"She is perhaps Hitler's best-known victim." "Her book has sold more than 25 million copies and has been translated into at least 55 languages." "She's become a symbol of 10 million souls murdered by the Nazis Jews and non-Jews and, in particular, the one and a half million innocent children." "She was just 15 when she died." "A miserable and lonely death in a concentration camp in Germany." "Yet she is remembered for her faith in humanity." "This is the story of the life and legacy of Anne Frank." "In Amsterdam, some of the remnants of a once-thriving Jewish community." "Every person in this congregation, like Jews throughout Europe has a story of their own of persecution, murder, fear or betrayal." "The rabbi spent the first 2 years of his life in hiding sheltered by a Christian family." "But one girl reaches beyond all those memories." "Hers is not just a Holocaust story, for the voice of Anne Frank stands as a warning to those who discriminate on the basis of color, culture or creed." "Her message is as fresh today as it was 50 years ago." "The notorious Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew." "Distorted images portraying an Aryan nightmare of the Jewish threat to European civilization." "And this, the family Frank:" "Prosperous, cultivated, sophisticated and integrated." "In fact, they were a German family." "German to the core." "The antithesis of ghetto Jews." "Anne's father, Otto, was an officer in the German army in the first World War." "The family had lived in and around Frankfurt for generations." "But Otto had traveled the world, even working in Macy's store in New York where a college friend, Nathan Straus, was the owner's son." "In 1925, the 36-year-old Otto married Edith Hollander a 25-year-old Jewish girl from Aachen, Germany near the Dutch border." "They honeymooned in Italy." "Their first daughter, Margot, followed 9 months later and their second, Annelies, better known as Anne, in June 1929." "It was a good life in Frankfurt in those early years." "One could almost forget the long shadow of National Socialism." "But beneath the idyllic surface far removed from the children's world, turmoil." "DANGER JEWS" "Their landlord turned out to be a Nazi party member." "And in March 1931, they moved." "The bank owned by the family also had serious problems resulting in its complete collapse in 1933 caused by Otto's brother being the victim of a fraud and the effects of the Depression, particularly acute in Germany." "And, of course, the threat of the gathering storm." "On the streets at the rallies..." "ONE RACE ONE NATION ...and finally in January 1933 the ballot box." "ONE LEADER" "For it is often forgotten that Hitler gained power in a democratic election." "For the Franks, the German dream was over." "Some of the family had moved to Switzerland." "Otto chose to try his luck in Holland where he had prior business connections." "In autumn 1933, the family settled here in Merwedeplein a modern housing development in South Amsterdam." "They established a settled and full existence amongst German refugees and Dutch neighbors." "We moved into the same neighborhood as the Frank family." "Many other refugees moved there." "And so there was a little bit of a German-Jewish enclave by no means a ghetto, but just a little enclave." "Quite often parents would speak German in the street which annoyed us children terribly, of course." "Hanneli Goslar" "My father was a deputy minister in the interior." "And he was the chief of the press in Germany." "He had really a very high position." "And he immediately fled when the whole government stepped down." "And, okay, we went to England before but he didn't find a job where he didn't have to work Shabbat." "And so we stopped here in Merwedeplein." "Life for Jewish refugees as I experienced it as a young child, in a way had its charms." "What I particularly enjoyed was that we adapted faster than our parents." "Our parents had to turn to us and ask us what's done in this country." "And I found this tremendously democratizing." "I really enjoyed that part very much." "The Franks formed an active social life amongst the other refugee families." "For visitors, Anne's behavior made the Sunday gatherings something of an ordeal." "She was just what you could call naughty." "She had to sit on a table where everything was very beautiful in a beautiful dress and have her chocolate not spoil it." "Isa Baschwitz" "She just didn't want to." "She got up and she made fuss, and she drew attention." "And then she grew angry." "And that angriness that was the problem between the parents." "Mother Frank said, "You sit down. "" "And Father Frank said:" ""Leave the child alone." "She's so small and she's so little. "" "So she was allowed to do the things she wanted." "And that happened every time." "Every time that girl was naughty was impertinent, later on, really impertinent." "I remember very strongly that Mr. Frank was seen as an ideal daddy, that he was the daddy because he was so much involved in his girls' education." "He fixed his wife breakfast on Sunday morning and brought it to her bedside which was unheard of in our circles." "So that news made the round:" ""Mr. Frank does this for his wife!" "How great. "" "Otto Frank interviewed in 1979" "We left Germany in 1933 because I didn't want to educate my children with blinkers." "They were not allowed to see Christian friends anymore." "In Holland, it was different." "Upon her arrival in Amsterdam the 4-year-old Anne was sent to the Montessori school where Lies Goslar became her best friend." "Years later, in her diary, Anne wrote this of Lies:" ""Hanneli Goslar, or Lies, as she's called at school, is a bit strange." "She's usually shy outspoken at home but reserved around other people." "She blabs whatever you tell her to her mother." "But she says what she thinks." "And lately, I've come to appreciate her a great deal. "" "Anne and Lies' friendship had begun on their very first day at school." "Exactly in opposite of the door I saw the back of Anne, and she was ringing these little bells." "And she turned around, and she saw me, I saw her, and hop we run each into the arms of another." "I think my mother went away." "I didn't look at her anymore." "And this was the first day." "Since then we were together really till the end." "Of the two sisters, I was really more impressed with Margot than with Anne for rather obvious reasons." "Margot was a year and a half older than I am, so she was a model." "She was ladylike." "She was always composed." "She always did her homework." "She was just the ideal young lady." "I was a tomboy, so I always thought it would be great to be like Margot." "Anne was very lively, and I didn't need any model for that." "I was lively myself." "Besides, she was younger." "You never model yourself after a younger child." "So I know her- All the time." "I could do that just as well." "I will start with the sentence my mother said always." "My mother said, "God knows everything." "Anne knows everything better. "" "This describes Anne, you understand?" "I don't know in English..." "She knew everything better." "Anne was" " In America you say "spicy. " A spicy girl." "She always was friendly with the boys." "The boys liked her." "The girls liked her." "She also always was in the center of the thing." "Then she had something I never saw, not before and not afterwards." "She could take out the socket out of the shoulder and she would sit, and everybody looked." "And then she made out, and knock, knock, knock." "You have to be very careful." "You can end up with an orthopedic doctor." "She liked it, and everybody was looking at her." "And then she was happy." "When he came to Holland, Otto Frank set up the Opekta Company a Dutch subsidiary of a German concern, selling pectin a substance used in making jam." "The progressive Otto had a film produced to promote the product." "In the early days, he had four key colleagues, all non-Jews." "One of those employees was an Austrian who'd grown up in Holland." "Miep Gies." "It was a very fine place to work because we understand all the people in the office." "We were very close, was friendly together." "He was always our boss but also our father." "We can go to Mr. Frank with all our troubles and sorrow." "The office boy and general helper from 1933 until 1939 was Henk van Beersekamp." "Mrs. Frank was different from Otto Frank." "Otto Frank was a familiar, friendly man who treated me as an equal and with kindness." "Mrs. Frank was a bit well, maybe she had been accustomed to better things in life in Germany." "I don't know." "Margot was a bit subdued but Anne was a dear." "I had lots of fun with her because we would make funny faces which she found amusing." "I remember one time I did this:" "And she always split her sides with laughter." "And when I did that, her tongue would move to and fro." "But it was fun." "She was a great girl." "Dutch Nazis putting on a show in Amsterdam in 1938." "Though Hitler had infiltrated the police, the civil service even the prime minister in the years before the war, Holland was generally good to its Jewish refugees from Germany." "Despite these scenes of Fascist collaborators the Dutch and German Jews believed that they would be safe in Holland far from the Führer in their former homeland." "Few, very few, tried to leave for safer shores." "And Otto and his family were not amongst them." "Sometimes I said to Mr. Frank:" ""You must go out of the Netherlands." "It will be danger for you. "" "Miep Gies" ""No," said he." ""In the first World War, the German came not here in the Netherlands." "So they come the second time, also not. "" "And I said to him, "You must go to America. "" ""No, I stay here because I love the Netherlands. "" "The faith of Otto Frank and thousands like him was catastrophically misplaced." "By May 1940, Hitler had conquered almost all of Europe." "Austria, Poland, Norway, Denmark Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and most of France had fallen to Germany's air force and storm troops." "Europe's low countries remained as a tantalizing morsel to be swallowed whole." "Then by the 14th of May, 1940, it was all over." "Five days after the Germans had finally smashed through Holland's borders, the Dutch capitulated." "In Amsterdam, Hitler's victory was greeted with black humor." "My father made himself look like Hitler." "It was wonderful how he did it." "Here was the hair and the black mustache." "The Franks lived next door, and he would ring at the door and come in." "I remember them all, you know, the first moment." "They were very frightened what happened." "If you could think Hitler didn't come to their house." "But it was very funny how everybody was frightened at the moment till they till they saw who it was and what happened." "What happened to your father?" "He died in Bergen-Belsen." "The German vice tightened gradually." "First they conducted a hearts-and-minds campaign to win over the Dutch their Aryan brothers." "THANK ADOLF HITLER" "JEWISH QUARTER" "For the Jews, it was another story as their freedom was gradually restricted by a never-ending series of anti-Jewish decrees already familiar in Germany and other conquered territories." "JEWS prohibited" "By 1942 no area of Jewish life was excluded from German control." "Jews Prohibited By Law" "Everything that was fun in life was forbidden." "We were not allowed to go anymore to a park or to a swimming pool." "We were not allowed to go to shops." "Only to Jewish shops and only between 3 and 5." "8:00 in the evening you had to be at home." "You had to wear the star." "You had to have something with you that would look if you are Jewish or not even if you had the star." "Then things were- You were frightened." "You just wouldn't go out." "To school and home, and that's it, yes." "How one of the friends of Anne said:" ""Everything I did, I was afraid it is forbidden. "" "Well, the effect of these restrictions was, I think, mainly because it came inch by inch, very slowly." ""If that's all, we can bear it. "" "We always had a stiff upper lip, and we tried to make the best of it." "If you can't go to public school anymore there are good Jewish teachers." "If you can't go to concerts, which was important in my family there are fine Jewish musicians, so we make music at home." "So we always tried to put the best spin on whatever happened." "And that way, I think, we tried to ward off thinking about how we were being more restricted and what was going to be sure to come afterwards." "Otto Frank, always the perfect father rented movies to show the girls on the living room wall." "Rin Tin Tin was a particular favorite with Anne." "She and her friend Jacqueline van Maarsen created a cinema of their own." "Together we made little cards to get in." "Of course, everybody could come in, but we wanted to make it look real by making these little tickets." ""Jacqueline van Maarsen is invited on Sunday, the 1st of March with Anne Frank, Merwedeplein 37 11:00 for a movie." "Without this card, no entrance." "Please inform in time." "Row 2." "Seat 2."" "THE LIGHTHOUSE BY THE SEA WITH RIN TIN TIN" "This film supplied the entertainment for Anne and her friends when they celebrated her 13th birthday her last in freedom." "Her prized gift that 13th birthday on Friday, the 12th of June, 1942 was her diary a present she had bought with her father a few days before." "From the beginning, Anne addressed her diary as a special friend with whom she would conduct a secret correspondence." "Her first entry was this:" ""I hope I will be able to confide everything to you as I have never been able to confide in anyone." "And I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support. "" "Her early diary jottings were typical of a 13-year-old:" "Gossip about school friends, jokes and a record of her unextraordinary daily life together with photos and other scraps." "In the years that followed, she also shared her most intimate secrets including her increasing interest in the development of her body and in sex." "What interested Anne very much was sexual behavior and she wanted to know what it was all about." "Jacqueline "Jopie" van Maarsen" "And she asked her father about it." "I knew much more than she did because I had my sister, who told me everything." "So I thought, "Well, I'm not going to enlighten you altogether." "You just ask your father. "" "At the time, Anne's body was not changing yet." "And I think that she was curious because she had some little..." "She used a bra from Margot with cotton wool in it to show a bit of breast." "And I did not need that kind of thing and she was interested to see exactly..." "While Anne was innocently absorbed with her developing body Otto Frank was mindful that if the Nazi measures against Jews continued to their inevitable conclusion he and his family would need to take precautions to protect themselves." "For a year, he had been secretly preparing a hiding place for them all together with his German business associate Hermann van Pels van Pels' wife, Auguste, and son, Peter." "It was to be in several rooms behind the company offices on Prinsengracht in central Amsterdam." "Laboriously, and unknown to all but the innermost circle Otto accumulated furniture, cooking implements bedding and clothes." "At the Frank home, two and a half miles away in Merwedeplein Sunday, the 5th of July, 1942, was the day that everyone had dreaded had hoped against hope would never come." "That Sunday, the Germans delivered this innocuous document by registered mail to several thousand Jews, the majority of them of German extraction aged between 15 and 40." "They were to report within 9 days to be transported to a labor camp in Germany." "Margot Frank was one of them throwing her family, like so many, into crisis." "The agonies at that moment were when you had some youngsters saying:" ""Labor won't floor me." "I'm strong." "I can do whatever's asked of me." "I'm going and that's it. "" "And the parents would say, "No, stay." "It's going to be the end of your life. "" "So you saw the family in tension." "Then you had other families where a youngster would say:" ""I don't want to go." "I'm scared." "What will happen?" The parents would say:" ""You must go." "Remember, grandmother lives with us and the baby." "If you don't go, we'll be punished. " And you saw the families really torn asunder by these events." "And that was terrible." "Nine years after fleeing Germany, the Franks were on the run again." "By 7:30 on Monday, the 6th of July, 1942 the whole family had disappeared leaving behind an elaborate false trail indicating they had fled to Switzerland." "We came here and the kitchen was not..." "The kitchen was just left like it was with everything dirty in the sink." "I went into her room, and I saw her bed not made." "And the shoes that she loved, she'd just received them for the summer were near the bed." "I came here, you see." "I went up, and I am ringing and ringing and ringing and nobody opens." "And at the end somebody opened." "It was a tenant." "Mr. Goudschmidt." "He had the room at the roof in the Frank apartment." "He looked at me as if he'd never seen me before." "And I didn't know what happened." "He said, "What do you want?"" ""I come to play as usual. " And he said:" ""Yes, but don't you know?" "The Frank family left for Switzerland. "" "Miep Gies had been given the responsibility of getting Margot who was now in flight from the Germans, to the hiding place." "I took Margot by bicycle." "Monday morning, very raining." "And that was good for us because the German came not on street." "And I came with her to the Prinsengracht 263 go up with her." "She was very..." "Upset?" "Yes." "She was very upset." "I saw it." "And when I was standing with her in front of the hiding place I was afraid that she would fall down." "And what could I do with her?" "I opened the door and put her in." "Despite Otto's carefully laid plans on their first day there, the family was surrounded by chaos." "When I come there, it was terrible." "Nothing was okay." "And Mrs. Frank and Margot were sitting down on the bed." "They could not do anything." "There was..." "They couldn't accept this situation." "But Anne and Mr. Frank were busy, very busy." "I ask Mrs. Frank, "Can I do something for you?"" ""No," said Mrs. Frank." ""For today, I have all the things. "" "And then I went down." "But the next day, when I came, all was okay." "So Anne and Mr. Frank-?" "Were busy the whole day." "Was this typical of the family?" "Yes." "That was typical for the family." "Now the family was dependent on Otto Frank's four employees who had volunteered to help them survive." "Johannes Kleiman and Viktor Kugler supplied Anne and Margot with school books and other reading matter at the same time, ensuring the Opekta Company continued to function even producing record profits that could be used to keep everyone alive." "Miep Gies and her assistant, the 23-year-old typist, Bep Voskuijl had the dangerous task of supplying the residents of the annex with food purchased on the black market or with forged or stolen ration books." "In one of her first diary entries in hiding Anne described her new home to her imaginary friend:" ""Thursday, July 9, 1942." "Dear Kitty:" "Our secret annex is at the back of the building." "There's just one small step in front of the door, and then you're inside." "Straight ahead of you is a steep flight of stairs." "To the left is a narrow hallway opening onto a room that serves as the Frank family's living room and bedroom." "Next door is a smaller room:" "The bedroom and study of the two young ladies of the family." "To the right of the stairs is a windowless washroom with a sink." "The door in the corner leads to the toilet and another one to Margot's and my room." "If you go up the stairs and open the door at the top you're surprised to see such a light and spacious room in an old canal house like this." "It contains a stove and a sink." "This will be the kitchen and bedroom for Mr. and Mrs. van Pels as well as the general living room, dining room and study for us all." "A tiny side room is to be Peter van Pels' bedroom." "Then just as in the front part of the building there's an attic and a loft. "" "As they settled into their confinement, the chimes of the Westerkerk clock seemed to act as a constant reminder of the world they had left behind them." "Before long, the entrance to the hiding place was disguised as a bookcase." "But in every respect, what lay behind those innocuous files was untypical of the shelter provided to other Jews." "It was relatively spacious, within a city." "There were people outside dedicated to helping and protecting them." "Most families were torn apart but here, all four of the Franks could stay together." "A week later, they were joined by their friends the van Pelses." "Miep Gies visited each day." "When I came here from this door in the middle was standing the table with the chairs." "All the people, seven people were standing in the line here." "Did not say any word. ...but waited for me to begin." "It was always an awful moment for me because I felt the dependence from these people of us, the helpers." "Except Anne." "Anne was in the front." "She asked, "Hello, Miep, what is the news?"" "In those early months, Anne was desperately lonely and always hoping for news of her friends." "She even invented a correspondence with one of them." ""September 25, 1942." "Dear Jacqueline:" "I'm writing this letter in order to bid you goodbye." "I can't write to everyone, and that's why I'm just writing to you." "I'd be grateful if you'd be really nice and keep up a secret correspondence with me." "All inquiries to Mrs. Gies." "I hope we'll meet again soon but it probably won't be before the end of the war." "Well, then, Jackie, I hope things go well with you and that I hear from you soon." "Your best friend, Anne." "P. S.:" "I hope that we'll always stay best friends until we meet again." "Bye. "" "I think that she wrote it immediately after she went into hiding." "And afterwards, at that moment in September, she wrote it down." "She invented in that my answer to her." "And then she wrote a second letter in answer to this invented letter." "And she must have been very lonely that she invented these letters." "Anne also wrote a long fantasy in which she imagined living with her cousin in the safety of Switzerland." "When I think that when Anne wrote about Switzerland and about me..." "Bernd Elias ...it must have been a painful thought to her to realize that she was like a bird in a cage and we, over here in Switzerland were free to do anything we wanted to do." "And all her dreams were caged in." "And we, the boys, her cousins could fulfill everything she was dreaming of." "It must have been a very, very hard thing for her." "In the diary, she even designs a skating dress..." "... so she can be your skating partner." "Yes." "Yes, when I saw that the first time it really overwhelmed me." "It made me cry, to be very honest." "Especially then that I knew she was not alive anymore when I saw it." "I would have loved to go skating with her." "Anne also addressed her diary entries to a circle of imaginary friends all characters from a well-known series of books for adolescent girls." "Eventually, she settled on one friend, Kitty as her diary correspondent." "Anne was always a very curious child." "When I was upstairs and went away she'd always wait till the last to speak with me." "And then she had me." "And she asked everything what happened outside." "And I told her the truth." "The terrible truth." ""November 19, 1942." "Dearest Kitty:" "Countless friends and acquaintances have been taken off to a dreadful fate." "Night after night, green and gray military vehicles cruise the streets." "In the evenings, when it's dark I often see long lines of good, innocent people accompanied by crying children, walking on and on." "No one is spared." "The sick, the elderly, children babies and pregnant women all are marched to their death." "I get frightened when I think of close friends who are now at the mercy of the cruelest monsters to stalk the earth." "And all because they're Jews. "" "Bloeme Evers-Emden Margot's classmate" "At the beginning of the class of '41, we had about 50 children." "The deportations began in July '42." "And then from 50 children all the time, children disappeared." "When you came in your class, you said:" ""That child's missing and that one and that one. "" "You did hope they were ill." "But you knew that they were round up or maybe they were hidden." "At the end of the school year in April '43 there were three children left two boys and I." "And we did our final examination together." "The second part of the final examination, I was alone." "It was very sad." "Very difficult." "From 50 children, one remained at the end of the year?" "While the roundups of their friends continued outside in their hiding place, Anne and the others tried to establish a kind of normality." ""Dear Kitty:" "Up to now, our bedroom with its blank walls was very bare." "Thanks to Father, who brought my entire post card and movie star collection here beforehand and to a brush and a pot of glue I was able to plaster the walls with pictures. "" "We were both collecting pictures from the children of the queen." "Here you see Elizabeth, today Queen Elizabeth and her sister Margaret." "And I also was collecting, and we would change together." "We had from Belgium..." "From all the queens in the world, we would change pictures." "I liked it very much." "Anne was also collecting from film stars." "This I wasn't interested in at all." "I only remember she had Deanna Durbin." "This one." "This is the only one I remember from then." "I never saw a film." "I don't remember if Anne saw films." "We went to see Shirley Temple films." "And here in Amsterdam, we had a cinema, Cineac." "There you could see one hour a little film and news." "And then it started." "Over there, we would go very often." "Four months after going into hiding, an 8th person joined the annex a 54-year-old German dentist, Fritz Pfeffer." "Margot slept on a folding bed with her parents." "And Anne had to share her room with the newcomer." "Look, Mr. Pfeffer was my dentist." "And Mr. Pfeffer asked me always:" ""Miep, do you have a place for me?"" "Then I went next day in the hiding place and tell it to Mr. Frank and the other peoples." "They listened to me." "Next day, Mr. Frank said:" ""Miep, where seven people can eat can eight also eat. "" "Pfeffer moved into Anne's bedroom..." "While no one would now lack treatment of their cavities relations between the 54-year-old disciplinarian and the free spirit in her early teens were inevitably stormy." "On this corner it was the desk for Anne and Pfeffer." "There this..." "This gave sometimes troubles with Anne." "Anne was standing on her rights." "From so till so is her time." "But I believe Mr. Pfeffer did not see the importance of a diary for a little child." ""Him and his lies." "I'll smack his ugly mug so hard, he'll go bouncing off the wall." "Anyone who is so petty and pedantic at the age of 54 was born that way and is never going to change. "" "What Anne never knew was that Fritz Pfeffer had a son whom he had raised as a single parent in Germany until sending him to England after Kristallnacht in 1938." "A few weeks later, Pfeffer himself fled to Amsterdam with his fiancee, Charlotte." "But his 11-year-old son never saw his father again." "Peter Pepper Fritz Pfeffer's son" "We're talking about a girl under very difficult circumstances who first of all decided that my father was not a nice man." "Therefore, she called him Dr. Dussel, which in English is "idiot. "" "As far as my point of view retrospectively to the age of 11 and below there's a very large inaccuracy." "First of all, my father, although being a very strict man was a very kind man." "What other people don't recognize is his love of life, his love of freedom." "My father was a sportsman." "He loved to row." "He loved to ride horses." "He liked to climb mountains." "So if you take a man who's always been active all his life and then in flight he ends up here it's like caging a bird." "Weekly, Mrs. Miep Gies would bring a package containing letters and other personal messages from Charlotte Karletta." "And weekly, she would take a letter from him to her." "What do you feel now about what that may have meant for your father?" "What it meant for my father is that it is a thin lifeline." "A thin lifeline that was the only hope of expression and relationship." "Because with Charlotte's letters to him expressing her love, her feelings her news, whatever it was in those letters is the only thing where my father would have the semblance of mental health." "Because you're a prisoner of your own mind." "For the first time, Fritz Pfeffer's son meets his father's protector." "Mr. Pfeffer." "How do you do?" "Fine." "I was a very good friend of your father." "Do you understand German?" "I came into contact with him every day." "He was my dentist, exceptionally good." "He asked me if I could help him find a place, and so I helped him." "Unbelievable." "Nice to meet you." "He was a lovely, lovely man." "Do you speak English?" "Very bad." "Shall we try German?" "Yes, if that's okay, it would be better." "What would you like to know?" "I just want to say two words." "Many thanks." "Two months after this meeting, Peter Pepper died of cancer." "If Anne reserved her special venom for Fritz Pfeffer with the claustrophobia of the months in hiding that turned into years all the adults at one time or another were subjected to the fury of her pen." ""September 27, 1942." "Some people, like the van Pelses, take delight not only in raising their own children but in helping others raise theirs." "Margot doesn't need it since she is naturally good kind and clever, perfection itself." "But I seem to have enough mischief for the two of us." "More than once, the air's been filled with the van Pels' admonitions and my saucy replies." "They tell me I should talk less, mind my own business and be more modest." "But I seem doomed to failure. "" "Otto, the ever-indulgent father, was frequently called in to act as a peacemaker between Anne and the others." "Her adoration of him was matched only by her increasing problems with her mother." ""I cling to Father because my contempt of Mother is growing daily." "And it is only through him that I'm able to retain the last ounce of family feeling I have left." "I don't know how I should act." "I can't very well confront her with her carelessness, her sarcasm and her hard-heartedness." "Yet I can't continue to take the blame for everything." "I'm the opposite of Mother, so of course we clash." "She's not a mother to me." "I have to mother myself." "I'm charting my own course and will see where it leads me. "" "Mrs. Frank was the most depressed of all the people." "Sometimes when I go out of the hiding place the staircase downstairs she went with me till the door." "I did not understand that." "What did she want of me?" "And once again, I go with her in her sleeping room and she closed the door, and then she said to me:" ""Miep I am so afraid. "" "She told me all her troubles." "But what could I do?" "I didn't say anything because I was in the same position as she." "While Anne and her mother feuded in the second year, she developed a strong passion for Peter van Pels the 17-year-old boy with whom she shared her caged existence." "They spent hours together in the loft chatting or simply staring out the window at the chestnut tree." ""Sunday, March 19, 1944." "I have the feeling that Peter and I share a secret." "When he looks at me with those eyes, with that smile and with that wink it's as if a light goes on inside me." "I hope things stay like this and we'll have many, many more happy hours together." "Your grateful and happy Anne. "" "Peter van Pels was a blue-eyed boy with very little intellectual capacity." "I didn't know him nearly as well as I knew Anne." "But he once came to our house when we were reading the classics and he was so singularly bewildered by it that I remember thinking:" ""My goodness, he doesn't know a thing!"" "The relationship with Peter waxed and then waned." "They cuddled and kissed, but as she noted in her diary Anne gradually became dissatisfied with his inability to express his feelings." "The pressures of confinement created and then crushed their adolescent love affair." "In the secret annex, the claustrophobia was stifling." "The radio, broadcasting from England was an essential lifeline to news from the outside world." "Every Allied victory brought hope, every defeat, gloom." "Arguments over food blew up into major rows." "And then always the ever-present threat of discovery." "The windows had to be covered by blinds, even in the heat of summer." "The toilet could only be used outside office hours." "No one could walk in shoes on the lower floor for fear that the workers in the warehouse below would hear." "And always the question, "Would they be betrayed or would they betray themselves by some inadvertent error?"" "To add to everyone's fears the warehouse and offices under their hiding place were burgled a few times." "My father had the maintenance of the building, the daily maintenance." "Hans Wijnberg" "Later I recognized that he must have been the carpenter that's repairing the door which is opened by the burglary in the book, in Anne Frank's diary." "I think there were two burglaries, weren't there?" "Yeah." "The other one was me." "What were you after?" "I think it's a mixture of adventure and spices." "We found some spices." "But we had to move out because we recognized people living in the house because they made a mistake upstairs." "That's what I later realized." "I didn't know it was the Frank family." "We did not know." "We were not supposed to know who was living in a house because of what I explained earlier." "You didn't speak about people living somewhere." "So we heard them flushing the toilet so we moved out because that was a sign people were upstairs." "And well, we were not there with an agreement of anybody." ""Wednesday, March 29, 1944." "Dearest Kitty:" "Mr. Bolkestein, the cabinet minister speaking on the Dutch broadcast from London said that after the war, a collection would be made of diaries and letters dealing with the war." "Of course, everyone pounced on my diary." "Imagine how interesting it would be if I published a novel about the secret annex." "The title alone would make people think it was a detective story." "Seriously though, 10 years after the war people would find it very amusing to read how we lived what we ate and what we talked about as Jews in hiding. "" "For 6 weeks, Anne thought constantly about the message from London." "Then she made up her mind." "She had wanted to be a journalist, a famous writer, to travel the world see Paris and Hollywood." "This was her opportunity." "Starting in the middle of May 1944 she began to furiously rewrite her whole diary from the first entry with a view to future publication at the same time as keeping up her regular diary entries." ""Tuesday, June 6, 1944." "Dearest Kitty:" "'This is D-day, ' the BBC announced at 12." "'This is the day." "The invasion has begun. '" "A huge commotion in the annex." "Is this really the beginning of the long-awaited liberation?" "The liberation we've all talked so much about which still seems too good, too much of a fairy tale ever to come true?" "Will this year, 1944, bring us victory?" "We don't know yet." "But where there's hope, there's life." "It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again." "The best part of the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are on the way." "Those terrible Germans have oppressed and threatened us for so long that the thought of friends and salvation means everything to us." "Maybe, Margot says I can even go back to school in October or September. "" "With the Allies advancing, the spirits in the annex soared." "Otto Frank kept a map tracking every advance of the British and American troops." "But the odds were stacked against those in the hiding place." "Of the 25,000 Jews who hid from the Nazis in Holland during WWII some 8 to 9 thousand were discovered by the Germans or betrayed by their Dutch hosts." "Many of the Franks' neighbors, some of whom were known Nazi sympathizers knew there was something going on in the back house at 263 Prinsengracht." "Anyone could've called the authorities to collect the reward for betraying Jews in hiding." "Anne herself chronicled many acts of carelessness that could've led to the suspicion that could easily lead on to betrayal." "It has never been proved how they were betrayed but on a sunny summer morning in 1944 two years after they first stepped behind their secret door their world collapsed." "It was the 4th of August 1944." "You know, it was always my task to go first up in the hiding place." "Also this day." "I go up, took my shopping list talked with the people and came down." "After an hour, I was working in the office." "Bep in front of me, Koophuis on this side." "The door goes open, but I did not look." "And it was quiet." "In a moment, I look up and there was a man standing before me with a gun to me and said:" ""Quiet." "No words. "" "Was there ever a plan for this sort of situation?" "No." "No." "We were so sure that it never would happen." "The authorities were alerted by an anonymous phone call that there were Jews hiding in the Opekta offices." "Four Dutch policemen from the German security service led by an Austrian officer, went straight to the secret bookcase." "I could hear the voice of the Nazi." "And I heard this man speak with a with a Vienna accent." "And if you know, I'm born in Vienna." "I know that accent." "I stand up and say to him in a nearly friendly mien:" ""You are a Vienna." "I'm a Vienna too. "" "And this one sentence was perhaps too much for this man." "He was standing there looked at me." "And when he come to him- He come to me so near to me that I feel his his adem." "His breath, I feel his breath." ""Aren't you ashamed of yourself helping Jewish baggage?" "You deserve to receive the worst punishment." "And you know what that is. "" "I did not say any word." "I was..." "He was going in my office from the one wall to the other as a wild animal." "Animal." "After a while, he stood still looked me a little friendlier." ""Out of personal sympathy, you may stay but woe betide you if you flee." "Then we'll take your husband. "" "When the Germans captured Jews in hiding they looted everything of value." "Officially, this was meant to finance the transportation of the Jews to the Polish death camps." "But corruption was rife and Jewish valuables often lined the pockets of Nazi policemen." "Needing a container for his loot the Austrian arresting officer, SS Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer emptied the contents of Otto Frank's briefcase onto the floor." "And thus, he left behind Anne's diary." "After the Franks and the other peoples were away I come here in and found the diary scattered on the floor." "Ellie and me, Bep and me." "Bep and me, we saw this." ""That is the diary of Anne!"" ""Please take!" "Take it!"" "We took all the things but I was afraid that I had not all the paper of the diary." "I knew that." "But I was so in hurry because I was afraid that this Austrian man came again." "That the officer" "That the officer..." "Because he say, "I come back. "" "Within two weeks of Miep Gies saving Anne's diary the Dutch firm of A-Puls stripped the hiding place of its possessions to be sent to Germany to aid bombed-out German civilians." "Silberbauer and his assistants had taken the eight Jewish prisoners to Gestapo headquarters, housed here in a former school in Amsterdam." "Of the helpers, Johannes Kleiman and Viktor Kugler were also arrested." "Though not the two women, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl." "Kleiman and Kugler were then sent here to Amersfoort labor camp in Holland shown in this film during a Dutch Red Cross inspection." "Kleiman was released in September due to bad health and Kugler managed to escape in 1945 when the train in which he was being transported to Germany was bombed by American planes." "The day after the arrest of the Franks, the van Pelses and Pfeffer Miep tried one last desperate effort to help them." "I go to the Gestapo." "And when you dare go in you did not know if you come out." "I found this Austrian man and he said, "Yes, come. " I went to him." "But when I came there, his office was full of young people." "Secretaries and all the peoples." "But he was sitting in the corner." "And when I came in, I could not- I think "I cannot speak with this man what I want. "" "So I go to the corner to him over his desk, and I did so:" ""Understand me," I said to him." ""Please come back tomorrow." "I can't do anything more for you today. "" "And then I went away." "Next morning, I go to him." "He was standing in the door waiting for me." ""I am sorry," he said to me." ""I can't do anything for you because I am not high enough." "You understand me?"" "And I said to him, "I don't believe you. "" ""Go to my boss. " And I go upstairs." "I knocked on the door." "Nobody said anything." "Then I opened the door, and what did I see?" "A large table sitting high German people." "Their caps on the table, and in the middle the radio, listening to England." "That was very, very" "Was not allowed for the German people." "And it was very dangerous for me because I saw what they did." "And I said, "Who is he, the boss?"" "One man came to me, pushed me out of the door." ""You are a swine. "" "And then I went down." "And this Vienna man was standing in the door." "I said, "What did I say to you?"" "And then I went down and I feel the curtain of this play was fallen for me." "Afterfour days in the cellars of the Gestapo building the prisoners were taken to the Amsterdam railway depot." "They were loaded under guard onto an ordinary passenger train." "Janny Brilleslijper, a member of the Dutch Resistance was amongst the prisoners." "What I saw was a family." "There were a number of people a very worried father and a nervous mother and two children wearing sports clothes, I believe." "Of course, it is more than fifty years ago." "They had sports clothes on and backpacks with them and the four of them stayed together constantly." "They spoke very softly to one another and there were other people there." "It was a beautiful day the sun shone to greet you the houses of the city were bathed in gold and those people all had a sort of silent melancholy about them." "Nobody said anything." "I cannot say that the people were afraid." "We went to meet the unknown." "We didn't know what was waiting for us." "This was the first destination for the Franks and the other prisoners." "Westerbork Transit Camp in northern Holland." "This film was made by the commandant to show his superiors in Berlin how successful he was in keeping his prisoners occupied before sending them on to less benign places in Poland or Germany." "104,000 people were processed through here between 1942 and 1945 more than 75% of the Jews in Holland before the outbreak of war." "Proudly, and without irony, the commandant showed the humiliation of his prisoners who were largely ignorant of the fate that awaited them." "Of the 60,000 or so who were sent to Auschwitz from here only 673 were ever to return." "And of the 34,313 transported to Sobibor death camp just 19 came back." "In the meantime, Westerbork offered ball games and calisthenics." "The Jews were encouraged to entertain themselves with a weekly cabaret." "Three survivors of that time in August 1944 returned for the first time in 50 years." "All, like the Franks, had been captured in hiding." "It is maybe unbelievable but when we were arrested and brought to the prison..." "Sal de Liema Westerbork Prisoner Aug/Sept 1944 ...I cannot say it was a kind of relief." "No." "But there was something that we said:" ""Now this is maybe the end of the war. "" "Because we knew the invasion was going on and, "The end is finally in sight." "What we have to do now is try to survive this. "" "It was overwhelming." "I knew it was Westerbork." "Rachel van Amerongen-Frankfoorder Westerbork Prisoner June/Sept 1944" "I thought, "This is the end," because I knew what happened in Germany." "And I knew that they were going to kill us." "We never gave up hope that we would survive the war." "Rose de Liema Westerbork Prisoner Aug/Sept 1944" "There was not that much Gestapo supervision in the camps." "The first ones I saw were the Franks." "I knew Margot rather well..." "Bloeme Evers-Emden Westerbork Prisoner Aug/Sept 1944 ...and I knew Anne." "We said to each other, "You too, here?" "You too?" "Were you hidden?" "What happened?"" "But very soon you were taken inside the camp and you had to be registered and you got your wooden shoes because we were punished, because we were hidden." "For me, it was the best time of the war." "No hunger, nice boys." "Frieda Menco Westerbork Prisoner July/Sept 1944" "We worked during the daytime." "Wasn't bad." "Then we got food and we were standing around and making jokes with each other." "Like other prisoners, the eight were given make-work jobs by their captors." "The Franks had the task of breaking up old batteries for recycling." "Otto Frank wanted something better for his Anne." "I was cleaning a table and then at once, somebody came to me with a girl" "That was Otto Frank." "Later on, I knew it." "He was with Anne, and he asked me:" ""Here's Anne, my daughter." "Do you have work for her?"" "Because he wanted, of course, her to be inside with us." "Then she said to me, "I can help you." "I'm very handy." "I can do everything. "" "This was the end, actually." "This was it." "It all started here." "My grandparents all my uncles, my aunts, my nieces, my nephews all my friends." "They came here, and it was the beginning of the end." "And I really feel like this is a big cemetery." "In the end, you start to believe that it won't happen." "You know that there are transports going each Tuesday." "But when two months have passed and your own name wasn't on the list, you start to believe:" ""We can stay here until the end of the war. "" "Because by then of course, we knew that there would be an end." "Although it was incredible, but we knew that the English and the Americans were already in Europe." "And then it came, and you became very factual." "You took your things, everything" "You got back what belonged to you because they had taken that away from you because they gave you that outfit." "It was like what happened so many times later." "It was like having" "I don't know how you call it." "You don't quite realize what's going on and what will happen with you and to you." "Eighty-three trains left Westerbork during the second World War for the Polish death camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor." "On September 3, 1944, they loaded many of the Jews in Westerbork onto the very last transport to Auschwitz." "1019 men, women and children amongst them, the group of eight from the secret annex." "For most, it was to be their last sight of Holland." "Darkness is the first thing I think about." "Being cramped in." "Too many people." "No room enough." "Luggage." "No possibility to lie." "Sitting for three days." "Now and then standing." "You were like in a trance." "You didn't realize." "You realized that very bad things were to happen and to be completely powerless." "Sometimes we stood up." "We got up and looked through cracks when we were at a station when the train stopped." "Because we still had no idea how we went and where it would end and how long it would take." "People cried, and on the other side, they told stories to each other to try to sleep, to sleep standing." "There was not enough food and drink." "We were, I think, about 40 or 50 people in that cattle car." "We were standing." "Sometimes we got to our knees to rest a little bit." "Urinating and other things." "I don't remember what we did, but there was nothing there, nothing." "I think we just let it go." "And it was like an endless journey." "And even that was better than that there would have come an end to it." "Because the end was not good." "That, we felt." "Your imagination stops at certain moments." "You refuse to imagine the worst." "On September 5, the train from Holland reached its final destination:" "Auschwitz death camp in southwest Poland." "All those lamps." "Terrible, terrible hard." "The color was so terrible." "It was yellowish." "And we came there, men, women, children alike on the platform here." "Don't know where exactly." "Yeah, I see there, the rail." "We were astonished." "I really thought I passed away, and this was hell." "Really, I thought, "I'm already dead. "" "We were driven one way or another way." "After all, was the one way to the death and this was to a kind of life." "I remember very well too that you were naked before men and I was educated chastely in the values of my people." "And I got a shock." "I knew that from this moment on all your norms and values were of no importance anymore." "And that there was a quite new set of values to be learned." "And if you didn't learn it, you would be dead." "I remember that I realized it in one second." "And I was only 18 years old." "According to Auschwitz records, more than half the people on that train were gassed on the day after their arrival, September 6." "549 Jews, among them every child under the age of 15." "They told us right away what was waiting for us: death." ""All of your people, they're going to the chimneys." "Maybe tonight already. "" "It was just a death factory." "We knew." "We saw that terrible pipe burning day and night." "The smell." "I thought that when it should come here that I should have had a penetrant smell." "But no." "I was sure that I should smell it because sometimes I smell it." "The smell of the disinfection, the smell of the burning flesh and the smoke." "Anne, Margot and Edith Frank, and Mrs. van Pels were among the 212 women from the Dutch train who were granted entry into that hell they called Auschwitz-Birkenau." "They were placed in Women's Block 29." "It was no life." "It was no life at all." "We were degraded to even less than beasts." "Less than animals." "We were standing outside, and I saw a wagon on the first day." ""What's he throwing on there?"" "Dead bodies." "Oh, my God!" "I could hardly look." "The next couple of days later, I saw it." ""Oh, there's that wagon again who picks up the dead bodies. "" "The next time, I didn't pay any attention to that wagon." "So your brain starts functioning differently because if you didn't- You didn't do it on purpose but then you couldn't go on living." "In Auschwitz-Birkenau, Edith Frank and her daughters were drawn together as never before." "A very important survival for all the people in concentration camps were the forming of groups." "Support groups." "And of course, as mother and children and daughters you were a natural support group." "And I think everything from the past was faded away against this scene of Auschwitz." "It was of no importance anymore, I suppose." "Was there any sign of the previous antagonism between Anne and her mother?" "I think it was all forgotten." "They were always together." "You can have the luxury of a struggle with your mother in normal circumstances." "These circumstances were so bad." "Not only bad but like a ghost writing that everything fell away." "I'm quite sure about that." "The last time I saw Anne and Margot and Mrs. Frank was when there had been a selection for a working camp." "But you never knew for what the selection was." "But Anne and her mother were told that Anne was not allowed to go with our group because she had scabies." "Her mother and Margot decided to stay with Anne." "We went to a labor camp where we didn't get food and worked hard but most of us survived." "There were few deaths, and there were no gas chambers." "Had she not had the scabies and had they gone with our transport they had had a better chance to survive." "So because Anne suffered from scabies and her mother and sister stayed with her they lost their chance to leave Auschwitz for the work camp where many of the Dutch women saw out the remainder of the war." "As for the men, when they had first arrived at Auschwitz, September 5 Otto Frank, Hermann and Peter van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer together with the other 254 males who had not immediately been gassed had been separated from their women and taken to the nearby Auschwitz I." "This, the original death camp created from an old Polish army barracks may have been smaller than Auschwitz-Birkenau where the women had remained within sight of the gas chambers and three crematoria, but life here for the men was no easier." "Mr. van Pels was the first to wither." "We told him, "Don't give up. "" "He did, and it was just like he melted away." "It was two weeks" "Two days, he was gone." "He gave up." "That was it." "No one knows exactly when they took Hermann van Pels to the gas chamber but it was only a few weeks after his arrival at Auschwitz." "Otto Frank and Sal de Liema resolved to keep up their morale by whatever means." "People around us like we all were, of course very nervous." "Talking about food all the time." "Talking about clothes that we didn't have any, practically no clothes." "Only the striped clothes that we had." "The food was just a piece of bread that they'd give you." "It was really bad." "So Mr. Frank and I" "We knew each other from Westerbork." "He said, "We should get away from those people because if you start talking about food and everything your brain is gonna go. "" "And we said, "We understand that physically we maybe will not survive this. "" "We should try to survive mentally and talk about things that had nothing to do with the camp, like:" ""Do you remember the melody from the 9th Symphony from Beethoven?"" "And then we start singing to each other just to get away from this fear." "Just to get our brain thinking about other things." "We talked about van Gogh, Rembrandt." ""Ever go to the Van Gogh Museum?" "Ever go to the Rijk Museum?"" "And all those things, just not to" "To get out of our minds." "To get out of this here." "And it really helped, I think." "He was older, much older than I was." "He said, "You know, why don't you call me Papa Frank because I have to have something in my life that I can be a papa to. "" "I didn't know what he was talking about." "I said, "What do you mean?" "I have a father and he is hidden in the Netherlands, in Holland." "If you do it for me, you don't have to, because I have already a father and he's alive." "I know he's hidden. "" ""No," he said, "you do it for me." "I'm the type of a man, I need this." "I need somebody to be a papa for. "" "So I told him, "If it will help you, I'll do that. "" "He said, "Call me Papa Frank. " Until he died, when he wrote his letters he always signed his letters, "Papa Frank. "" "I was standing one time in the snow naked after we came back from our work." "We stand appell here, outside here and a German soldier came and he had his fur coat on and he looked at me and said:" ""Cold, huh?" "It is cold?"" "I didn't even answer." "I just looked at him." "And he said, "You know you will not survive this, you know that." "But in case you will survive" "But I'll take care of it that it's not gonna happen." "Nobody, but nobody will believe you what we did to you people." "Nobody. "" "Otto Frank interviewed in 1979" "One day in Auschwitz, I was very depressed." "I had been beaten the day before and that had really affected me also in terms of my morale." "It was a Sunday morning and I said, "I can't get up. "" "And then my comrades all Dutchmen of course because I was the only German among Dutchmen but I was totally accepted by the others they said to me, "That's not possible you must get up, otherwise you are lost. "" "And then they went to a Dutch doctor who worked with a German doctor and this Dutch doctor came to me in my barracks." "He said, "Get up and come tomorrow morning to the sick barracks and I'll speak to the German doctor so that you will be accepted. "" "And that is what happened and through that I was saved." "While Otto languished in a sick barracks his daughters were transported away." "On October 28, 1944, they were separated from their mother and together with 1308 other women, they were sent here to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany." "Rachel van Amerongen-Frankfoorder was with them." "You see with your own eyes how beautiful it is." "It is beautiful." "And there were birds here." "And I wanted to be a bird." "Freedom, freedom, freedom." "I thought, "Oh, how nice to be a bird." "You can fly wherever you go. "" "I was simply jealous of birds." "When Anne, Margot, Rachel and the others arrived at Bergen-Belsen the camp was overflowing with new inmates brought from throughout Europe." "The barracks being built to accommodate them were not ready and they were crammed into the makeshift shelter of tents." "On November 7, a violent storm raged through the camp destroying many of these." "Seeking shelter from the rain Anne and Margot encountered Lientje and Janny Brilleslijper the two Dutch sisters whom they knew from Auschwitz and Westerbork." "It stormed, it hailed." "We had walked four kilometers and we sat together the two of us with only our two little faces sticking out of two blankets." "Those dark horse blankets with our heads together and only our two little faces like two heaps on a little hill up against a tree to stay as dry as possible." "And four legs came walking up also with blankets around them and over their heads." "And at the same time as we saw them we all threw off our blankets with a shout..." ""Oh, how wonderful that you are here. "" "How can you find something wonderful in the middle of a concentration camp?" "Deliberately starved, frozen and racked with disease Bergen-Belsen was no place to be in those last months of World War II." "A wooden barracks was found for the unfortunate women from Auschwitz." "But Anne and Margot Frank came to be in the worst position of all:" "In the lower bunk next to the door." "Incapable of protecting themselves from the vicious wind that swept through Bergen-Belsen's barren acres." "They shouted, "Close the door!" "Close the door!" "It is cold!" "It is cold!" "It is cold!"" "And it was terrible for them, of course." "What did the Frank girls look like when you saw them in the barracks?" "Very terrible." "Terrible." "Sick." "Thin." "No hair." "Their eyes, very big." "Very big eyes because they were so thin." "Almost impossible to imagine but there was a time when the name Bergen-Belsen brought hope to the eyes of Jews due to be transported here." "In the early years, the Nazis planned it as a camp for Jews who might be used for exchange for German prisoners of war." "In those long ago days, Anne's friend Lies Goslar had been sent here with her sister and father, the former German government minister." "In 1945, Lies discovered she was in the compound next to the Dutch women from Auschwitz." "One day, a friend of mine tells me:" ""You know, between all these women, there is your friend, Anne Frank. "" "I don't know, I felt very crazy because I was thinking the whole time:" ""Anne is safe in Switzerland. "" "I was sure of this." "This was what the tenant said to me." "And so I had no choice to go also near this barbed wire." "This was not allowed, and the German in the watchtower was watching us." "And you know he would have shot if he would have caught us." "So we couldn't see." "I told you there were barbed wire with straw and we couldn't see the other side." "So I just went near at dark and I start to call, "Hello?" "Hello?" Something like this." "And who answered me was Mrs. van Pels." "Maybe the Dutch women went near the barbed wire because the others didn't know anybody." "I don't know." "I didn't even ask her, "How are you?" I knew her, but not very good." "But immediately she said to me, "You want Anne?" And I said, "Yes. "" "And she says, "You know, I will call her for you." "Margot I can't call for you." "She's very sick already." "But Anne I will call for you. "" "And so I was standing there in the cold, and I was waiting." "And then suddenly, I heard somebody calling me and it was Anne." "And this was awful." "The first thing, we both started to cry." "Then I said:" ""What are you doing here?" "You are in Switzerland. "" "And she answered me, "We wanted this rumor to go around because we hoped then the Germans will not look after us. "" "And then she said she had nobody anymore." "And this was not right, and I am so very sorry because she said:" ""My mother is dead. " And her mother really was dead at that moment but she couldn't know." "She was sure her mother was killed when she left." "But her mother came out later, was not killed she just died of exhaustion in the beginning of January." "Her sister, she knew, was very, very sick already." "But now her father." "Look, if it was Mengele or somebody else they wouldn't know how old you are." "They would see only naked bodies." "And Mr. Frank was 55 years old but he was only one month in the Dutch camp so he looked still very good." "And the Germans just looked and saw somebody that still can walk so they sent him to the right, to live." "But Anne thought they go by the age, and she was sure of it." ""My father is dead." "He is an old man. "" "And I always think, if she had known her father is still alive" "After her sister died, she just was without any hope." "Then maybe she had- You know, it was only one month she died before the liberation." "But she didn't know, and so she had really nothing to live for." "At this time, as a special prisoner being kept for possible exchange Lies Goslar received a parcel from the Red Cross." "My friends, everybody gave me a glove or a little sock and a little bread." "So I came back at night with such a small package." "And then I hear her again, and we were speaking." "I told her about my little sister." "I told her my mother wasn't alive anymore." "She didn't know." "Miep only told her that my- That the baby died." "And my father was then already in hospital." "He died 25 of February, and this was before." "And I throw the package over and then I heard her crying or shouting." "And I couldn't understand." ""What happened?"" ""The lady next to me caught the package, and she run away with it. "" "And she didn't give her anything." "I said, "I will try for another time. " And really, I tried another time." "And this time she caught the package." "And it was the last time I saw her." "More than 50,000 of Bergen-Belsen's inmates died in 1945 as disease and starvation ravaged the camp." "Typhus, carried by lice, was a particularly horrible killer." "It is terrible when you are covered in lice." "Anne had thrown away her clothes and she came to us crying wrapped only in her gray blanket." "Lientje (my sister) lay sick and I couldn't do anything except give Anne some clothes to wear and give her some delousing material." "And I promised to come to her the next day to come to both of them because she said, "You have to come." "Margot is so ill. "" "At that time Margot was already mortally sick." "I suppose she also had typhus." "I'm not sure." "But the next day, I couldn't get away and it took at least four or five days before I went to her and then they were already dead." "Both dead." "And all of a sudden I didn't see them anymore." "But you would not pay attention." "The place was empty." "We were sick." "And when I was ill, to speak about myself is why I couldn't pay more attention than I did." "They're not there anymore." "They are dead." "That was that." "Outside in the entry guard all of them were swept away." "Boom." "They are outside." "I don't know whether I can talk about it." "Meat was traded bodies." "It's very difficult..." "Leave it." "I can't say any more." "The bodies from our barracks we almost couldn't lift them anymore." "They were thrown onto a pile between the barracks and inscribed on my eyes are these people in every possible position in every possible form covered in snow because they would always be undressed." "On a pile with wide open eyes." "We tried to close as many eyes as possible." "It didn't always work." "Bergen-Belsen, as filmed by British liberators:" "A place where humanity had been reduced to the worst indignities." "Cannibalism became part of a desperate struggle to quench the most appalling hunger." "Only a few hundred yards away the Germans kept supplies of food and medicine while their prisoners died by the tens of thousands." "In November 1943, a year and a half before her death in the safety of her Amsterdam hiding place Anne Frank had a nightmare in which Hanneli Goslar appeared before her." "Hanneli Goslar in a concentration camp." ""I saw her there, dressed in rags her face thin and worn." "She looked at me with such sadness and reproach in her enormous eyes that I could read the message in them:" "'Oh, Anne, why have you deserted me?" "Help me, help me." "Rescue me from this hell. '" "And I can't help her." "I can only stand by and watch while other people suffer and die." "All I can do is pray to God to bring her back to us." "If only I could help her." "Dear God, I have everything I could wish for while fate has her in its deadly clutches." "Hanneli, Hanneli." "If only I could take you away." "If only I could share everything I have with you." "It's too late, but I'll never forget her again and I'll always pray for her." "Yours, Anne. "" "She didn't do so much wrong, you know, if you are in this age." "But this is one of the reasons that I tell the story now because it is the other way around." "Yes, today I am standing here, and she is dead." "And so I am quite obliged to tell about her." "And she wanted to be so very famous." "I can't help a lot of this but a little bit." "I think, "What a waste, such a young life should end and without any reason. "" "She could really have given something to the world." "The whole thing is crazy." "My father died there one week after I saw her." "I don't know." "I cannot judge this whole period." "Nobody can understand it, I think." "I don't know." "Auschwitz had been liberated two and a half months before Bergen-Belsen." "On a freezing January 27, 1945 a Ukrainian division of the Soviet army, accompanied by a film crew arrived at the site of the most successful mass murder in mankind's history." "The last SS guards had already fled leaving behind only those too young or infirm to be led away on the now-notorious death marches." "The gassings at Auschwitz had already stopped the previous November." "The gas chambers dynamited." "But in a wild attempt to cover their tracks the SS dragged thousands away with them in desperate flight in the biting cold." "Those of the prisoners who could not keep up were shot at the side of the road by their German escort." "Tens of thousands perished "somewhere in Europe" of hunger thirst or exhaustion, or from an SS bullet." "Fritz Pfeffer had been amongst those taken away before the Russians came to die on December 20, 1944 in Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany." "Anne's boyfriend from the days in the annex, Peter van Pels was marched out of Auschwitz by the Germans on January 16 and taken to Mauthausen death camp in Austria where he died on May 5, 1945 just three days before the Americans liberated that camp." "His mother, Auguste van Pels, was sent on a crazy journey across Germany and Czechoslovakia." "First to Bergen-Belsen, then to Theresienstadt." "And in the last days of the Reich to an unknown camp, where she too died." "One of the millions of anonymous bodies left by Hitler's failed vision of a thousand-year empire." "Otto Frank, weighing less than 115 pounds was amongst the lucky few that the Russians found alive in Auschwitz." "When he was recovered, Otto wrote to his mother in Switzerland where she had lived since before the war." "His letters then remained forgotten in the attic of her home in Basle for nearly 50 years until they were discovered by his nephew in May 1994." ""Auschwitz, 23 February 1945." "Dearest Mother:" "Hopefully these lines will reach you bringing you and all my loved ones the news that I have been liberated by the Russians that I am healthy and in good spirits and that I am being well taken care of." "I do not know where Edith and the children are." "We have been separated since September 5, 1944." "I just hope to see them back in good health." "I'm longing to see you all again and hope that this will be possible soon." "All my love, greetings and kisses." "Your son, Otto. "" "So it was that Otto Frank, the only survivor of the eight who had been in hiding in Amsterdam took the long journey back to his Dutch adopted homeland." "By May, with the war in Europe ended his Russian liberators had sent him to the Black Sea port of Odessa." "There, he was placed on a New Zealand merchant ship bound for France." ""May 26, 1945." "The steamer Monowai." "Dearest Mother and all you loved ones:" "Tomorrow we arrive in Marseilles, and this letter can hopefully be mailed." "I imagine I will be able to telegraph you so that you will get the news of my return in good health." "All my hope is the children." "I cling to the conviction that they are alive and that we will be together again." "Unfortunately, Edith did not survive." "She died on January 6, 1945 in the hospital, of starvation." "Her body could not withstand attack of influenza." "The closer we get to home, the more impatient we get to hear news of our loved ones." "What happened in all these years!" "We own nothing anymore." "We won't find a pin when we get back." "Bernd Elias Otto Frank's nephew" "The Germans stole everything." "No photograph, letter or document will remain there." "Financially, we had no worries during the last years." "I earned good money and saved." "Now all is gone." "But I don't worry about this." "We have gone through too much to worry about things like that." "Only the children." "The children are what count." "I hope to get news from you straightaway." "Maybe you already have news of the girls." "I cannot write about everything that I am thinking of." "I have to stay in Holland as with the exception of a tattooed number on my arm I have no papers and therefore must think of seeing you later." "The main thing is that we have contact." "We hope to see each other soon." "With innermost greetings and kisses and love, your Otto. "" "My husband worked on the station..." "Miep Gies ...registering all the people who are coming down from the concentration camps." "And he ask everyone:" ""Have you seen Mr. Frank?" "Have you heard about Mr. Frank?"" "And one day, one evening, he came home and he said:" ""I have good news for you." "Otto Frank is coming home. "" "And when he said this, we lived downstairs." "Mr. Frank came along the window." "I ran to the door." "At first what I ask was:" ""Where's Edith?"" "Otto Frank said to me, "Edith never come but I have hope for the children. "" "And he came to us." "Because he had no house, no nothing he lived seven years in our house." "But the life go on." "We go every day to the office." "But I do not give him the diary of Anne Frank." "You may not know this but when he was on the ship from Odessa to Marseilles Otto wrote a letter to his mother." "In that letter he said this:" ""Kugler and Kleiman, and especially Miep her husband and Bep Voskuijl cared for us for two years with everything we needed in spite of the dangers and unprecedented sacrifices they made." "One cannot describe it." "I will never be able to repay what all these people have done. "" "I never know about this." "No." "That is the first time I heard it." "Thank you." "While Miep kept the diary secret from Otto in case Anne should return he was desperate to find his daughters." "He advertised in newspapers and visited the Dutch Red Cross asking, always asking for news of Anne and Margot." "At the end of July, he was told that someone knew of their fate." "In August, he had the tragic news confirmed." "He stood on the porch and rang the bell and remained standing on the porch." "He said, "Are you Janny Brandes?"" "And I said, "Yes. "" ""Can I come in?"" "Because he was a very polite gentleman." "He came into the hallway and remained standing there and said:" ""What happened to my daughters?" "I am Otto. "" "I could hardly speak because it was very difficult to tell someone that his children were not alive anymore." "I said, "They are no more. "" "He turned deathly pale and slumped down into a chair." "I just put my arm around him." "When the girls' death had been confirmed Miep gave up the secret she kept hidden from Otto since the day of the family's capture more than a year before." "From her top drawer, she handed him three books and a sheaf of loose papers:" "Anne's diary, which she herself had never read." "I took the diary out of my desk and gave him it with the words:" ""That is a testament for your daughter Anne. "" "Can you look?" "Can you see how this man looked at me?" "Lost his wife." "Lost his two children." "He had the diary." "Otto transcribed sections of the diary for his mother in Switzerland." "He also started showing it to friends seeking their views on what to do with his daughter's unique legacy." "They all advised him to have it published but his efforts met with no success." "Then this article, written by a friend of a friend appeared in an Amsterdam paper in April 1946 and finally, a publisher stepped forward." "Het Achterhuis, "The Back House, " appeared in June 1947." "Initially, it made little impact." "Then in the 1950s German, French, English and other translations began to appear." "In 1955, a stage adaptation opened on Broadway to a rapturous reception." "The transformation of the 15-year-old German-Jewish refugee into an emblem of the Holocaust gathered pace." "A 1959 feature film based on the play added further to this process." "To some, she had become little short of a saint." "But her diary, at the very least, had become a publishing phenomenon." "In 1953, Otto had remarried and moved to Switzerland." "In the absence of Anne, he became the focus for his daughter's celebrity." "He, in turn, came to symbolize the perfect father so many children crave." "Thousands wrote to him from around the world and he replied to each individually." "If young people are writing to me after reading the diary..." "Otto Frank interviewed in 1976 ...I start to think:" ""That is, for me, one of the most precious. "" "Though Otto developed relationships, sometimes close ones with many of the children who wrote to him he admitted he never understood his own daughter in her lifetime." "Was she in fact the optimist and cheerful person that he saw as a child?" "She showed herself like that." "But in fact, I only learned to know her really through her diary." "Throughout these years, one persistent problem refused to go away:" "Citing differences between different language versions of the diary which were never explained in the various editions together with further fictional scenes in the play and film neo-Nazis around the world wanting to throw doubt on the very existence of the Holocaust alleged that the diary was a hoax." "Painful and inconclusive lawsuits followed but it was only in 1980, after Otto's death that the authenticity of the diary was finally tested scientifically." "The extensive report by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation took five years to complete and was eventually published with a study of all the versions of Anne's diary." "It categorically stated that the diary was genuine in every respect." "In 1960, one of Holland's most secret places became one of its most public." "The Franks' annex was opened as a museum and is now visited by over 600,000 tourists a year." "Otto also created charitable foundations to perpetuate Anne's message to the world." "Anne was not simply to be commemorated but her short life was to become a more general force for good." "To fight against prejudice and discrimination and hatred against people of different race and religion." "Since 1985, a touring exhibition telling Anne's life story and its relevance to current world affairs has traveled from country to country, from Moscow to Minneapolis South America to South Africa." "It has also shown that the diary has had some surprising readers in surprising places." "During the many years my comrades and I spent in prison..." "Nelson Mandela President of South Africa" "Political Prisoner 1964-1990 ...we derived inspiration from the courage and tenacity of those who challenge injustice even under the most difficult circumstances." "Some of us read Anne Frank's diary on Robben Island and derived much encouragement from it." "It's very interesting the letters of the German children." "They always ask me everything because they wrote me:" ""My father or grandfather didn't tell me anything about the war." "They say always, 'That is the past." "That is over. "'" "But that is not true." "The past goes always with you in your whole life, and we can learn from the past." "In 1941, there was a wedding at Merwedeplein in Amsterdam." "After filming the street the cameraman pointed at the onlookers above." "There at the window was Anne Frank." "This is the only known moving footage of her." "When she stood at the window that sunny day in June it's not surprising that the 12-year-old Anne Frank was yet to find her life's purpose." "But less than three years later, as she sat caged in the fragile security of her hiding place she had discovered her destiny." ""Wednesday, April 5, 1944." "My dearest Kitty:" "I don't want to have lived in vain like most people." "I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to people even those I've never met." "I want to go on living, even after my death." "And that's why I'm grateful to God for having given me this gift which I can use to develop and to express all that's inside me." "Yours, Anne M. Frank. ""