After The Diaries

For over two years they hid from the Nazis in a secret annexe in Amsterdam. But on 4 August 1944 Anne Frank and her family were betrayed, arrested by the Gestapo and despatched to concentration camps. Anne’s poignant diaries stopped on that tragic day but now leading historian Jonathan Mayo has pieced together a nerve-shredding account of what happened.

OTTO and Edith Frank and their daughters, Margot and Anne, fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and settled in the Netherlands. But by mid-1942 life for Dutch Jews was increasingly harsh. They were forced to wear yellow stars and forbidden to run a business, travel on trams, sit on a park bench or even ride a bicycle.

So that July, after 16-year-old Margot received a call-up to work in a German labour camp, the family went into hiding in the upper storeys of Otto Frank’s former business premises in Amsterdam.

They were joined by another family, Auguste and Hermann van Pels with their son, Peter, and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer. By August 1944, having spent more than two years in hiding, they were daring to hope that the city would soon be liberated.

“I have the feeling that friends are approaching,” Anne wrote in her diary.

But the families were far from safe.

FRIDAY, 4 AUGUST 1944 6.45AM

It’s a misty morning in Amsterdam. On the second floor of the secret annexe at 263 Prinsengracht, 15-year-old Anne is asleep in a bed so small there are chairs at the end to make it longer for her. It’s her 761st day in hiding.

On the walls of the bedroom are pictures she’s cut out from magazines of the British princesses Elizabeth and Margaret and film stars Greta Garbo and Ginger Rogers. Anne shares the room with 55-year-old Fritz Pfeffer, who’s also fast asleep.

In the room above them, Auguste van Pels’ loud alarm clock goes off and Anne waits for the creak of a floorboard as Auguste’s husband, Hermann, makes his way downstairs to the bathroom. There’s a strict daily timetable for washing and dressing.

Next door to Anne in a briefcase in her parents’ bedroom is her most precious possession – her diary, which she started just a few weeks before they went into hiding.