CHAPTER THIRTY

Afterword

On the morning of 4 August 1944, a car arrived at 263 Prinsengracht, the address of the Secret Annexe. German and Dutch police arrested the eight people who were hiding in the Annexe. Somebody must have told the authorities that they were hiding there. They also arrested two of their helpers, Mr Kugler and Mr Kleiman. Miep and Bep were not arrested. The police took all the money and anything valuable that they could find in the Annexe. Miep later found Anne’s diary in the building and kept it safely until after the war.

The police took Kugler and Kleiman to a prison in Amsterdam. On 11 September 1944 they were sent to a concentration camp in Amersfoot, also in Holland. Because Kleiman was ill, he was allowed to go free on 18 September. He lived in Amsterdam until he died in 1959.

Kugler later escaped, and he went to live in Canada, where he died in 1989.

Bep’s real name was Elisabeth Voskujil Wijk, and she died in Amsterdam in 1983.

Miep Santrouschicz Gies is still living in Amsterdam, but her husband Jan died in 1993.

The eight people from the Annexe were first taken to a prison in Amsterdam. Then they were sent to Auschwitz, the concentration camp in Poland.

It seems that Mr van Daan died by gas at Auschwitz, and his wife was taken to several more concentration camps. She died in a concentration camp, though nobody knows exactly how. On 16 January 1945, Peter van Daan had to go on the terrible prisoners’ walk from Auschwitz to Mauthausen in Austria, where he died on 5 May 1945. He died only three days before the Allies got to the camp.

Albert Dussel died on 20 December 1944 in the Neuen Gamme concentration camp.

Edith Frank, Anne’s mother, died in the Auschwitz concentration camp on 6 January 1945, too tired and too hungry to live any longer.

Margot and Anne Frank were taken from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Hanover, in Germany. A terrible illness attacked the prisoners there. They both died in the winter of 1944-5. Anne must have died in late February or early March. All the bodies of the prisoners were thrown together. The British army arrived at the camp on 12 April 1945.

Otto Frank was the only one of the eight still alive. After Russian soldiers reached Auschwitz, he was finally taken back to Amsterdam. In 1953 he moved to Switzerland, married again, and lived there until his death in 1980. He spent the rest of his life trying to share the message of his daughter’s diary with the rest of the world.