CBSE Class 10 Answered
4 August 1944
Anne’s last entry in her diary ‘Kitty’ is that of 1 August 1944, three days before the ‘Secret Annexe’ is raided by the police. On 4 August 1944 a car arrived at the address of the Secret Annex in the morning. The eight people who were hiding in the annexe were arrested by German and Dutch police. It is believed that somebody informed the police authorities that the place was being used by certain people to hide from the Nazis.
The police seized everything that they could find in the Annexe. Although Mr Kugler and Mr Kleiman were arrested, Miep and Bep were not arrested. Fortunately, Anne’s diary was not taken away by the police, which Miep later found in the building and kept it safely until after the war. The eight people from the Annexe were first taken to a prison in Amsterdam, and then were sent to Auschwitz, the concentration camp in Poland.
Mr van Daan died by gas at Auschwitz but his wife was taken to several concentration camps. It is said that she died in some concentration camp but it is not known where. Peter van Daan died on 5 May 1945. He had to go on the terrible prisoners' walk from Auschwitz to Mauthausen in Austria on 16 January 1945. It is sad that he died just three days before the Allies reach the camp. Anne’s mother Edith Frank, died in the Auschwitz concentration camp on 6 January 1945 of hunger and fatigue.
Margot and Anne Frank, who were at the Auschwitz concentration camp, were taken to the BergenBelsen concentration camp near Hanover, in Germany. They both died in February or March 1945 probably of typhus, weeks before the British army arrived at the camp in April 1945. All the dead bodies were thrown together at the camp, typical of the treatment given to the holocaust victims.
Otto Frank was the only person to survive among the eight people who were caught from the Annexe. After Russian soldiers reached Auschwitz, he was finally taken back to Amsterdam. He moved to Switzerland in 1953 where he married again and lived there until his death in 1980. He spent the rest of his sharing the message of his daughter's diary with the world.