Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
(see the
transport list,
which includes “Anneliese Frank”). On the
platform at Auschwitz, they were “forcibly separated from each
other” (as Otto later reported) and sent to different camps. Anne
and Margot were sent to Bergen-Belsen.
Don't miss the
video
of one of Anne's former neighbors who,
by chance, ended up at Bergen-Belsen with Anne. In English, she
describes their reunion as they talked through a barbed wire fence
shortly before Anne died. She says of Anne, “She didn't have any
more tears.”
Anne and Margot both died of typhus in March of 1945, only
weeks before the camp was liberated. Five of the other original
eight were either gassed or died of disease. Only Otto survived.
The Franks' story was that of Holland's Jews. The seven who
died were among 100,000 Dutch Jews killed during the war years.
(Before the war, 135,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands.) Of Anne's
school class of 87 Jews, only 20 survived.
• The next room is devoted to Anne's father
.
The Otto Frank Room
Listen to a 1967 video of Anne's father talking about how he dis-
covered her diary. In a case are a few notebooks that Otto kept
during the hiding period.
• Downstairs you come to the…
Videos and the Diaries
See Anne's three diaries, which were discovered and published
after the war. (Sometimes a reproduction of the fragile original
is on display.) Anne received the first
diary as a birthday present when she
turned 13, shortly before the family
went into hiding. She wrote it in the
form of a letter to an imaginary friend
named Kitty.
The video of Miep Gies, who is
still living, describes how she found
Anne's diaries in the Secret Annex
after the arrest and gave them to
Otto when he returned. Another
video shows Otto's reaction. Though
the annex's furniture had been ransacked during the arrest, after-
ward the rooms remained virtually untouched, and we see them
today much as they were.
Otto decided to have the diaries published, and in 1947,
De
Achterhuis
(he Back-House)
appeared in Dutch, soon followed by
many translations, a play, and a movie. While she was alive, Anne
herself had recognized the uniqueness of her situation and had
