Original subtitles

Narrator: She is perhaps Hitler's best-known victim.

Her book has sold more than 25 million copies

and has been translated into at least 55 languages.

She has become a symbol of 10 million souls murdered by the Nazis,

Jews and non-Jews,

and, in particular, the one and a half million innocent children.

She was just 15 when she died,

a miserable and lonely death in a concentration camp in Germany.

Yet she is remembered for her faith in humanity.

This is the story of the life and legacy of Anne frank.

Narrator: In Amsterdam, some of the remnants of a once-thriving Jewish community.

Every person in this congregation, like Jews throughout Europe,

has a story of their own

of persecution, murder, fear or betrayal.

Even the rabbi spent the first two years of his life in hiding,

sheltered by a Christian family.

But one girl reaches beyond all those memories.

Hers is not just a holocaust story, for the voice of ahne frank

stands as a warning to all those who would discriminate on the basis

of color, culture or creed.

Her message is as fresh today as it was 50 years ago.

Narrator: The notorious Nazi propaganda film the eternal Jew.

Distorted images portraying an Aryan nightmare

of the Jewish threat to European civilization.

And this, the family frank:

Prosperous, cultivated, sophisticated, and integrated.

In fact, they were a German family. German to the core.

The antithesis of ghetto Jews.

Anne's father, Otto, even served as an officer in the German army in the first world war.

The family had lived in and around the German city of Frankfurt for generations,

but Otto had traveled the world,

even working in Macy's department store in New York,

where a college friend, Nathan Strauss, was the owner's son.

In 1925, the 36-year-old Otto married Edith hollander,

a 25-year-old Jewish girl from the German town of aachen,

near the Dutch border

they honeymooned in Italy.

Their first daughter, margot, followed nine months later

and their second, annelies, better known as Anne, in June, 1929.

It was a good life in Frankfurt in those early years.

One could almost forget the long shadow of national socialism.

But beneath the idyllic surface,

far removed from the children's world, turmoil.

Danger Jews

the landlord of their apartment turned out to be a Nazi party member

and in march, 1931, they moved.

The bank owned by the family also had serious problems,

resulting in its complete collapse in 1933,

caused by Otto's brother being the victim of a fraud

and the worldwide effects of the depression, particularly acute in Germany.

And, of course, the threat of the gathering storm.

On the streets, at the rallies...

One race one nation

and finally in January, 1933, the ballot box.

For it is often forgotten that Hitler gained power in a Democratic election.

For the Franks, the German dream was over.

Some of the family had already moved to Switzerland,

but Otto chose to try his luck in Holland

where he had prior business connections.

In Autumn, 1933, the family settled here in merwedeplein,

a modern housing development in south Amsterdam.

They quickly established a settled and full existence,

amongst other German refugees and Dutch neighbors.

We moved into the same neighborhood as the frank family,

and many other refugee families moved into that neighborhood,

and so there was a little bit of a German-Jewish enclave,

by no means a ghetto, but just a little enclave.

So quite often parents would speak German in the street,

which annoyed us children terribly, of course.

My father was a deputy minister in the interior.

And he was the chief of the press in Germany.

And he immediately fled when the whole government stepped down.

And, okay, we went to england before,

but he didn't find a job there he didn't have to work for shabbat

and so we stopped here in merwedeplein.

Laureen: Life for Jewish refugees as I experienced it as a young child,

in a way had its charms.

Besides, what I particularly enjoyed was the fact that we adapted faster than our parents.

So our parents had to turn to us and ask us:

"How do people say these things? What's done in this country?"

And I found this tremendously democratizing.

I really enjoyed that part very much.

Narrator: The Franks formed the hub of an active social life

amongst the other refugee families.

But for one visitor at least,

Anne's behavior made the Sunday gatherings something of an ordeal.

She was just what you would call naughty. Heh-heh.

She had to sit on a table where everything was very beautiful

in a beautiful dress and have her chocolate without spoil it.

And she just didn't want to.

She got up and she made fuss, and she...

Drew attention.

And then she grew angry.

And that angriness,

that was the problem between the parents.

Mother frank said, "you sit down."

And father frank said:

"Ah, leave the child alone. She's so small and she's so little"

so she was allowed to do the things she wanted.

And that happened every time.

Every time that girl was naughty,

was impertinent, later on, really impertinent.

Laureen: I remember very strongly that Mr. frank

was seen as an ideal daddy, that he was the daddy

because he was so much involved in his girls' education.

Then there was the story that he fixed his wife breakfast on Sunday morning

and brought it to her bedside, which was unheard of in our circles.

So that news made the round:

"Oh, Mr. frank does this for his wife! How great.”

Otto: We left Germany in 1933

because I didn't want to educate my children with blinkers.

They were not allowed to see Christian friends anymore.

In Holland, it was different.

Narrator: Upon her arrival in Amsterdam,

the 4-year-old Anne was sent to the montessori school near her home,

where I ies goslar became her best friend.

Years later in her diary, Anne wrote this of lies:

Close: "Hanneli goslar, or lies as she's called at school,

is a bit on the strange side.

She's usually shy,

outspoken at home, but reserved around other people.

She blabs whatever you tell her to her mother.

But she says what she thinks.

And lately I've come to appreciate her a great deal.”

Narrator: Anne and lies' friendship had begun on their very first day at school.

Lies: Exactly opposite of the door,

I saw the back of Anne, and she was ringing these little bells.

And she turned around, and she saw me, I saw her, and hop,

we run each into the arms of another.

And I think my mother went away. I didn't look at her anymore.

And this was the first day

and since then we were together really till the end.

Of the two sisters, I was really more impressed with margot than with Anne,

and that for rather obvious reasons.

Margot was a year and a half older than I am, so she was a model.

She was ladylike. She was always composed.

She always did her homework. She was just the ideal young lady.

I was a tomboy, so I always thought it would be great to be like margot.

Anne was very lively, and I did not need any model for that.

I was lively myself.

Besides, she was two years younger. You never model yourself after a younger child.

So I know her... "Yap-yap-yap-yap-yap!" All the time.

I could do that just as well.

I will start with the sentence my mother said always.

My mother said, "god knows everything. Anne knows everything better."

This describes Anne, you understand? I don't know in english.

She knew everything better.

Anne was... in America you say "spicy." A spicy qitl.

She always was friendly with the boys. The boys liked her.

The girls liked her. She also always was in the center of the thing.

Then she had something I never saw, not before and not afterwards.

She could take out the socket out of the shoulder,

and she would sit and everybody looked.

And then she made out, and k-nack, k-nack.

You have to be very careful. You can end up with an orthopedic doctor.

She liked it, and everybody was looking at her. And then she was happy.

Narrator: When he came to Holland, Otto frank set up the opekta company,

a Dutch subsidiary of a German concern selling pectin,

a substance used in making jam.

The progressive Otto had a film produced to promote the product.

In the early days he had four key colleagues, all non-Jews.

One of those first employees was an Austrian who'd grown up in Holland.

Miep gies.

It was a very fine place to work

because we understand all the people in the office.

We were very close, friendly together.

He was always our boss but also our father.

We can go to Mr. frank with all our troubles and so on.

Narrator: The office boy and general helper from 1933 until 1939 was henk Van beusekom.

Narrator: Dutch Nazis putting on a show in Amsterdam in 1938.

Though Hitler had succeeded in infiltrating the police, the civil service,

even the prime minister's office,

in those years before the war,

Holland was generally good to its Jewish refugees from Germany.

Despite these scenes of fascist collaborators,

like the Dutch Jews, most of the German refugees believed that they would be safe in Holland,

far from the fiihrer in their former homeland.

Few, very few, tried to leave for safer shores.

And Otto and his family were not amongst them.

Sometimes I said to Mr. frank:

"Mr. frank, you must go out of the Netherlands. It will be danger for you."

"No, miep," said he.

"In the first world war, the German came not here in the Netherlands.

So they come the second time, also not."

And I said to him, "you must go to America.”

"No, I stay here because I love the Netherlands."

Narrator: The faith of Otto frank and tens of thousands like him

was catastrophically misplaced.

By may, 1940, Hitler had conquered almost all of Europe.

Austria, Poland, Norway, Denmark,

yugoslavia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria,

and most of France had fallen to the might of Germany's air force and stormtroops.

Europe's low countries remained as a tantalizing morsel

to be swallowed whole

then, by the 14th of may, 1940, it was all over.

Five days after the Germans had finally smashed through Holland's borders,

the Dutch capitulated.

In Amsterdam, Hitler's victory was greeted with black humor.

My father made himself look like Hitler.

It was wonderful how he did it.

Here with the hair and a black mustache.

The Franks lived next door, and he would ring at the door and come in.

I remember them all, you know, the first moment.

They were really frightened what happened.

If you could think Hitler didn't come to their house.

But it was very funny how everybody was frightened at the moment

till they began...

Till they saw who it was and what happened.

Mm-hm.

Blair: What happened to your father?

He died in bergen-belsen.

Narrator: The German vice tightened gradually.

At first, they conducted a hearts-and-minds campaign to win over the Dutch,

their Aryan brothers.

Thank Adolf Hitler

Jewish quarter

for the Jews, it was another story,

as one by one their freedom was gradually restricted

by a never-ending series of anti-Jewish decrees

already familiar in Germany and other conquered territories.

Jews prohibited

by 1942, no area of Jewish life was excluded from German control.

Jews prohibited by law

lies: Everything that was fun in life was forbidden.

You were not allowed to go any more to a park or to a swimming pool.

You were not allowed to go to shops.

Only to Jewish shops and only between 3 and 4.

Eight o'clock in the evening you had to be at home.

You had to wear the star.

You had always to have something with you that would look if you are Jewish or not,

even if you had the star.

Then things were... then you were frightened.

You just wouldn't go out. To school and home, and that's it, yes.

How one of the friends of Anne said:

"Everything I did, I was afraid it is forbidden."

Well, the effect of these restrictions

was, I think, mainly,

because it came inch by inch, very slowly:

"If that's all, we can bear it."

We always had a stiff upper lip, and we tried to make the best of it.

If you can't go to public school anymore,

well, there are good Jewish teachers.

If you can't go to concerts, which was important in my family,

well, there are fine Jewish musicians, so we make chamber music at home.

So we always tried to put the best spin on whatever happened.

And that way, I think, we tried to ward off

thinking about how we were being more and more restricted

and what was going to be sure to come afterwards.

Narrator: Otto frank, always the perfect father,

rented movies to show the girls and their friends on the living room wall.

Rin tin tin was a particular favorite with Anne.

She and her friend Jacqueline Van maarsen created a make-believe cinema of their own.

Together we made little cards to get in.

Of course, everybody could come in, but we wanted to make it look real

by making these little tickets.

"Jacqueline Van maarsen

is invited on Sunday, the 1st of march,

with Anne frank, merwedeplein 37,

11:00,

for a movie.

Without this card, no entrance.

Please inform in time. Row 2, seat 2."

The lighthouse by the sea with rin tin tin

narrator: This film of rin tin tin supplied the entertainment for ahne and her friends

when they celebrated her 13th birthday,

her last in freedom.

Her prized gift that 13th birthday,

on Friday, the 12th of June, 1942,

was her diary,

a present she had bought with her father a few days before.

From the beginning, Anne addressed her diary as a special friend

with whom she would conduct a secret correspondence.

Her first entry was this:

Close: "I hope I will be able to confide everything to you,

as I have never been able to confide in anyone.

And I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”

Narrator: Her early diary jottings were typical of a 13-year-old:

Gossip about schoolfriends, jokes,

and a record of her unextraordinary daily life,

together with photos and other scraps.

But in the years that followed, she did indeed also share her most intimate secrets,

including her increasing interest in the development of her body and in sex.

Jacqueline: What interested Anne very much was sexual behavior,

and she wanted to know what it was all about and she didn't know anything.

And she asked her father about it, and I knew much more than she did

because I had my sister, who told me everything.

So I thought, "well, I'm not going to enlighten you altogether.

You just ask your father."

At the time, ahem, Anne's body was not changing yet.

And I think that she was curious

because she had some little...

She used a bra from margot with cotton wool in it

to show a bit of breast,

and I did not need that kind of thing

and she was interested to see exactly.

Narrator: While his daughter was innocently absorbed with her developing body,

ofto frank was mindful that if the Nazi measures against Jews

continued to their inevitable conclusion,

he and his family would need to take special precautions to protect themselves.

For almost a year, he had been secretly preparing a hiding place for them all,

together with his German business associate Herman Van pels,

Van pels' wife, auguste, and son, Peter.

The hiding place was to be in several rooms behind the company offices on prinsengracht

in central Amsterdam.

Laboriously, and unknown to all but the innermost circle,

Otto accumulated furniture, cooking implements,

bedding, and clothes.

At the frank family home, two and a half miles away in merwedeplein,

Sunday the 5th of July, 1942, was the day that everyone had dreaded,

had hoped against hope would never come.

That Sunday the Germans delivered this innocuous document by registered mail

fo several thousand Jews,

the majority of them of German extraction aged between 15 and 40.

They were to report within nine days to be transported to a "labor" camp in Germany.

Margot frank was one of them,

throwing her family, like so many, into crisis.

The agonies at that moment, when you had some youngsters saying:

"Oh, labor won't floor me. I'm strong. I can do whatever's asked of me.

I'm going and that's it."

And the parents would say, "no, stay. It's going to be the end of your life."

So you saw the family in tension.

Then you had other families where a youngster would say:

"I don't want to go. I'm scared. What's going to happen to me?"

The parents would say:

"You must go. Remember, grandma lives with us and the baby, and so on.

If you don't go, all of us will be punished.”

And you saw the families really torn asunder by these events,

and that was terrible.

Narrator: Nine years after fleeing Germany, the Franks were on the run again.

By 7:30 on Monday the 6th of July, 1942,

the whole family had disappeared,

leaving behind an elaborate false trail indicating they had fled to Switzerland.

We came here, and the kitchen was not, uh...

The kitchen was just left like it was

with everything dirty in the sink.

I went into her room, and I saw her bed not made

and the shoes that she loved so much, she had just received them for the summer,

were near the bed.

I came here, you see.

I went up, and I am ringing and ringing, and ringing,

and nobody opens.

And at the end, somebody opened. It was a tenant, Mr. goudschmidt.

He had the room at the roof in the frank apartment.

He looked at me as if he had never seen me before,

and I didn't know what happened.

He said, "what do you want?"

"I come to play as usual." And he said:

"Yes, but don't you know? The frank family left for Switzerland."

Narrator: Miep gies had been given the dangerous responsibility of getting margot,

who was now in flight from the Germans, to the hiding place.

I took margot by bicycle.

Monday morning, very raining.

And that was good for us because the German

came not on street.

And I came with her to the prinsengracht 263,

go up with her.

She was very...

Blair: Upset? - Upset. Yes. She was very upset.

I saw it

and when I was standing with her in front of the hiding place,

I was afraid that she would fall down.

And what could I do with her?

I opened the door and put her in.

Narrator: Despite Otto's carefully laid plans,

on their first day in the hiding place, the family was surrounded by chaos.

When I come there, it was terrible.

Uh, nothing was okay.

And Mrs. frank and margot were sitting down on the bed.

They could not do anything.

There was

they could not accept this situation.

But Anne and Mr. frank were busy, very busy.

I ask Mrs. frank, "can I do something for you?"

"No," said Mrs. frank.

"For today, I have all the things."

And then I went down.

But the next day, when I came, all was okay.

Blair: So Anne and Mr. frank...? - Were busy the whole day.

Blair: Was this typical of the family?

Yes. That was typical for the family.

Narrator: From now on,

the family was completely dependent on Otto frank's four employees

who had volunteered to help them survive.

Johannes kleiman and Viktor kugler kept Anne and margot supplied

with school books and other reading matter

at the same time as ensuring the opekta company continued to function,

even producing record profits that could be used to keep everyone alive.

Miep gies and her assistant, the 23-year-old typist, bep voskuijl,

had the dangerous and difficult daily task of supplying the residents of the annex with food,

which was purchased on the black market or with forged or stolen ration books.

In one of her first diary entries in hiding,

Anne described her new home to her imaginary friend.

Close: "Thursday, July 9th, 1942.

Dear kitty:

Our secret annex is at the back of the building.

There's just one small step in front of the door and then you're inside.

Straight ahead of you is a steep flight of stairs.

To the left is a narrow hallway opening on to a room

that serves as the frank family's living room and bedroom.

Next door is a smaller room,

the bedroom and study of the two young ladies of the family.

To the right of the stairs is a windowless washroom with a sink.

The door in the corner leads to the toilet,

and another one to margot's and my room.

If you go up the stairs and open the door at the top,

you're surprised to see such a large, light and spacious room

in an old canal house like this.

It contains a stove and a sink.

This will be the kitchen and bedroom for Mr. and Mrs. Van pels,

as well as the general living room, dining room, and study for us all.

A tiny side room is to be Peter Van pels' bedroom.

Then, just as in the front part of the building,

there's an attic and a loft."

Narrator: As they settled into their confinement,

the chimes of the clock from the nearby westerkerk

seemed to act as a constant reminder of the world they had left behind them.

Before long, the entrance to the hiding place was ingeniously disquised as a bookcase.

But in every respect, what lay behind those innocuous files

was untypical of the shelter provided to other Jews.

It was relatively spacious, within a city,

and there were people outside dedicated to helping and protecting them.

Most families were torn apart,

but here all four of the Franks could stay together.

A week later, they were joined by their friends, the Van pelses.

Miep gies visited each day.

Uh when I came here from this door.

In the middle was standing the table with the chairs.

All the people, seven people,

were standing in the line here.

Did not say any word.

Did not say any word,

but waited for me to begin.

It was always an awful moment for me

because I felt so the dependence

from these people of us, the helpers.

Except Anne. Anne was in the front.

She asked, "hello, miep, what is the news?"

Narrator: In those early months, Anne was desperately lonely

and always hoping for news of her friends.

She even invented a correspondence with one of them.

Close: "September 25th, 1942.

Dear Jacqueline,

I'm writing this letter in order to bid you goodbye.

I can't write to everyone and that's why I'm just writing to you.

I would be grateful if you would be really nice

and keep up a secret correspondence with me.

All inquiries to Mrs. gies.

I hope we'll meet again soon,

but it probably won't be before the end of the war.

Well, then, Jackie, I hope things go well with you

and that I hear from you soon.

Your best friend, Anne.

P.s. I hope that we'll always stay best friends until we meet again.

Bye."

I think that she wrote it immediately after she went into hiding.

And afterwards, at that moment in September she wrote it down.

She invented in that my answer to her

and then she wrote a second letter

in answer to this invented letter.

And she must have been very lonely that she invented these letters.

Narrator: Anne also wrote a long fantasy in which she imagined living with her cousin bernd

in the safety of Switzerland.

When I think that when Anne wrote about Switzerland and about me,

To realize that she was like a bird in a cage

and we over here in Switzerland

were free to do anything we wanted to do.

And all her dreams.

Were caged in,

and we, the boys, her cousins,

could fulfill everything she was dreaming of.

That must have been a very, very hard thing for her.

Blair: In the diary, she even designs a skating dress

- s0 she can be your skating partner? Bernd: Yes.

Yes, when I saw that the first time,

it really overwhelmed me.

It made me cry, to be very honest.

Especially then that I knew she was not alive anymore when I saw it.

I would have loved to go skating with her.

Narrator: Initially Anne also addressed her diary entries to a wide circle of imaginary friends,

all characters from a well-known series of books for adolescent girls.

Eventually, she settled on one friend, kitty, as her diary correspondent.

Anne was always a very curious child.

Uh, when I was upstairs and went away,

she'd always wait till the last one to speak with me

and then she had me.

And she asked everything that happened outside.

And I told her the truth.

The terrible truth.

Close: "November 19th, 1942.

Dearest kitty:

Countless friends and acquaintances have been taken off to a dreadful fate.

Night after night, green and gray military vehicles cruise the streets.

In the evenings when it's dark,

I often see long lines of good, innocent people

accompanied by crying children, walking on and on.

No one is spared.

The sick, the elderly, children,

babies and pregnant women, all are marched to their death

I get frightened myself when I think of close friends who are now at the mercy

of the cruelest monsters to stalk the earth.

And all because they're Jews."

At the beginning of the class in September 41, we had about 50 children.

The deportations began in July 42.

And then, from the 50 children,

all the time, children disappeared.

When you came in your class, you said:

"That child's missing and that one and that one.”

You did hope they were ill.

But you knew that they were round up

or maybe they were hidden.

At the end of the school year in April '43,

there were three children left.

Two boys and I.

And we did our final examination, uh, together.

The second part of the final examination, I was alone.

It was very sad.

Very difficult.

Blair: From 50 children, one remained at the end of the year?

Mm-hm. Mm-hm_

Narrator: While the roundups of their friends continued outside,

in their hiding place, Anne and the others tried to establish a kind of normality.

Close: "Dear kitty,

up to now, our bedroom, with its blank walls, was very bare.

Thanks to father, who brought my entire

postcard and movie star collection here beforehand,

and to a brush and a pot of glue,

I was able to plaster the walls with pictures.”

Lies: We were both collecting pictures

from the children of the queen.

Here you see Elizabeth, today queen Elizabeth,

and her sister Margaret.

And I also was collecting, and we would change together.

We had from Belgium,

from all the queens in the world, we would change pictures.

I liked it very much. Anne was also collecting from film stars.

This I wasn't interested in at all

I only remember she had Deanna durbin. This one.

This is the only one I remember from then. I never saw a film.

I don't remember if Anne saw films.

We went to see Shirley temple films.

And here in Amsterdam, we had a cinema, cineac.

There you could see one hour a little film and news.

And then it started over. There, we would go very often.

Narrator: Four months after going into hiding, an eighth person joined the secret annex,

a 64-year-old German dentist, Fritz pfeffer.

Margot went to sleep on a folding bed with her parents,

and Anne had to share her room with the hewcomer.

Miep: Look, Mr. pfeffer was my dentist.

And Mr. pfeffer asked me always:

"Miep, do you have a place for me?"

Then I went next day

in the hiding place and tell it to Mr. Frank and the other peoples.

They listened to me.

Next day Mr. frank said:

"Miep, where seven people can eat, can eight also eat."

Narrator: Pfeffer took up residence in Anne's bedroom,

complete with his drill and dental implements.

While none of those in hiding would now lack treatment of their cavities,

the relationship between the 54-year-old disciplinarian

and the free spirit in her early teens

was inevitably stormy.

On this corner...

It was the desk

for Anne and, uh, pfeffer.

There this

this gave sometimes troubles with Anne.

Anne was standing on her rights.

From so till so is her time.

But I believe Mr. pfeffer, uh...

Did not see the importance of a diary

for a little child.

Close: "Him and his lies.

I'll smack his ugly mug so hard, he'll go bouncing off the wall.

Anyone who is so petty and pedantic at the age of 54 was born that way

and is never going to change."

Narrator: What Anne never knew was that Fritz pfeffer had a son

whom he had raised as a single parent in Germany

until sending him to england after kristallnacht in 1938.

A few weeks later, pfeffer himself fled to Amsterdam

with his fiancée Charlotte.

But his 11-year-old son never saw his father again.

Here we're talking about a little girl, under very difficult circumstances,

who first of all decided that my father was not a nice man.

Therefore, she called him Dr. dussel, which in english is "idiot."

As far as my point of view...

Retrospectively to the age of 11 and below...

Uh, there's a very large inaccuracy.

First of all, my father, although being a very strict man,

was a very kind man.

What other people don't recognize

is his love of life, his love of freedom.

My father was a sportsman.

He loved to row. He loved to ride horses.

He liked to, oh, climb mountains.

So if you take a man who's always been active all his life

and then in flight he ends up here,

it's like, uh, caging a bird.

Blair: Weekly, Mrs. miep gies would bring a package containing letters

and other personal messages from Charlotte karletta,

and weekly, she would take a letter from him to her.

What do you feel now about what that may have meant for your father?

What it meant for my father is that...

Is a thin lifeline.

A thin lifeline that was the only hope of expression

and relationship.

Because with Charlotte's letters to him

expressing her love, her feelings,

her news, whatever it was in those letters,

is the only thing where my father would have

the semblance of mental health.

Because you're a prisoner of your own mind.

Narrator: For the first time, Fritz pfeffer's son meets his father's protector.

Mr pfeffer.

How do you do?

Fine.

I was a very good friend of your father.

Unbelievable

nice to meet you.

Do you speak english?

Very bad.

Narrator: Two months after this meeting, Peter pepper died of cancer.

If Anne reserved her special venom for Fritz pfeffer,

with the claustrophobia of the months in hiding that turned into years,

all the adults at one time or another were subjected to the fury of her pen.

Close: "September 27th, 1942.

Some people, like the Van pels, seem to take special delight

not only in raising their own children

but in helping others raise theirs.

Margot doesn't need it since she is naturally good,

kind and clever, perfection itselr.

But I seem to have enough mischief for the two of us.

More than once, the air has been filled with the Van pels' admonitions

and my saucy replies.

They keep telling me I should talk less, mind my own business and be more modest.

But I seem doomed to failure.”

Narrator: Otto, the ever-indulgent father, was frequently called in

fo act as a peacemaker between Anne and the others.

Her adoration of him was matched only by her increasing problems with her mother.

Close: "I cling to father because my contempt of mother is growing daily

and it is only through him that I'm able to retain

the last ounce of family feeling I have left.

I don't know how I should act.

I can't very well confront her with her carelessness, her sarcasm

and her hard-heartedness,

yet I can't continue to take the blame for everything.

I'm the opposite of mother so of course we clash.

She's not a mother to me, I have to mother myself.

I'm charting my own course and will see where it leads me"

Mrs. frank was the most depressed of all the people.

Uh

Sometimes when I go out of the hiding place,

the staircase downstairs,

she went with me till the door.

I did hot understand that

what did she want of me?

And once again, I go with her in her sleeping room,

and she closed the door and then she said fo me:

"Miep...

I am so afraid.”

Blair: We won't get saved.

She told me all her troubles.

But what could I do?

I did not say anything

because I was in the same position as she.

Narrator: While Anne and her mother feuded, in the second year of their imprisonment,

she developed a strong passion for Peter Van pels,

the 17-year-old boy with whom she shared her caged existence.

They spent hours together in the loft chatting

or simply staring out the window at the Chestnut tree.

Close: "Sunday, march 19th, 1944.

I have the feeling that Peter and I share a secret.

When he looks at me with those eyes, with that smile and with that wink,

it's as if a light goes on inside me.

I hope things stay like this

and we'll have many, many more happy hours together.

Your grateful and happy Anne."

Peter Van pels was a blue-eyed boy

with very little intellectual capacity.

I did not know him nearly as well as I knew Anne,

but he once came to our house when we were reading the classics

and he was so singularly bewildered by it

that I remember thinking:

"My goodness, he doesn't know a thing!"

Narrator: The relationship with Peter waxed and then waned.

They cuddled and kissed, but as she noted in her diary,

Anne gradually became dissatisfied with his inability to express his feelings.

The pressures of confinement created and then crushed their adolescent love affair

in the secret annex, the claustrophobia was stifling.

The radio, with its broadcasts from england,

was an essential lifeline to news from the outside world.

Every allied victory brought hope, every defeat, gloom.

Arguments over food blew up into major rows.

And then always the ever-present threat of discovery.

The windows had to be covered by blinds, even in the heat of summer.

The toilet could only be used outside office hours.

No one could walk in shoes oh the lower of the two floors

for fear that the workers in the warehouse below would hear them.

And always the question: "Would they be betrayed,

or would they betray themselves by some inadvertent error?"

To add to everyone's fears,

the warehouse and offices under their hiding place were burgled several times.

My father had the maintenance of the building, the daily maintenance, and, um...

Well, later I recognized that he must have been the carpenter

that's repairing the door

which is opened by the burglary in the book, in Anne frank's diary.

Blair: I think there were two burglaries, weren't there?

Yeah the other one was me.

Blair: What were you after? - I think it's a mixture of adventure and spices.

We found some spices.

But we had to move out

because we recognized people living in the house

because they made a mistake upstairs.

That's what I later realized.

I didn't know it was the frank family.

We did not know.

We were not supposed to know who was living in a house

because of what I explained earlier.

You didn't speak about people living somewhere.

So we heard them flushing the toilet,

so we moved out because that was a sign people were upstairs.

And, well, we were not there with an agreement of anybody, were we?

Close: "Wednesday, march 29th, 1944.

Dearest kitty:

Mr. bolkestein, the cabinet minister,

speaking on the Dutch broadcast from London,

said that after the war,

a collection would be made of diaries and letters dealing with the war.

Of course, everyone pounced on my diary.

Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a novel about the secret annex.

The title alone would make people think it was a detective story.

Seriously though, 10 years after the war,

people would find it very amusing to read how we lived,

what we ate and what we talked about as Jews in hiding."

Narrator: For six weeks, Anne thought constantly about the message from London.

Then she made up her mind.

She had wanted to be a journalist and a famous writer,

to travel the world, see Paris and Hollywood.

This was her opportunity.

Starting in the middle of may, 1944,

she began to furiously rewrite her whole diary from the very first entry

with a view to future publication,

at the same time as keeping up her regular diary entries.

Close: "Tuesday, June 6, 1944.

Dearest kitty:

'This is d-day, ' the BBC announced at 12.

'This is the day. The invasion has begun.'

a huge commotion in the annex.

Is this really the beginning of a long-awaited liberation?

The liberation we've all talked so much about,

which still seems too good, too much of a fairy tale ever to come true?

Will this year, 1944, bring us victory?

We don't know yet.

But where there's hope, there's life.

It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.

Oh, the best part of the invasion

is that I have the feeling that friends are on the way.

Those terrible Germans have oppressed and threatened us for so long

that the thought of friends and salvation

means everything to us.

Maybe, margot says,

I can even go back to school in October or September.”

Narrator: With the allies advancing, it was natural that spirits in the annex soared.

Otto frank kept a map on the wall

tracking every advance of the British and American troops.

But the odds were stacked against those in the hiding place.

Of the 25,000 Jews who hid from the Nazis in Holland during the second world war,

some 8 to 9000 were discovered by the Germans

or betrayed by their Dutch hosts.

Many of the Franks' neighbors, some of whom were even known Nazi sympathizers,

knew that there was something strange going on

behind the blinds of the back house at 263 prinsengracht.

Any one of them could have called the authorities at any time

to collect the reward for betraying Jews in hiding.

Then Anne herself chronicled many acts of carelessness

that could have led to the sort of suspicion that could easily lead on to betrayal.

It has never been proved how they were betrayed,

but on a sunny summer morning in 1944,

two years after they first stepped behind their secret door,

their world collapsed.

It was the 4th of August, 1944.

You know, it was always my task to go first up in the hiding place.

Also this day.

I go up, took my shopping list,

talked with the people...

And came down.

After an hour, I was working in the office.

Uh

Bep in front of me, koophuis on this side.

The door goes open, but I did not look.

And it was quiet.

In a moment, I look up,

and there was a man standing before me with a gun to me and said:

"Quiet. No words."

Blair: Was there ever a plan for this sort of situation?

No no.

We were so, uh, sure

that it never would happen.

Narrator: The authorities had been tipped off by an anonymous phone call

that there were Jews hiding in the opekta offices.

Four Dutch plainclothes policemen from the German security service,

led by an Austrian officer, went straight to the secret bookcase.

I could hear the voice of the Nazi.

And I heard this man

spoke with a Vienna accent.

And if you know, I'm born in Vienna. I know that accent.

I stand up and say to him,

in a nearly friendly mien:

"You are a Vienna. I'm a Vienna too."

And this one sentence

was perhaps too much for this man.

He was standing there, looked at me.

When he come to him, he come to me...

So near to me that I feel his

his ardem. Blair: His breath

his breath, I feel his breath.

I did not say any word.

I was

he was going in my office, from the one wall to the other,

- as a wild, uh, "enimel." ” Blair: Animal.

Animal

after a while, he stood still,

looked me a little friendlier.

Narrator: When the Germans captured Jews in hiding,

they looted everything of value.

Officially, this Booty was meant to finance the transportation of the Jewish prisoners

to the Polish death camps.

But corruption was rife

and Jewish valuables often lined the pockets of Nazi policemen.

Needing a container for his loot,

the Franks' Austrian arresting officer, ss oberscharfiihrer Karl Josef silberbauer,

emptied the contents of Otto frank's briefcase onto the floor

and thus, he left behind Anne's diary.

After the Franks and the other peoples were away,

I come here in.

And found.

The diary scattered on the floor.

Ellie and me, bep and me.

Bep and me, we saw this.

"That is the diary of Anne! Please take! Take it!"

We took all the things,

but I was afraid that I had not all the paper of the diary.

I knew that. But I was so in hurry...

Because I was afraid that this Austrian man came again.

Blair: That the officer...? - That the officer... yeah.

Because he say, "I come back."

Narrator: Within two weeks of miep gies saving Anne's diary,

the Dutch removal firm of a-puls stripped the hiding place of every possession,

fo be sent to Germany to aid bombed-out German civilians.

Silberbauer and his Dutch assistants had taken the eight Jewish prisoners

fo gestapo headquarters, housed here in a former school in Amsterdam.

Of the helpers, Johannes kleiman and Viktor kugler were also arrested,

though not the two women, miep gies and bep voskuijl.

Kleiman and kugler were then sent here to amersfoort labor camp in central Holland,

shown in this film during a Dutch red cross inspection.

Kleiman was released in September due to bad health,

and kugler managed to escape in 1945,

when the train in which he and other prisoners

were being transported to Germany was bombed by American planes.

The day after the arrest of the Franks, the Van pels and pfeffer,

miep tried one last desperate effort to help them.

I go to the gestapo.

And when you dare go in,

you did not know if you come out.

I phoned this Austrian man...

And he said, "yes, come."

I went to him.

But when I came there, his office was full of young people.

Secretaries and all the peoples.

But he was sitting in the corner.

And when I came in, I could not... I think:

"I cannot speak with this man what I want.”

So I go to the corner to him,

over his desk, and I did so.

"Understand me," I said to him.

And then I went away.

Next morning, I go to him.

He was standing in the door,

waiting for me.

"I am sorry," he said to me.

"I can't do anything for you

because I am not high enough. You understand me?”

And I said to him, "I don't believe you."

"Go to my boss." And I go upstairs.

I knocked on the door. Nobody said something.

Then I opened the door, and what did I see?

A large table sitting high German people.

Their caps on the table, and in the middle,

the radio, listening to england.

That was very, very...

Was not allowed for the German peoples.

And it was very dangerous for me because I saw what they did.

And I said, "who is here the boss?"

One man came to me, pushed me out of the door.

And then I went down.

And this Vienna man was standing in the door.

He said, "what did I say to you?"

And then I went down.

And I feel

the curtain of this play was fallen for me.

Narrator: After four days in the cellars of the gestapo building,

the prisoners were taken to the railway station in Amsterdam.

There, they were loaded under guard onto an ordinary passenger train.

Janny brilleslijper, a member of the Dutch resistance,

was amongst the prisoners.

Narrator: This was the first destination for the Franks and the other prisoners.

Westerbork transit camp in northern Holland.

This film was produced by the camp commandant

to show his superiors in Berlin how successful he was

in keeping his temporary prisoners occupied

before sending them on to less benign places in Poland or Germany.

104,000 people were processed through here between 1942 and 1945,

more than 75 percent of the Jews in Holland before the outbreak of war.

Proudly, and without irony,

the commandant showed the bizarre humiliation of his prisoners,

who were largely ignorant of the fate that awaited them.

Of the 60,000 or so who were sent to Auschwitz from here,

only 673 were ever to return.

And of the 34,313 transported to sobibor death camp,

just 19 came back.

In the meantime, westerbork offered ball games and calisthenics.

The Jews were encouraged to entertain themselves with a weekly cabaret.

Three survivors of that time in August 1944

returned for the first time in 50 years.

All, like the Franks, had been captured in hiding.

It is maybe unbelievable,

but when we were arrested and brought to that prison...

I cannot say it was a kind of relief. No.

But there was something that we said:

"Now this is maybe the end of the war."

Because we knew the invasion was going on

and the end is finally in sight.

"What we have to do now is try to survive this."

It was so overwhelming to come here. I knew it was westerbork.

And I thought, "this is the end,” because I knew what happened in Germany.

And I knew that they were going to kill us.

We never gave up hope that we would not survive the war.

And there was not that much gestapo supervision in the camps.

The first people I saw at the gate were the Franks.

I knew margot rather well and I knew Anne.

We said to each other, "you too, here? You too?

Were you hidden? What happened?" Ahem.

But very soon you were taken inside the camp,

and you had to be registered,

and you got your wooden shoes

because we were punished because we were hidden.

For me, it has been the best time of the war.

No hunger, nice boys.

Um.

We worked during the daytime, wasn't bad.

Then we got food,

and we were standing around and making jokes with each other.

Narrator: Like other prisoners, the eight from the annex

were given make-work jobs by their captors.

The Franks were amongst those who had the dirty task of breaking up old batteries for recycling.

Otto frank wanted something better for his Anne.

I was cleaning a table and then at once, somebody came to me, uh,

with a girl...

That was Otto frank later on I knew it.

And with Anne, and he asked me:

"Here's Anne, my daughter. Do you have work for her?"

Because he wanted, of course, her to be inside and with us.

And, uh, then she said to me, "il can help you. I'm very handy, I can do everything."

Sal: This was the end, actually.

This was it

my grandparents...

All my uncles, all my aunts, all my nieces, all my nephews,

all my friends.

They came here, and it was the beginning of the end.

And I really...

Feel like this is a.

Big cemetery.

Frieda: In the end you start to believe that it won't happen.

You know there are transports going each Tuesday.

But when two months have passed

and your own name wasn't on the list,

you start to believe, "we can stay here until the end of the war."

Because by then, of course, we knew that there would be an end

although it was incredible,

but we knew that the english and the Americans were already in Europe.

And then it came and you became very factual.

You took your things, everything...

You got back the things that belonged to you because they had taken that away from you,

because they gave you that outfit.

And, um...

It was like what happened so many times later.

It was like having...

I don't know how you call it.

You don't quite realize what's going on

and what will happen with you and to you.

Narrator: 83 trains left westerbork during the second world war for the east,

for the death camps of Auschwitz and sobibor.

On September the 3rd, 1944, they loaded many of the Jews in westerbork

onto the very last transport to Auschwitz.

1019 men, women and children,

amongst them, the group of eight from the secret annex.

For most, it was to be their last sight of Holland.

Frieda: Darkness... is the first thing I think about.

Being cramped in.

Too many people.

No room enough.

Luggage.

No possibility to lie.

Sitting for three days.

Now and then standing.

You were, uh, like in a trance.

You didn't realize.

You realized that very bad things were to happen

and, ahem...

To be completely powerless.

Frieda: Sometimes we stood up.

We got up and looked through cracks,

and when we were at a station when the train stopped.

Because we still had no idea how we went and where it would end

and how long it would take.

People cried, and on the other side, they told stories to each other

to try to sleep, to sleep standing.

And, uh...

There was not enough food and drink.

We were, I think, about 40 or 50 people in that cattle car.

We were standing.

Sometimes we got to our knees to rest a little bit.

Urinating and other things,

I don't remember what we did, but there was nothing there, nothing.

I think we just let it go.

And it was like an endless journey.

And even that was better than that there would have come an end to it.

Because the end was not good. That we felt.

Your imagination stops at certain moments.

Uh, you...

You refuse to imagine the worst.

Narrator: On the night of September the 5th, the train from Holland reached its final destination.

Auschwitz death camp in southwest Poland.

Rachel. Then we saw all those lamps. Terrible, terrible hard.

Uh, the color was so terrible. It was yellowish.

And we came there, men, women, children alike,

on the platform here.

Don't know where exactly.

Yeah, I see there, the rail.

We were astonished.

I really thought I passed away, and this was hell.

Really, I thought, "I'm already dead.”

We were driven one way or another way.

After all was the one way to the death...

And this was to a kind of life.

I remember very well too

that you were naked before men,

and I was educated chastely...

In the values of my people.

And I got a shock.

I knew that from this moment on,

all your norms and values

were of no importance anymore.

And that there was a quite new set of values to be learned.

And if you didn't learn it, you would be dead.

I remember that I realized it in one second.

And I was only 18 years old.

Narrator: According to Auschwitz's own records,

more than half the people from that train were gassed on the day after their arrival,

September the 6th.

549 Jews, among them every child under the age of 15.

Sal: They told us right away what was waiting for us, death.

"All your people right here, they're going to the chimneys. Maybe tonight already."

It was just a death factory.

Rachel: We knew. We saw that terrible pipe burning day and night.

The smell

I thought that when I should come here that it should have had a penetrant smell, but no.

I was sure that I should smell it because sometimes I smell it,

the smell of the disinfection, the smell of the burning flesh

and the smoke.

Narrator: Anne, margot and Edith frank, together with Mrs. Van pels,

were among the 212 women from the Dutch train

who were granted entry into that special hell they called Auschwitz-birkenau.

They were placed in women's block 29.

It was no life. It was no life at all

we were degraded...

To even less than beasts.

I ess than animals.

We were standing outside, and I saw a wagon on the first day.

I thought, "what's he throwing on there?"

Dead bodies. Oh, my god! I could hardly look.

The next couple of days later, I saw it.

"Oh, there's that wagon again who picks up the dead bodies."

The next time, I didn't even pay any attention to that wagon.

So your brain starts functioning differently

because if you didn't...

You didn't do it on purpose,

but then you couldn't go on living.

Narrator: In Auschwitz-birkenau, Edith frank and her daughters

were drawn together as never before.

Bloeme: A very important survival...

For all the people in concentration camps

were the forming of groups, support groups.

And of course as mother and children, and daughters,

you were a natural support group.

And I think everything from the past was faded away

against this scene of Auschwitz.

It was of no importance anymore, I suppose.

Blair: Was there any sign of the previous antagonism

between Anne and her mother?

I think it was all forgotten.

They were always together and...

You can have the luxury...

Uh

Of a struggle with your mother in normal circumstances.

These circumstances were so.

Bad. Not only bad but like a ghost writing,

uh, that everything fell away.

I'm quite sure about that.

The last time I saw Anne and margot and Mrs. frank

was when there had been a selection

for a working camp.

But you never knew for what the selection was.

But Anne and her mother were told

that Anne was not allowed to go with our group

because she had scabies.

Uh, her mother and margot decided to stay with Anne.

We went to a labor camp

where we didn't get food, and hard work,

but most of us survived.

There were few deaths, and there were no gas chambers.

Had she not had the scabies

and had they gone with our transport...

They had had a better chance to survive.

Narrator: So because Anne was suffering from scabies

and her mother and sister chose to remain with her,

all three lost their chance to leave Auschwitz for the safety of the work camp

where many of the Dutch women saw out the remainder of the war.

As for the men, when they had first arrived at Auschwitz that September the 5th,

ofto frank, hermann and Peter Van pels, and Fritz pfeffer,

together with the other 254 males who had not immediately been gassed,

had been separated from their women and taken to the nearby camp of Auschwitz 1.

This, the original death camp created from an old Polish army barracks,

may have been smaller than neighboring Auschwitz-birkenau,

where the women had remained within sight of the massive gas chambers

and three crematoria,

but life here for the men was no easier.

Mr Van pels was the first to wither

we told him, "don't give up."

He did, and it was just like he melted away. It was two weeks...

Two days, he was gone. He gave up.

That was it.

Narrator: No one knows exactly when they took hermann Van pels to the gas chamber,

but it was only a few weeks after his arrival at Auschwitz.

Otto frank and sal de liema resolved to keep up their morale by whatever means.

People around us,

like we all were, of course very nervous.

Talking about food all the time.

Talking about clothes,

that we didn't have any, practically no clothes.

Only the striped clothes that we had.

The food was just a piece of bread that they'd give you. It was really bad.

So Mr. frank and I ..

Uh, we knew each other from westerbork.

He said, "we should get away from those people

because if you start talking all the time about food and everything,

your brain is going to go."

And we said, "we understand that physically we maybe will not survive this."

So

We should try to...

Uh, survive mentally

and try to talk about things had nothing to do with the camp like,

let's say, "do you remember the melody from the 'ninth symphony' from Beethoven?"

And then we start singing to each other.

Just to get away from this fear.

Just to get our brain...

Uh, thinking about other things.

We talked about Van gogh, Rembrandt.

"Ever go to the Van gogh museum? Did you ever go to the rijksmuseum?"

And all those things, just not to...

To get out of our mind. To get out of this here.

And it really helped, I think.

Uh... he was older, much older than I was.

He said, "you know, why don't you call me papa frank

because I have to have something in my life

that I can, uh, be a papa to."

I didn't know what he was talking about in the beginning.

I said, "what do you mean? I have a father

and he is hidden in the Netherlands, in Holland.

If you do it for me, you don't have to, because I have already a father

and he's still alive. I know he's hidden"

"no," he said, "you do it for me. I'm the type of a man, I need this.

I need somebody to be a papa for."

So I told him, I said, "if it will help you, I'll do that."

He said, "call me papa frank."

Until he died not too long ago, when he wrote his letters,

I was standing one time in the snow...

Naked,

after we came back from our work.

We stand here for rollcall, outside here for rollcall,

and a German soldier came

and he had his fur coat on and he looked at me and said:

"Cold, huh? It is cold?"

And he said, "you know you will not survive this, you know that.

But in case you will survive...

But I'll take care of it that it's not gonna happen.

Nobody, but nobody will believe you

what we did to your people. Nobody."

Narrator: While Otto languished in an Auschwitz sick barracks,

his daughters were transported away.

On October the 28th, 1944, they were separated from their mother,

and together with 1308 other women,

they were sent here to bergen-belsen concentration camp in Germany.

Rachel Van amerongen-frankfoorder was with them.

Rachel: You see with your own eyes how beautiful it is. It is beautiful

and there were birds here. And I wanted to be a bird.

Freedom, freedom, freedom.

I thought, "oh, how nice to be a bird. You can fly wherever you go."

I was simply jealous of birds.

Narrator: When Anne, margot, Rachel, and the others arrived at bergen-belsen,

the camp was overflowing with new inmates brought here from throughout Europe.

The new barracks that were being built to accommodate them were not yet ready,

and they were crammed into the makeshift shelter of tenis.

On November the 7th, a violent storm raged through the camp,

destroying many of these.

Seeking shelter from the rain,

Anne and margot encountered lientje and janny birilleslijper,

the two Dutch sisters whom they knew from Auschwitz and westerbork

Narrator: Deliberately starved, frozen and racked with disease,

Eventually, a wooden barracks was found for the unfortunate Jewish women from Auschwitz.

But Anne and margot frank came to be in the worst position of all,

in the lower bunk right next to the door,

incapable of protecting themselves from the vicious wind

that swept through bergen-belsen's barren acres.

They shouted, "close the door! Close the door!

It is cold! It is cold! It is cold!"

And, uh...

And it was terrible for them, of course.

Blair: What did the frank girls look like when you saw them in the barracks?

Very terrible. Terrible. Sick.

Thin. No hair.

Their eyes, very big. Very big eyes because they were so thin.

Narrator: Almost impossible to imagine,

but once there had been a time when the name bergen-belsen

brought hope to the eyes of Jews due to be transported here.

In the early years, the Nazis planned it as a camp for Jews

who might be used for exchange for German prisoners of war.

In those long-ago days, Anne's schoolfriend lies goslar

had been sent here with her sister and father, the former German government minister.

In early 1945, lies discovered she was in the compound

right next to the Dutch women from Auschwitz.

Lies: One day, a friend of mine tells me:

"You know, between all these women, there is your friend, Anne frank."

I don't know, I felt very crazy because I was thinking the whole time:

"Anne is safe and she's in Switzerland"

I was sure of this. This was what the tenant said to me.

And so I had no choice to go also near this barbed wire.

This was not allowed, and the German in the watchtower was watching us.

And you know he would have shot if he would have caught us.

But, um, so we couldn't see.

I told you there were barbed wire with straw,

and we couldn't see the other side.

So I just went near at dark

and I start to call, "hello? Hello?" Something like this.

And who answered me was Mrs. Van pels.

It was real

maybe the Dutch women went near the barbed wire

because the others didn't know anybody. So I don't know.

I remember, I even didn't ask her, "how are you?" Because I knew her, not very good.

But immediately she said to me, "you want Anne?" And I said, "yes."

And she says, "you know, I will call her for you.

Margot, I can't call for you. She's very sick already.

But Anne I will call for you."

And so I was standing there in the cold, and I was waiting.

And then suddenly, I heard somebody calling me and it was Anne.

And this was awful.

The first thing, we both started to cry. Then I said:

"What are you doing here? You are in Switzerland.”

And she answered me, "we wanted this rumor to go around

because we hoped then the Germans will not look after us."

And then she said she had nobody anymore.

And this was not right, and I am so very sorry because she said:

"My mother is dead.”

And her mother really was dead at that moment, but she couldn't know.

She was sure her mother was killed the moment she left

but her mother, it came out later, was not killed,

she just died of exhaustion in the beginning of January.

Her sister, she knew, was very, very sick already.

But now her father.

Look, if it was Mengele or somebody else,

they wouldn't know how old you are.

They would see only naked bodies.

And Mr. frank was 55 years old,

but he was only one month in the Dutch camp,

so he looked still very good.

And the Germans just looked and saw somebody that still can walk,

so they sent him to the right, to live.

But Anne thought they go by the age, and she was sure of it.

"My father is dead. He is an old man."

And I always think, if she had known her father is still alive

after her sister died, she just was without any hope.

Then maybe she had... you know, it was only...

One month she died before the liberation.

But she didn't know, and so she had really nothing to live for.

Narrator: At this time, as a special prisoner being kept for possible exchange,

lies goslar received a parcel from the red cross.

All my friends, everybody gave me a glove or a little sock and a little bread.

So I came back at night with such a small package.

And then I hear her again, and we were speaking.

I told her about my little sister.

I told her that my mother wasn't alive anymore. She didn't know.

Miep only told her that my... that the baby died.

And my father was then already in hospital.

He died 25 of February, and this was before.

And I throw the package over,

and then I heard her crying or shouting.

And I couldn't understand. So, "what happened?”

"The lady next to me caught the package, and she run away with it."

And she didn't give her anything.

I said, "I will try for another time." And really, I tried another time.

And this time she caught the package.

And it was the last time I saw her.

Narrator: More than 50,000 of bergen-belsen's inmates died in 1945

as disease and starvation ravaged the camp.

Typhus, carried by lice, was a particularly horrible killer.

And all of a sudden

we didn't... I didn't see them anymore.

But you would not pay attention.

So then the place was empty. We were sick.

And when I was ill, to speak about myself,

why I couldn't pay more attention than I did.

They were not anymore there. They are dead.

That was that. Outside into the ground.

All of them were swept away.

Boom. They are outside.

Narrator: Bergen-belsen, as filmed by British liberators.

A place where humanity had been reduced to the worst indignities.

Where cannibalism had become part of a desperate struggle

to quench the most appalling hunger.

And only a few hundred yards away,

the Germans kept vast supplies of food and medicine

while their prisoners died by the tens of thousands.

In November 1943, a year and a half before her death,

in the safety of her Amsterdam hiding place,

Anne frank had a nightmare in which hanneli goslar appeared before her.

Hanneli goslar in a concentration camp.

Close: "I saw her there, dressed in rags,

her face thin and worn.

She looked at me with such sadness and reproach in her enormous eyes

that I could read the message in them:

'Oh, Anne, why have you deserted me?

Help me, help me. Rescue me from this hell.'

and I can't help her.

I can only stand by and watch while other people suffer and die.

All I can do 1s pray to god to bring her back to us.

If only I could help her.

Dear god, I have everything I could wish for,

while fate has her in its deadly clutches.

Hanneli, hannell. If only I could take you away.

If only I could share everything I have with you.

It's too late, but I'll never forget her again

and I'll always pray for her.

Yours, Anne."

She didn't do so much wrong, you know, if you are in this age.

But this is one of the reasons that I tell the story now,

because it is the other way around.

Yes, today I am standing here and she is dead.

And so I am quite obliged to tell about her.

And she wanted to be so very famous.

I can't help a lot of this, but a little bit.

I think, "what a waste, such a young life should end

and without any reason."

She could really have given something to the world.

The whole thing is crazy.

My father died there one week after I saw her.

I don't know. I cannot judge this whole period.

Nobody can understand it, I think. I don't know.

Narrator: Auschwitz had been liberated two and a half months before bergen-belsen.

On a freezing January the 27th, 1945,

a Ukrainian division of the Soviet army, accompanied by a film crew,

arrived at the site of the most successful experiment in mass murder in mankind's history.

The last ss guards had already fled,

leaving behind only those prisoners too young or infirm

fo be led away on the now-notorious death marches.

The gassings at Auschwitz had already stopped the previous November,

the gas chambers dynamited.

But in a wild attempt to further cover their tracks,

the ss dragged thousands of prisoners away with them in desperate flight

in the biting cold.

Those of the exhausted prisoners who could not keep up

were shot at the side of the road by their German escort.

Tens of thousands perished "somewhere in Europe”

of hunger, thirst or exhaustion, or from an ss bullet.

Fritz pfeffer had been amongst those taken away before the Russians came,

fo die on December the 20th, 1944,

in neuengamme concentration camp in Germany.

Anne's boyfriend from the days in the annex, Peter Van pels,

was marched out of Auschwitz by the Germans on January the 16th

and taken to mauthausen death camp in Austria,

where he died on may the 5th, 1945,

just three days before the Americans liberated that camp.

His mother, auguste Van pels, had been sent on a crazy journey

across Germany and czechoslovakia,

first to bergen-belsen, then to theresienstadit.

And later still in the last days of the reich to an unknown camp, where she too died.

Another of the millions of anonymous bodies left behind

by Hitler's failed vision of a thousand-year empire.

Otto frank, weighing less than 115 pounds,

was amongst the lucky few that the Russians found alive in Auschwitz.

When he was sufficiently recovered, Otto wrote to his mother in Switzerland,

where she had lived since before the war.

His letters and postcards then remained forgotten

in the attic of her home in basel for nearly 50 years

until they were discovered by his nephew in may, 1994.

Bernd: "Auschwitz, 23rd February, 1945.

Dearest mother, hopefully these lines will reach you,

bringing you and all my loved ones the news

that I have been liberated by the Russians,

that I am healthy and in good spirits and that I am being well taken care of.

I do not know where Edith and the children are.

We have been separated since September 5th, 1944.

I just hope to see them back in good health.

I'm longing to see you all again and hope that this will be possible soon.

All my love, greetings and kisses,

your son, Otto."

Narrator: So it was that Otto frank,

the only survivor of the eight who had been in hiding in those years in Amsterdam,

took the long journey back to his Dutch adopted homeland.

By may, with the war in Europe ended,

his Russian liberators had sent him by various means to the black sea port of Odessa.

From there, he was placed on a New Zealand merchant ship bound for France.

Bernd: "26th may, 1945.

The steamer monowal.

Dearest mother and all you loved ones,

tomorrow we will arrive in marseilles, and this letter can hopefully be mailed.

I imagine I will be able to telegraph you

so that you will get the news of my return in good health.

All my hope is the children.

I cling to the conviction that they are alive

and that we will be together again.

Unfortunately, Edith did not survive.

She died on January 6, 1945, in the hospital of starvation.

Her body could not withstand attack of influenza.

The closer we get to home, the more impatient we get

to hear hews of our loved ones.

What happened in all these years!

We own nothing any more. We won't find a pin when we get back.

The Germans stole everything.

No photograph, no letter, no document will remain there.

Financially, we had no worries during the last years.

I earned good money and saved.

Now all is gone.

But I don't worry about this.

We have gone through too much to worry about things like that.

Only the children. The children are what count.

I hope to get news from you straightaway.

Maybe you already have news of the girls.

I cannot write about everything that I am thinking of.

I have to stay in Holland

as, with the exception of a tattooed number on my arm, I have no papers

and therefore must think of seeing you later.

The main thing is that we have contact.

We hope to see each other soon.

With innermost greetings and kisses and love, your Otto."

My husband was working on the station...

Uh

Registering all the people who are coming down from...

The concentration camps.

And he ask everyone:

"Have you seen Mr. frank?" Or, "have you heard about Mr. frank?"

And one day, one evening, he came at home and he said:

"I have good news for you. Otto frank is coming home."

And when he said this... We lived downstairs.

Mr. frank came

along the window.

L, uh...

I ran to the door.

At first what I ask was:

"Where's Edith?"

Otto frank said to me, "Edith never come, but I have hope for the children."

And he came to us, and...

Because he had no house, no nothing.

He lived seven years in our house.

But the life go on.

We go every day to the office.

But I do not give him the diary of Anne frank.

Blair: You may not know this,

but when he was on the ship

from Odessa to marseilles, yeah?

And in that letter he said this.

"Kugler and kleiman, and especially miep,

her husband and bep voskuijl cared for us for two years

with everything we needed,

in spite of the dangers and unprecedented sacrifices they made.

One cannot describe it.

I will never be able to repay what all these people have done."

I never know about this. No.

That is the first time.

I heard it.

Thank you.

Narrator: While miep kept the diary secret from Otto in case Anne should return,

he was desperate to find his daughters.

He advertised in newspapers and visited the Dutch red cross most days,

asking, always asking for news of Anne and margot.

Then, at the end of July, he was told that someone knew of their fate.

In August, he had the tragic news confirmed.

Narrator: When the girls' death had been confirmed,

miep gies gave up the secret she had kept hidden from Otto

since the day of the family's capture more than a year before.

From her top drawer, she handed him three books and a sheaf of loose papers.

Anne's diary, which she herself had never read.

I took the diary...

Out of my desk...

And gave him it with the words:

"That is a testament for your daughter Anne."

Can you look?

Can you see how this man looked at me?

I ost his wife. Lost his two children.

He had the diary.

Narrator: Ofto transcribed sections of the diary for his mother in Switzerland.

He also started showing it to friends,

seeking their views on what to do with his daughter's unique legacy.

They all advised him to have it published, but his efforts met with ho success.

Then this brief article, written by a friend of a friend,

appeared in an Amsterdam paper in April, 1946,

and finally, a publisher stepped forward.

Het achterhuis, the back house, appeared in June 1947.

Initially, it made little impact.

Then, in the 1950s, German, French, english, and other translations began to appear.

In 1955, a stage adaptation opened on Broadway to a rapturous reception.

The transformation of the 15-year-old German-Jewish refugee

into an emblem of the holocaust gathered pace.

A 1959 feature film based on the play added further to this process.

To some, she had become little short of a Saint,

but her diary, at the very least, had become a publishing phenomenon.

In 1953, ofto had remarried and moved to Switzerland.

In the absence of Anne, he became the focus for his daughter's celebrity.

And he, in turn, came to symbolize the perfect father so many children crave.

They wrote to him from around the world in their thousands

and he replied to each individually.

If young people are writing to me after having read the diary,

I start to think:

"That is for me one of the most precious.”

Narrator: Although Otto developed relationships, in some cases close ones,

with many of the children who wrote to him,

he had to admit that he had never fully understood his own daughter in her lifetime.

Was she in fact the optimist and cheerful person that he saw as a child?

Otto: She showed herself like that

but in fact, I only learned to know her really through her diary.

Narrator: Throughout these years, one persistent problem refused to go away.

Exploiting the numerous differences between the different language versions of the diary,

which were never formally explained in the various editions,

together with further fictional scenes invented for the play and film,

Neo-Nazis around the world,

interested in throwing doubt on the very existence of the holocaust,

alleged that the diary was a hoax.

Painful and inconclusive lawsuits followed,

but it was only in 1980, after Otto's death,

that the authenticity of the diary was finally tested scientifically.

The extensive report by the Netherlands state institute for war documentation

took five years to complete and was eventually published,

together with a comparative study of all the versions of Anne's diary.

It categorically stated that the diary was genuine in every respect.

In 1960, one of Holland's most secret places became one of its most public.

The Franks' annex was opened as a museum

and is now visited by over 600,000 tourists a year.

Otto also created charitable foundations to perpetuate Anne's message to the world.

Anne was not simply to be commemorated,

but her short life was to become a more general force for good.

To fight against prejudice and discrimination

and hatred against people of different race and religion.

Narrator: Since 1985, a touring exhibition

telling the story of Anne's life and its relevance to contemporary world affairs

has traveled from country to country, from Moscow to Minneapolis,

south America to South Africa.

It has also shown that the diary has had some surprising readers

in surprising places.

During the many years my comrades and I spent in prison,

we derived inspiration from the courage and tenacity

of those who challenge injustice,

even under the most difficult circumstances.

Some of us read Anne frank's diary on robben island

and derived much encouragement from fit.

It's very interesting, uh...

The letters of the German children.

They always ask me everything because they wrote me:

"My father or grandfather didn't tell me anything about the war."

They say always, "that is the past. That is over."

But it is not true.

The past goes always with you...

In your whole life, and we can learn from the past.

Narrator: In 1941, there was a wedding at merwedeplein in Amsterdam.

After filming the people in the street,

the cameraman pointed his camera at the onlookers above.

There at the window was Anne frank

this is the only known moving footage of her.

When she stood at the window that sunny day in June,

it's not surprising that the 12-year-old Anne frank

was yet to find her life's purpose.

But less than three years later,

as she sat caged in the fragile security of her hiding place,

she had discovered her destiny.

Close: "Wednesday, April 5th, 1944.

My dearest kitty,

I don't want to have lived in vain like most people.

I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to people,

even those I've never met.

I want to go on living, even after my death.

And that's why I'm grateful to god for having given me this gift

which I can use to develop and to express all that's inside me.

Yours, Anne m. Frank.”