Anne Frank : a timeline

June 12
July-August
September 15 November December January January 4 February 16
?
?

Anne frank: a timeline
1929
Anneliese "Anne" Marie Frank is born in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto Frank and Edith Frank (nee Hollnder.) Margot Frank (1926-1945) is her older sister.
1933
The Frank family prepares to move to Amsterdam, Holland. Edith and the children first go to Aachen, Germany where they stay with Edith's mother, Rosa Hollnder. Amsterdam, the country's largest city, has a Jewish population of about 75,000 and increases to over 79,000 in 1941. Jews represented less than 10 percent of the city's total population. More than 10,000 of these were foreign Jews who had found refuge in Amsterdam in the 1930s. Otto Frank sets up his Opekta business in Amsterdam and becomes director.
Edith moves to the Netherlands.
Margot moves to the Netherlands.
1934
Otto secures an apartment on the Merwedeplein (Merwede Square) in southern Amsterdam for the Frank family. Margot begins school on Amsterdam's Jekerstraat, near the family's apartment.
Anne moves to the Netherlands as "a birthday surprise." (Edith and Margot share a birthday of February 16.)
Anne enrolls in a Montessori school in Amsterdam.
1938
Otto Frank starts a second company, Pectacon, in partnership with Hermann van Pels, a Jewish butcher, who has also fled from Germany with his family.
1939
Edith Frank's mother, Rosa Hollnder, comes to live with the Franks in Amsterdam.
1940
1

May 10 May 14 ?
August December January 22 December
January January 29 June 12 June 14 July
July 5

The Germans invade the Netherlands.
The Netherlands surrenders to Germany. The Germans establish a civilian administration dominated by the SS.
Margot has to go to the Joods Lyceum (`Jewish High School.') An anti-Jewish law imposed a year after the 1940 German invasion of the Netherlands demanded Jewish students be removed to a Jewish lyceum. While Anne inherited her father's ambivalence towards the Torah, Margot followed her mother's example and became involved in Amsterdam's Jewish community. She took Hebrew classes, attended synagogue, and in 1941 joined a Dutch Zionist club for young people who wanted to immigrate to Land of Israel to found a Jewish state, where, according to Anne, she wished to become a midwife.
The family visits the beach at Zandvoort in the Netherlands.
Opekta and Pectacon move to a new address in Amsterdam: Prinsengracht 263.
1941
The Germans arrest several hundred Jews and deport them from Amsterdam first to the Buchenwald concentration camp and then to the Mauthausen concentration camp. Almost all of them were murdered in Mauthausen.
Jews are forbidden to own their own businesses, so Otto appoints Mr. Kleiman and Mr. Kugler as directors, but remains in charge behind the scenes.
1942
The Germans begin the relocation of Holland's provincial Jews to Amsterdam. Within Amsterdam, Jews are restricted to certain sections of the city. Foreign and stateless Jews are sent directly to the Westerbork transit camp.
Rosa Hollnder dies of cancer.
Anne receives an autograph book for her birthday that she had pointed out to Otto in a shop window. She decides to use it as a diary.
Anne writes the first entry in her diary.
The Germans begin mass deportations of Jews to extermination camps in occupied Poland, primarily to Auschwitz but also to Sobibor. The city administration, the Dutch municipal police, and Dutch railway workers all cooperate in the deportations, as do the Dutch Nazi party (NSB). German and Dutch Nazi authorities arrest Jews in the streets of Amsterdam and take them to the assembly point for deportations - the municipal theater building, the Hollandsche Schouwburg. When several hundred people are assembled in the building and in the back courtyard, they are transferred to Westerbork.
Margot receives her call-up papers: she has to report for a `work camp' in Germany.
2

July 6 July 13
October November 6
May 25 May 26
December 5

The Frank family goes into hiding in the secret annex hidden at Prinsengracht 263.
Hermann van Pels, his wife, Auguste, and his son, Peter, go into hiding in the secret annex. (The van Pels family is from Osnabrck, Germany. Hermann is the son of a Dutch father and a German mother. When he married Auguste in 1926 she became a Dutch citizen because according to law women automatically took on the nationality of their husbands. On November 8, 1926, their son Peter was born. On June 26, 1937, they moved to the Netherlands. Hermann began working with Otto Frank in 1938. Miep Gies remembered him as "tall, large man" and "quite an agreeable sort, [who] had no trouble fitting into the routine" in the company already hiding in the annex. Miep described Auguste as stylish and coquettish.) The Van Pels family provides ample excitement, which can sometimes be fun but there are also a lot of major arguments. Mrs. Van Pels becomes the cook of the house. She likes discussing politics, and invariably gets into arguments with her husband.
The Germans send hundreds of Jews and their families in Amsterdam to Westerbork transit camp. All are deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau within a few weeks.
Fritz Pfeffer goes into hiding in the secret annex. (Pfeffer was born on April 30, 1889, in Giessen, Germany. His parents were Jewish and had a clothing store in the center of the city. After high school Fritz studied to be a dentist in Berlin, where he started a dental practice after his study. In 1921 he married Vera Bythiner. Their son Werner was born on April 3, 1927. The marriage ended in divorce in 1933. Pfeffer received custody of his son. Following his divorce, Pfeffer met Charlotte Kaletta, a Catholic. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, outlawing marriages between Jews and non-Jews, made it impossible for them to marry. After "Kristallnacht," the night of broken glass, Pfeffer and Charlotte Kaletta decided to emigrate to the Netherlands. He arranged a place for Werner on a boat going to England as part of a "children's transport." Pfeffer and Charlotte quickly felt at home in the Netherlands.)
1943
German authorities order 7,000 Jews, including employees of the Judenrat in Amsterdam, to assemble in an Amsterdam city square for deportation. Only 500 people comply. The Germans respond by sealing the Jewish quarter and rounding up Jews.
A big raid on Jews is carried out in the Centre and East of Amsterdam. 3,000 people are taken by the police. All are deported to Westerbork transit camp and from there, most of them to the Sobibor extermination camp.
The Germans confiscate the property left behind by deported Jews. In 1942 alone the contents of nearly 10,000 apartments in Amsterdam were expropriated by the Germans and shipped to Germany. Some 25,000 Jews, including at least 4,500 children, went into hiding to evade deportation. About one-third of those in hiding were discovered, arrested, and deported. In all, at least 80 percent of the prewar Dutch Jewish community perished.
Anne writes a traditional Saint Nicholas Day poem. In the poem, she describes a very different, active Peter, than the boy she had described upon first impression
3

as lazy and hypersensitive. Now she tells of how he chops wood, carries up vegetables and potatoes from downstairs, cleans the attic, takes care of the cats and even washes his own overalls.

1944

February

In her diary, Anne mentions Peter's idea "to go to the Dutch East Indies and live on a rubber plantation." She states in her diary, "He just doesn't have a goal, plus he thinks he's too stupid and inferior to ever achieve anything. Poor boy!"

August 4

The one thing the people hiding in the secret annex have been afraid of for so long finally happens: they are discovered and arrested.

August 8

The 8 occupants of the Secret Annex are taken by train from Amsterdam Central Station to the Westerbork transit camp.

September 3

The people in hiding are deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in occupied Poland.

September 6

Arrival at Auschwitz. On the same train was Bloeme Evers-Emden, an Amsterdam native who had befriended Margot and Anne in the Jewish Lyceum in 1941. (Bloeme saw Anne, Margot, and their mother regularly in Auschwitz.) All the inhabitants of the secret annex survive selection. Otto is separated forever from his wife and daughters. Eyewitness reports claim Edith and her two daughters remain close in the camp. Of the 1,019 passengers on the transport, 549-- including all children younger than 15--were sent directly to the gas chambers. Anne had turned 15 three months earlier and was one of the youngest people to be spared from the transport. She was soon made aware that most people were gassed upon arrival, and never learned that the entire group from the secret annex had survived this selection. She reasoned that her father, in his mid-fifties and not particularly robust, had been killed immediately after they were separated.

September/October

Hermann van Pels is gassed at Auschwitz. (According to eyewitness testimony, Hermann van Pels was not gassed immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz. Sal de Liema, an inmate at Auschwitz who knew both Otto Frank and Hermann van Pels, said that after two or three days in the camp, Herman van Pels mentally "gave up" the beginning of the end for any concentration camp inmate. He later injured his thumb on work detail and requested to be sent to the sick barracks. Soon after that, during a sweep of the sick barracks for selection, he was sent to the gas chambers. This occurred about three weeks after his arrival at Auschwitz. His selection was witnessed by both his son Peter and Otto Frank.)

Disease was rampant in Auschwitz; before long, Anne's skin becomes badly

?

infected by scabies. The Frank sisters are moved into an infirmary, which is in a

state of constant darkness and infested with rats and mice. Edith Frank stops

eating, saving every morsel of food for her daughters and passing her rations to

them through a hole she made at the bottom of the infirmary wall.

October ?

The Frank women are slated to join a transport to the Liebau labor camp in Upper Silesia. Bloeme Evers-Emden is slated to be on this transport. But Anne is prohibited from going because she has developed scabies, and her mother and sister opt to stay with her. Bloeme goes on without them.

4

October 30
October ? November 26 December 20

The last selection takes place at Auschwitz. Edith is selected for the gas chamber while Anne and Margot are selected for deportation to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Edith escapes with a friend to another section of the camp, where she remains through the winter.
Fritz Pfeffer is deported to Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany.
Mrs. van Pels is sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany with a group of eight women.
Fritz Pfeffer dies in Neuengamme.

1945

January 6

Edith dies of starvation in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 20 days before the Red Army liberates the camp and 10 days before her 45th birthday

January 16/17

In an attempt to hide German crimes from the advancing Red Army, the gas chambers of Birkenau are blown up. Evacuation of Auschwitz begins. Nearly 60,000 prisoners are forced on a death march toward a camp in Wodzislaw lski (German: Loslau). Those too weak or sick to walk are left behind. These remaining 7,500 are ordered for execution by the SS, but in the chaos of the Nazi retreat the order was never carried out. Peter van Pels runs to Otto Frank, who is in the infirmary, telling him he must join them in the evacuation. Otto refuses, not knowing that this resignation to die actually ends up saving his life.

Peter joins the death march out of Auschwitz.

January 25

Peter is registered at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

Tents are erected at Bergen-Belsen to accommodate the influx of prisoners in late
January/February 1944, and as the population rises, the death toll due to disease increases rapidly.

Anne and Margot arrive on a transport from Auschwitz that left in late October, 1944. Anne is briefly reunited with two friends, Hanneli Goslar and Nanette Blitz, who were confined in another section of the camp. Goslar and Blitz both survive the war and later discuss the brief conversations they conducted with Anne through a fence. Blitz describes her as bald, emaciated, and shivering. Goslar noted Auguste van Pels is with Anne and Margot Frank, and is caring for Margot, who is severely ill. (Neither of them see Margot, as she was too weak to leave her bunk.) Anne tells both Blitz and Goslar she believes her parents are dead, and for that reason she does not wish to live any longer. (Goslar later estimates their meetings took place in late January or early February 1945.)

January 27

Auschwitz is liberated by Soviet troops. Otto is still in the sick barracks. He is taken first to Odessa and then to France before he is allowed to make his way back to Amsterdam.

January 29

Peter is placed in an outdoor labor group.

5

February 4 March April 9 April 11 April 15 May 2 ? June 3
October 24
?
April 3 Summer June 25

Mrs. van Pels is deported from Bergen-Belsen to Raguhn (Buchenwald, Germany).
A typhus epidemic spreads throughout Bergen-Belsen, killing 17,000 prisoners. Witnesses later testify that Margot fell from her bunk in her weakened state and is killed by the shock. A few days later, Anne dies. Anne and Margot are buried in a mass grave; the exact whereabouts remain unknown.
Mrs. van Pels is deported from Bergen-Belsen to Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. It is believed she died en route or shortly upon arrival.
Peter is sent to the sick barracks at Mauthausen.
Bergen-Belsen is liberated by British troops; the exact dates were not recorded. After liberation, the camp is burned in an effort to prevent further spread of disease.
Peter dies at Mauthausen. (His exact death date is unknown but the International Red Cross designated it as 2 May 1945.) He was 18 years old. Mauthausen is liberated three days later on 5 May 1945 by men from the 11th Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army.
Fritz Pfeffer's son, Peter Werner, leaves for the Unites States and changes his name to Peter Pepper.
Otto Frank, the sole survivor from the secret annex, returns to Amsterdam. He is reunited with Miep and Jan Gies, who had continued to run his business. Despite being sent to camps after their arrest, Jo Kleiman and Victor Kugler, who also assisted in hiding the Frank family, have also survived. They return to work and wait for news of the people in hiding. At first Otto stays with Miep and her husband, Jan. Otto knows his wife has died, but he does not know that his daughters have died too. He still has hope and begins searching through records and writing letters inquiring after his daughters' whereabouts.
Otto Frank receives a letter informing him that his daughters died at BergenBelsen. Miep gives Anne's diaries and papers to Otto. She found and hid the diary after the Franks' arrest and had been hoping to return it to Anne.
1946
Otto leaves Anne's writings unread for some time but eventually begins transcribing them from Dutch for his relatives in Switzerland. He is persuaded that Anne's writing shed light into the experiences of many of those who suffered persecution under Nazis and is urged to consider publishing it. He types out the diary papers into a single manuscript and edits out sections he thinks too personal to his family or too mundane to be of interest to the general reader.
The manuscript is read by Dutch historian Jan Romein, who reviews it for the Het Parool newspaper. This attracts the interest of Amsterdam's Contact Publishing.
Amsterdam's Contact Publishing accepts the manuscript for publication.
The first Dutch edition of the diary is issued under the title Het Achterhuis
6

? ? ?
April 30
April 19 November 10

(meaning literally: "the back house.")
1950
The Diary of Anne Frank is published in Germany in an edition of 4,500 copies. (A very successful paperback edition follows in 1955.)
Otto Frank feels strongly about finding a German publisher for the diary: "Generally I waited until publishers in other countries contacted me, but one country I did try: Germany. I thought they should read it."
The diary is published in France.
1952
The success of Het Achterhuis leads to an English translation.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl is published in the United States and includes an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. From the start, the book is a huge success and is repeatedly reprinted. Within no time, millions of Americans read it. Its adaptation for the theatre and the big screen adds to its popularity.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl is published in the UK. Despite its success in the USA the book is at first rejected by several publishers in the UK. Once published and after receiving several good reviews it still fails to attract an audience and is out of print by 1953.
1953
Fritz Pfeffer and Charlotte Kaletta are posthumously married.
Otto marries a former neighbor from Amsterdam and fellow Auschwitz survivor, Elfriede Geiringer (19051998), in Amsterdam. (Elfriede Markovits was born in Vienna, Austria, on February 13, 1905. She married Erich Geiringer and the couple had two children: a son, Heinz, born in 1926, and a daughter, Eva, born on May 11, 1929. The family fled first to Belgium and then to the Netherlands in 1938, where they settled down as neighbors to the Frank family. Eva and Anne knew each through mutual friends. When the Germans invaded Holland and Heinz received a call-up to a work-camp, the family went into hiding. They successfully hid for two years and might have survived the war if they had not been betrayed in May 1944. They were then captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. They were liberated in January 1945 by the Russians, but Erich and Heinz Geiringer had perished in the forced march to Mauthausen that came just before the war ended. Elfriede and her daughter, Eva, returned to Amsterdam on June 13, 1945. Otto Frank visited them at their apartment not long after.)

7

October 5 ? May 3 May 3
? ? October 2

1955
The Broadway play "The Diary of Anne Frank" opens. The play was dramatized by Goodrich and Hackett and wins a Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama in 1956. Susan Strasberg, who plays Anne, was nominated for Best Actress.
1956
In Germany the play premires simultaneously in Berlin and Dresden.
1957
In response to a demolition order placed on the building in which Otto Frank and his family had hid during the war, he and Johannes Kleiman help establish the Anne Frank Foundation, with the principal aim of saving and restoring the building and allow it to be opened to the general public. With the aid of public donations, the building (and its adjacent neighbor) is purchased by the Foundation.
1960
The secret annex is opened as a museum the Anne Frank House.
1980
Otto Frank dies of lung cancer on 19 August 1980 in Basel, Switzerland.
1986
The Dutch Institute for War Documentation publishes the "Critical Edition" of the diary. It includes comparisons from all known versions, both edited and unedited. It includes discussion asserting the diary's authentication, as well as additional historical information relating to the family and the diary itself.
1995
Peter Pepper, Fritz Pfeffer's son, dies.
1998
After living long enough to see the birth of five of her great grandchildren, Elfriede Frank dies peacefully in her sleep.
1999
Cornelis Suijk--a former director of the Anne Frank Foundation and president of the U.S. Center for Holocaust Education Foundation--announces that he is in the possession of five pages that had been removed by Otto Frank from the diary prior
8

to publication; Suijk claims that Otto Frank gave these pages to him shortly before his death in 1980. The missing diary entries contain critical remarks by Anne Frank about her parents' strained marriage and discuss Anne's lack of affection for her mother. Some controversy ensues when Suijk claims publishing rights over the five pages; he intends to sell them to raise money for his foundation. The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, the formal owner of the manuscript, demands the pages be handed over.
2000
The Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science agrees to donate $300,000 to Suijk's Foundation, and the pages are returned in 2001. Since then, they have been included in new editions of the diary.
9