History isn’t always a pleasant thing or a nostalgic look at times past. Sometimes it’s a reminder of man’s inhumanity to man. On August 4, 1944, Anne Frank and her companions were discovered in the hiding place that had kept them free from the Nazis for 24 months. It was an anonymous tip that led to Frank’s eventual death of Typhoid in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp mere weeks before the camp was liberated by British troops.

263 Prinsengracht was the location of the “Secret Annex” that hid Anne and the place she hoped to write about after the war. The building housed the business of Otto Frank, Anne’s father and he, along with Herman Van Pels and two workers, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, made alterations to an empty section of the building in readiness for the Frank family’s seclusion.

On July 6, 1942 eight people went into hiding in the two floor secret annex. The Frank family consisted of Otto and Edith Frank and their two daughters Anne and Margot. Also with them were the Van Pels: Herman, Auguste and Peter and a family friend, Fritz Pfeffer. The entrance to the hiding place was behind a movable bookcase and everyday, office workers of Otto Frank brought food, supplies and news of the German occupation.

The time was spent, according to Anne’s famous diary, surviving, reading, writing, performing regular household chores, arguing and staving off the inevitable depression of forced hiding and persecution. Anne’s diary is the best place to read of the day to day tensions, romances and bad news the eight individuals experienced during that period. All in all, it was no way to live, a necessary seclusion that in the end, meant their demise.

It was a normal day for the hidden, the day the secret police banged on the front door of the building. An anonymous tip had told them of how workers brought supplies into the building and that there may be people, who should have left on train cars long ago, hiding inside. Early morning, while the workers were busy at their desks, the police arrived and forced Victor Kugler to show them the Secret Annex. Four days of interrogation followed.

The eight were then transferred to Westerbork transit camp. From there, to Auschwitz-Birkenau in early September of 1944. A life of heavy intense labor, starvation and illness followed. Those who couldn’t keep up were terminated. Herman Van Pels dies in the gas chamber. Auguste Van Pels dies sometime in 1944. Edith Frank dies of exhaustion in January of 1945. Margot and Anne die of disease in March of 1945. Peter Van Pels dies of exhaustion May 5, 1945. Germany surrenders May 7, 1945. Otto Frank is liberated and survives to tell the story and helps publish Anne Frank’s diary.

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Frank’s hiding only prolonged an unsettled existence where she and her fellow Jews were persecuted simply because of their religious beliefs. If anything good can said to have come of their stifling two year existence, it was the pages of Frank’s diary that were carelessly scattered to the floor during the arrests. Millions of children around the world read those pages today remembering a time they can hardly imagine in a world they believe no longer exists and appreciating the present they inhabit.

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