The Knock at the Bookcase: Anne Frank Is Arrested
On August 4, 1944, Nazi police raided the secret annex in Amsterdam and arrested Anne Frank and seven others — three days after her last diary entry.
Her last diary entry was dated August 1, 1944. Three days later, on the morning of August 4, the secret was over. Nazi police burst into the Amsterdam warehouse at Prinsengracht 263, pushed past the bookcase that hid a concealed doorway, and arrested the eight people who had lived in silence behind it for more than two years. Among them was a 15-year-old girl named Anne Frank.
Anne had been 13 when her family went into hiding in July 1942. Born in Frankfurt in 1929, she had moved to Amsterdam with her parents, Otto and Edith, and her sister Margot after Hitler's rise; when Germany occupied the Netherlands in 1940, the noose of anti-Jewish persecution tightened until hiding was the only choice. In the cramped rooms of the secret annex — joined by the van Pels family and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer — Anne filled diary after diary with the fierce, funny, observant voice of a teenager determined to become a writer. After a 1944 radio broadcast urged the Dutch to preserve records of the occupation, she began revising her diaries for future publication.
Someone betrayed them. To this day, no one knows who. On August 4, SS officer Karl Silberbauer and Dutch members of the Nazi security service stormed the building and arrested all eight, along with two of the brave employees who had been sheltering them.
The eight were sent to the Westerbork transit camp, then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Anne and Margot were later transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where both died of typhus in the winter of 1945 — weeks before the camp was liberated. Of the eight people from the annex, only Otto Frank survived.
After the war, Miep Gies — one of the helpers who had risked her life bringing the hidden families food — gave Otto the diary she had rescued from the ransacked annex. Reading it, he said, revealed a daughter he had never fully known. He had it published in 1947, and "The Diary of a Young Girl" became one of the most widely read books in the world.
Anne Frank was one of more than a million children murdered in the Holocaust. Her diary endures because it refuses to let them remain a number: it is the voice of one bright, particular girl, writing "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart" — three days before the knock came.
Photo: Ank Kumar, CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
