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 Voskuijl Wijk, and she died in
Amsterdam in 1983.
Miep Santrouschitz 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 DusseI 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 BergenBelsen
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.