But he never managed to get all the necessary documents together, and the option ran out when the US got involved in the war. At that point, all borders were closed. In the spring of , Otto decided to set up a hiding place in an empty part of his business premises. If necessary, there would be enough room for his own family and for the family of his employee Hermann van Pels, seven people in all. Otto asked four of his closest employees to take care of him and his family if they would have to go into hiding.
All of them agreed. The hiding place was not quite ready when Margot received a call-up on 5 July to report to a labour camp in Nazi Germany. Still, Otto and Edith did not hesitate for a moment: the next morning, they left for Prinsengracht with Margot and Anne. From 6 July onwards, Otto was in hiding in the company building on the Prinsengracht. The Van Pels family followed one week later, and in November , they were joined by Fritz Pfeffer, the eighth person in hiding.
Anne's diary tells us that Otto continued to be concerned with the ins and outs of the company. Whenever business relations from Frankfurt visited, he would lie down in the hiding place with his ear to the floor in order to hear what was being discussed in the office below. Whenever he was not busy with the companies, Otto loved to read Charles Dickens, with a dictionary at hand, according to Anne. Otto felt responsible for the atmosphere in the Secret Annex and mediated in the countless larger and smaller arguments.
Daddy goes about with his lips tightly pursed, when anyone speaks to him, he looks up startled, as is he is afraid he will have to patch up some tricky relationship again. Quite honestly, I sometimes forget who we are quarreling with and with whom we've made it up. He was the leader, the one in charge. The hiding place had been discovered. Otto and the other people in hiding were arrested.
Otto felt guilty when they also took Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler. After a few days in prison, Otto and the others were put on a train to the Westerbork transit camp. They ended up in the prison barracks, and the men and women were separated.
Otto had to work during the day - the kind of work is not known - but in the evening he could be with Edith, Margot, and Anne. After only a few weeks in Westerbork, Otto and the others were put on train travelling to the east.
This was the last train ever to leave Westerbork for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. The prisoners were packed tightly in cattle wagons, without enough food and with only a small barrel for a toilet.
After three days on the train, they arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The men and women were separated on the platform. It was the last time Otto would ever see his wife and children. After the separation on the Auschwitz-Birkenau platform, the men from the Secret Annex stayed together.
The gravel was used for construction projects. Then, he was transferred to the 'Kommando Strassenbau', building roads outside the camp.
When the frost made working outdoors impossible, Otto ended up with less exhausting work: peeling potatoes. He was also helped by other friends in the camp. When at one point, Otto lost hope after he had been beaten, his fellow inmates, with the help of a Dutch doctor, made sure that he was admitted to the sick barracks. When the Soviet troops came closer, the camp command cleared Auschwitz. Those able to walk, had to come along.
In , Margot received a letter demanding that she report to a work camp. As a result, Frank and his family went into hiding in a secret annex just above his office. The Franks, along with four other Jews, spent two years in hiding. During that time, Anne coped with her feelings by keeping a diary. On August 4, , the Gestapo raided the annex. The Frank family was arrested and sent to the Westerbork transit concentration camp, then to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Anne and Margot were later taken to Bergen-Belsen. After Auschwitz was liberated in , Frank discovered that he was the only member of his family to have survived the Holocaust. Months later, Frank's former secretary, Miep Gies , found Anne's diary in the abandoned annex and gave it to Otto. In , he had the journal published under the title The Diary of a Young Girl. Frank remarried, to fellow Jewish survivor Elfriede Fritzi Markovits, in The couple moved to Switzerland, where they would live out the remainder of their years together.
Frank died in Basel, Switzerland, on August 19, We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives.
Anne Frank was a Jewish teenager who went into hiding during the Holocaust, journaling her experiences in the renowned work 'The Diary of Anne Frank. Musician Frank Zappa made more than 60 albums during his career. Anne and Margot Frank were spared immediate death in the Auschwitz gas chambers and instead were sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northern Germany. In February , the Frank sisters died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen; their bodies were thrown into a mass grave. Several weeks later, on April 15, , British forces liberated the camp.
Edith Frank died of starvation at Auschwitz in January Hermann van Pels died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz soon after his arrival there in ; his wife is believed to have likely died at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic in the spring of Peter van Pels died at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria in May Fritz Pfeffer died from illness in late December at the Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany.
Margot Frank also kept a diary, but it was never found. Otto Frank knew that Anne wanted to become an author or journalist, and had hoped her wartime writings would one day be published. Anne had even been inspired to edit her diary for posterity after hearing a March radio broadcast from an exiled Dutch government official who urged the Dutch people to keep journals and letters that would help provide a record of what life was like under the Nazis.
Although U. It is required reading at schools around the globe and has been adapted for the stage and screen. Let me be myself and then I am satisfied. How much you can love! What you can accomplish!
And what your potential is! But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Now, officials from the Anne Frank House in A car pulled up outside a narrow brick building in central Amsterdam, around 10 a.
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