See also main article: Anne Frank.

Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who, along with her family and four other people, hid in rooms at the back of her father's Amsterdam company during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands. Helped by several trusted employees of the company the group survived in the achterhuis for more than two years before they were betrayed.

After spending time in both Westerbork and Auschwitz concentration camps, Anne and her elder sister Margot were eventually transferred to Bergen-Belsen where they both died during a typhus epidemic between late February and the middle of March 1945.

Their father Otto Frank survived the war, and upon his return to Amsterdam was given the diary his daughter had kept during their period of confinement. The diary was first published in 1947, and has become a widely read work, recognised both for its historical value as a document of the Holocaust, as well as for the high quality of writing displayed by so young an author.

Other occupants of the achterhuis

• Otto Frank remained in Auschwitz with other sick prisoners and survived. In 1953 he married Elfrida 'Fritzi' Markovits Geiringer, an Auschwitz survivor who had lost her husband and son in Auschwitz, and whose daughter, also a survivor, had been acquainted with the Frank sisters. Otto Frank died in Birsfelden, Switzerland from natural causes, August 19, 1980. His widow "Fritzi" continued his work until her death in October, 1998.
• Edith Frank, Anne and Margot's mother, was left behind in Auschwitz-Birkenau when her daughters and Auguste van Pels were transferred to Bergen Belsen, as her health had started to deteriorate. Witnesses reported that her despair at being separated from her family led to an emotional breakdown. They described her searching for her daughters endlessly and said that she seemed to not understand that they had gone, although she had seen them board the train that took them out of the camp. They also said that she began to hoard what little food she could obtain, hiding it under her bunk to give to Anne and Margot when she saw them. They said that Edith Frank told them Anne and Margot needed the food more than she did, and therefore she refused to eat it. She died January 6, 1945 from starvation.

• Hermann van Pels: died September 6, 1944, in Auschwitz. He was the only member of the group to be gassed. This occurred about three weeks after arriving at Auschwitz and his selection was witnessed by Otto Frank and Peter van Pels.
• Auguste van Pels: Both her date and place of death are unknown but witnesses testified she was with the Frank sisters during part of their time in Bergen-Belsen, but that she was not present when they died in February/March. She is therefore believed to have been transferred before March 1945, to Buchenwald, then to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where she is believed to have died.
• Peter van Pels: died May 5, 1945, in Mauthausen during a death march. Otto Frank had protected him during their period of imprisonment together, as the two men had been assigned to the same work group. Frank later stated that he had urged Peter to hide in Auschwitz and remain behind with him, rather than set out on the forced march. Peter decided that he would have a better chance of survival if he joined the march. His death at the age of eighteen occurred three days before the liberation of Mauthausen.
• Fritz Pfeffer: died December 20, 1944, in Neuengamme concentration camp.

The helpers

• Miep Gies saved Anne Frank's diary without reading it. She later said that if she had read it, she would have needed to destroy it, as it contained a great deal of incriminating information. She and her husband Jan took Otto Frank into their home where he lived from 1945 until 1952. In 1994 she received the "Order of Merit" of the Federal Republic of Germany, and in 1995 received the highest honor from the Yad Vashem, the Righteous Among the Nations. She was appointed a "Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau" by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. In 1996 she shared an Academy Award with Jon Blair for their documentary Anne Frank Remembered. Born in 1909, Miep Gies as of 2005 resides alone in her apartment in Amsterdam.
• Jan Gies, husband of Miep, died January 26, 1993 in Amsterdam.
• Johannes Kleiman spent seven weeks in a work camp after his arrest, and was released after intervention from the Red Cross. He returned to Opekta, and took over the firm when Otto Frank moved to Basel in 1952. He died in 1959 at his office desk, at the age of sixty-three.
• Victor Gustav Kuglar spent seven months in various work camps, and escaped in March, 1945 when the camp was attacked by British troops. He remained in hiding in his hometown of Hilversum until liberated by Canadian troops. He migrated to Canada in 1955 and lived in Toronto. He received the "Medal of the Righteous" from Yad Vashem Memorial, with a tree planted in his honour on the Boulevard of the Righteous Among the Nations in 1973. He died December 16, 1981 in Toronto, after a long illness, at the age of eighty-one.
• Elisabeth 'Bep' Voskuijl left Opekta shortly after the war and married in 1946. She died in Amsterdam on May 6, 1983.
• Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl (father of Bep) whose ill health was often mentioned in Anne's diary, died of cancer, in late November, 1945.

Friends and extended family

• Susanne "Sanne" Ledermann was Anne's constant companion from the time of her arrival in Amsterdam, and is mentioned several times at the beginning of the diary. After his return to Amsterdam Otto Frank determined to investigate the fates of his daughters' friends. He learnt that Sanne, her sister Barbara, and their parents Franz and Ilse were arrested on June 20, 1943. Barbara Ledermann, who was a friend of Margot, pretended to be Aryan and a young soldier allowed her to leave. She survived the war. Sanne and her parents were sent first to Westerbork, then on November 16 to Auschwitz, where all three were gassed upon arrival.
• Ilse Wagner is mentioned several times in the early part of the diary. Her family had a ping pong table, and Anne and Margot frequently went to their house to play. Wagner was the first of Anne's circle of friends to be deported. Along with her mother and grandmother, she was sent to Sobibór extermination camp, where all three were gassed upon arrival on April 2, 1943.
• Charlotte Kaletta, the common law wife of Fritz Pfeffer was not Jewish and therefore was able to remain in her Amsterdam apartment during the occupation. Miep Gies was especially touched by the devotion Pfeffer and Kaletta displayed to each other, and frequently passed letters from one to the other, an act which the other members of the household viewed as imprudent, but which she felt was important. Kaletta's Jewish husband and their son both died in Auschwitz, but she held hope for some time after the war's end that Pfeffer had survived. When she learnt of his death, she married him posthumously. Otto Frank was sympathetic to her, and offered her assistance, however in the 1950s she severed all contact with him and with Miep and Jan Gies, because she was offended by the unflattering depiction of Pfeffer in Anne's diary. She died in Amsterdam, June 13, 1985.
• Werner Pfeffer was Fritz Pfeffer's son and was approximately the same age as Anne Frank. After his parents divorced, Werner was raised by his father, until his father felt it was too dangerous for him to remain in Germany, and in 1938 sent him to London to live with his uncle. By the end of the war he had lost most of his close family, including his father, and his mother, who had died in Theriesienstadt. Werner was never able to tolerate Kaletta, and so, with the deaths of his parents, made the decision to move to the United States. He settled in California and changed his name to Peter Pepper. In 1995, during the production of the documentary Anne Frank Remembered, Miep Gies travelled to Los Angeles, where Pepper met her for the first time. He died from cancer soon after.
• Several members of the Frank and Holländer families, including Otto's mother and brothers and Edith's sister and two brothers fled from Germany to Switzerland in the 1930s, and all who did so, survived the war. In his later years, Otto Frank lamented his decision to take his family to the Netherlands.

References

• Lee, Carol Ann (2000). The Biography of Anne Frank - Roses from the Earth. Viking. ISBN 0708991742.
• Müller, Melissa; Kimber, Rita & Kimber, Robert (translators); With a note from Miep Gies (2000). Anne Frank - The Biography. Metropolitan books. ISBN 0747545235.