Anne Frank Hides: Secret Annexe Diary Begins

The Frank family had been preparing their disappearance for months when sixteen-year-old Margot Frank received a call-up notice from the SS on July 5, 1942, ordering her to report for a "work camp" in Germany. Otto Frank accelerated the plan. The next morning, the family left their apartment in Amsterdam s River Quarter, wearing multiple layers of clothing because carrying suitcases would attract attention, and walked through the rain to the secret annex above Otto s pectin and spice company at 263 Prinsengracht. Otto Frank, a German-Jewish businessman who had moved his family to Amsterdam in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution, had been stockpiling food and furnishings in the hidden rooms behind a moveable bookcase for over a year. Four employees — Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and Bep Voskuijl — knew about the hiding place and risked their lives daily to supply the residents with food, news, and human contact. Anne Frank was thirteen years old and had received a red-and-white plaid diary for her birthday three weeks earlier. She began writing on June 12, 1942, addressing her entries to an imaginary friend named Kitty. In the annex, her diary became her primary companion. Over the next two years, she filled the original diary and several additional notebooks with observations that ranged from teenage frustrations about sharing space with adults to sophisticated reflections on human nature, war, and her own identity. Eight people lived in the annex: Otto and Edith Frank, their daughters Margot and Anne, Hermann and Auguste van Pels with their son Peter, and Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist. They could not make noise during business hours, could not look out windows, and could not leave. The confinement lasted 761 days. On August 4, 1944, German police raided the annex after receiving a tip. All eight residents were arrested and deported. Anne and Margot died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945, weeks before British forces liberated the camp. Otto Frank was the sole survivor. Miep Gies had saved Anne s diary, and Otto published it in 1947. Translated into over 70 languages, it became one of the most widely read books in history.