خاتمه

AFTERWORD

On the morning of August 4, 1944, sometime between ten and ten-thirty, a car pulled up at 263 Prinsengracht. Several figures emerged: an SS sergeant, Karl Josef Silberbauer, in full uniform, and at least three Dutch members of the Security Police, armed but in civilian clothes. Someone must have tipped them off.

They arrested the eight people hiding in the Annex, as well as two of their helpers, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman-though not Miep Gies and Elisabeth (Bep) Voskuijl-and took all the valuables and cash they could find in the Annex.

After the arrest, Kugler and Kleiman were taken to a prison in Amsterdam. On September 11, 1944, they were transferred, without benefit of a trial, to a camp in Amersfoort (Holland). Kleiman, because of his poor health, was released on September 18, 1944. He remained in Amsterdam until his death in 1959. Kugler managed to escape his imprisonment on March 28, 1945, when he and his fellow prisoners were being sent to Germany as forced laborers. He immigrated to Canada in 1955 and died in Toronto in 1989.

Elisabeth (Bep) Voskuijl Wijk died in Amsterdam in 1983.

Miep Santrouschitz Gies is still living in Amsterdam; her husband Jan died in 1993.

Upon their arrest, the eight residents of the Annex were first brought to a prison in Amsterdam and then transferred to Westerbork, the transit camp for Jews in the north of Holland. They were deported on September 3, 1944, in the last transport to leave Westerbork, and arrived three days later in Auschwitz (Poland).

Hermann van Pels (van Daan) was, according to the testimony of Otto Frank, gassed to death in Auschwitz in October or November 1944, shortly before the gas chambers were dismantled.

Auguste van Pels (Petronella van Daan) was transported from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, from there to Buchenwald, then to Theresienstadt on April 9, 1945, and apparently to another concentration camp after that. It is certain that she did not survive, though the date of her death is unknown. Peter van Pels (van Daan) was forced to take part in the January 16, 1945 “death march” from Auschwitz to Mauthausen (Austria), where he died on May 5, 1945, three days before the camp was liberated.

Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel) died on December 20, 1944, in the Neuengamme concentration camp, where he had been transferred from either Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen.

Edith Frank died in Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 6, 1945, from hunger and exhaustion.

Margot and Anne Frank were transported from Auschwitz at the end of October and brought to Bergen Belsen, a concentration camp near Hannover (Germany). The typhus epidemic that broke out in the winter of 1944-1945, as a result of the horrendous hygenic conditions, killed thousands of prisoners, including Margot and, a few days later, Anne. She must have died in late February or early March. The bodies of both girls were probably dumped in Bergen-Belsen’s mass graves. The camp was liberated by British troops on April 12, 1945.

Otto Frank was the only one of the eight to survive the concentration camps. After Auschwitz was liberated by Russian troops, he was repatriated to Amsterdam by way of Odessa and Marseille. He arrived in Amsterdam on June 3, 1945, and stayed there until 1953, when he moved to Basel (Switzerland), where his sister and her family, and later his brother, lived. He married Elfriede Markovits Geiringer, originally from Vienna, who had survived Auschwitz and lost a husband and son in Mauthausen. Until his death on August 19, 1980, Otto Frank continued to live in Birsfelden, outside Basel, where he devoted himself to sharing the message of his daughter’s diary with people all over the world.