of the Nazi Party. Otto read passages of Hitler's Mein Kampf and took its threats against Jews seriously.

After Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, anti-Jewish laws were swiftly enacted. Boycotts targeted Jewish businesses, and Margot was forced to sit segregated from non-Jewish pupils at school. Otto's brother-in-law Erich Elias, who worked for Opekta, a company that sold pectin for home jam-making, in Basel, Switzerland, suggested Otto establish a Dutch subsidiary. Otto moved to Amsterdam in mid-1933, and by December the family had settled at 37 Merwedeplein in the River Quarter, a neighborhood soon filling with German-Jewish refugees.

Anne adjusted quickly, befriending fellow German-Jewish immigrant girls Hanneli Goslar and Sanne Ledermann. She entered a Montessori school, where the progressive approach suited her restless temperament. Otto built his business slowly, hiring the Austrian-born Miep Santrouschitz (later Gies) as his secretary and founding a second company, Pectacon, with Hermann van Pels, a German-Jewish refugee with expertise in the meatpacking trade. Meanwhile, conditions for Jews in Germany worsened. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped German Jews of citizenship. During the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, synagogues were burned and thousands of Jewish men were arrested. Edith's brother Walter Holländer was imprisoned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before being released to a Dutch internment camp. The family business in Aachen was forcibly dissolved. Otto explored every avenue of emigration, writing to his old Princeton friend Nathan Straus Jr. for help obtaining American visas, but restrictive immigration policies and the closing of borders left the family trapped.

After Germany invaded Holland on May 10, 1940, the occupation government introduced anti-Jewish measures incrementally. Jews were required to register, banned from public places, and forced to send their children to separate schools. Otto transferred control of his businesses to non-Jewish employees through shell companies. By April 1942, all Jews over six were required to wear a yellow Star of David.

On Anne's 13th birthday, June 12, 1942, she received a red-and-green checkered notebook that became her diary. Three weeks later, a registered letter summoned Margot for labor service at the Westerbork transit camp. The family enacted a plan they had been preparing for months. On the rainy morning of July 6, Margot rode her bicycle to 263 Prinsengracht with Miep, while Otto, Edith, and Anne walked through the city wearing layers of clothing since carrying suitcases would arouse suspicion. They entered the empty rear annex of Otto's office building, a hiding space of approximately 50 square meters secretly furnished by their helpers: Miep, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and Bep Voskuijl, all employees of Otto's companies. Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their teenage son, Peter, joined them a week later, and in November, Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist, became the eighth resident.

For 25 months, the annex residents lived in enforced silence during business hours, dependent on their helpers for food, news, and connection to the outside world. Anne's diary became her closest confidant. She wrote entries as letters to an imaginary friend named "Kitty," chronicling family conflicts, her turbulent relationship with her mother, and her awakening adolescence. She developed a brief romance with Peter van Pels in early 1944. Inspired by a Radio Oranje broadcast, a Dutch government-in-exile radio program that called for wartime diaries to be preserved, Anne began revising her entries, dreaming of becoming a journalist and famous writer. She developed a personal, pantheistic faith, finding God in nature, and maintained her conviction that people are fundamentally good even as danger closed in. Her final diary entry is dated August 1, 1944.

The annex residents lived under constant threat. The warehouse foreman, Willem van Maaren, set traps to confirm his suspicions that people were hiding in the building. Burglars broke in multiple times. On the morning of August 4, 1944, Karl Josef Silberbauer, an officer of the SD (the German security service), and Dutch collaborators raided the building following a telephone tip whose source was never conclusively identified. The eight residents were arrested, along with helpers Kleiman and Kugler. Silberbauer emptied the Franks' strongbox into a briefcase, scattering Anne's diary pages onto the floor. That evening, Miep and Bep returned and gathered the papers, placing them in Miep's desk drawer.

After several days in Amsterdam prisons, the eight were transported to Westerbork. On September 3, 1944, they were loaded onto cattle cars on the last train from Holland to Auschwitz. Upon arrival, 549 of the 1,019 deportees were sent immediately to the gas chambers. All eight annex residents survived the initial selection but were separated by sex. Anne, Edith, and Margot were assigned to the women's camp at Birkenau, the killing center adjacent to the main Auschwitz camp. Hermann van Pels was gassed after an injury left him unable to work. Pfeffer was transferred to Neuengamme concentration camp, where he died in December 1944.

In late October 1944, Anne and Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany, while Edith remained at Auschwitz. Conditions at Bergen-Belsen were catastrophic: overcrowded barracks, virtually no food or water, and rampant typhus. Anne was reunited briefly through a barbed-wire fence with Hanneli Goslar and told her she had lost everything. Edith died at Auschwitz on January 6, 1945. Otto, weakened but alive, was liberated by Soviet forces on January 27. Peter van Pels was forced on a death march from Auschwitz and died at Mauthausen concentration camp around May 5. Margot died at Bergen-Belsen between late February and mid-March 1945. Anne died a few days later, weeks before British troops liberated the camp on April 15.

Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam on June 3, 1945, the sole survivor of the eight annex residents. When he learned of his daughters' deaths, Miep gave him Anne's diary. He edited the entries, relying primarily on Anne's own revisions, and in 1947 the diary was published in Dutch as Het Achterhuis. Editions in German, French, and English followed, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning stage adaptation premiered in 1955. Otto remarried in 1953, moved to Basel, and spent the rest of his life promoting Anne's message of tolerance. He established the Anne Frank Fonds as a charitable foundation in 1963 and died on August 19, 1980, at age 91. The Anne Frank House at 263 Prinsengracht opened as a museum in 1960 and today draws more than a million visitors annually. Investigations into who betrayed the Franks, conducted in 1948 and 1963-64, produced no conclusive results.