Anne Frank was one of over one million Jewish children who died in

the Holocaust. She was born Annelies Marie Frank on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt,
Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank.
For the first 5 years of her life, Anne lived with her parents and older sister,
Margot, in an apartment on the outskirts of Frankfurt. After the Nazi seizure of
power in 1933, Otto Frank fled to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where he had
business connections. The rest of the Frank family followed Otto, with Anne
being the last of the family to arrive in February 1934 after staying with her
grandparents in Aachen.
The Germans occupied Amsterdam in May 1940. In July 1942, German
authorities and their Dutch collaborators began to concentrate Jews from
throughout the Netherlands at Westerbork, a transit camp near the Dutch town
of Assen, not far from the German border. From Westerbork, German officials
deported the Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobiborkilling centers in Germanoccupied Poland.

On August 4, 1944, a German secret police officer accompanied by four Dutch Nazis
stormed into the Secret Annex, arresting everyone that was hiding there. They had been
betrayed by an anonymous tip, and the identity of their betrayer remains unknown to
this day. The residents of the Secret Annex were shipped off to Camp Westerbork, a
concentration camp in the northeastern Netherlands, and arrived by passenger train on
August 8, 1944. They were transferred to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland in the
middle of the night on September 3, 1944. Upon arriving at Auschwitz, the men and

women were separated. This was the last time that Otto Frank ever saw his wife or
daughters.

After several months of hard labor hauling heavy stones and grass mats, Anne and
Margot were again transferred during the winter to the Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp in Germany. Their mother was not allowed to go with them, and Edith Frank fell ill
and died at Auschwitz shortly thereafter, on January 6, 1945.

At Bergen-Belsen, food was scarce, sanitation was awful and disease ran rampant.
Frank and her sister both came down with typhus in the early spring and died within a
day of each other sometime in March 1945, only a few weeks before British soldiers
liberated the camp. Anne Frank was just 15 years old at the time of her death, one of
more than 1 million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust.

Both sisters died of typhus in March 1945, just a few weeks before British
troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. SS officials also selected Anne's
parents for labor.
The fate of those arrested was mostly tragic. Herman van Pels was gassed in Auschwitz
exact date unknown. Auguste van Pels died either in The resienstadt or on the way
there in April or May 1945. Peter van Pels died in Mauthausen after leaving Auschwitz,
on 5 May 1945, the day the camp was liberated. Only Anne's father, Otto, survived

the war. Soviet forces liberated Otto at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.