3 September 1943

September 3, 1943, is a date whose significance in the diary spans two different scales of wartime experience: the changing military situation in Europe and the ongoing persecution threatening Jews in the Netherlands. The diary records it as the day the truce with Italy was signed, while the historical account also dates the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz to September 3, 1944. The shared date links a moment of news and apparent military change to a later deportation, without making the two events contemporaneous.

The Italian armistice

In a diary entry discussing the news from Italy, Anne reports that the truce was signed on Friday, September 3, 1943, the day British forces landed in Italy. The diary also notes that German forces occupied northern Italy and that German newspapers condemned the Italian king and Badoglio. These details set the armistice within a rapidly shifting military situation, as reported to people confined in hiding and dependent on news from outside.

The same entry recounts an announcement of Italy’s capitulation on the radio and the music that followed it, including “God Save the King,” the American national anthem, and the Russian “Internationale.” The broadcast made distant political and military change present in the Annex through news and sound. Yet the account is cautious: the Dutch program is described as uplifting without being too optimistic. The date therefore registers hope, but not certainty that the war or the danger surrounding the residents is near its end.

A date within life under occupation

The significance of military news is set against the daily restrictions imposed on Jews in the Netherlands. After the German occupation, Jews were required to wear a yellow star and faced restrictions on transport, shopping hours, movement at night, school, and access to public recreation. The diary’s list of prohibitions conveys how policy narrowed ordinary life, even as Anne observes that life continued.

News from outside the hiding place sharpened the contrast between relative safety and the fate of people who could not escape arrest. Anne writes of raids, families being taken away, and the helplessness of those in hiding who could not assist friends and acquaintances. The diary records this knowledge as news received by the residents, not as a complete account of events beyond their sight. Its force lies partly in that limit: the people in the Annex hear enough to understand the threat, while remaining unable to reach those in danger.

The later transport from Westerbork

The date recurs in the historical account in connection with a different event: on September 3, 1944, the eight residents of the Secret Annex were deported from Westerbork in the last transport to leave the camp. They had first been taken to a prison in Amsterdam and then transferred to Westerbork, the transit camp in the north of the Netherlands. They arrived in Auschwitz three days after the transport departed.

This later use of the date should be distinguished from the diary’s report of the Italian armistice in 1943. The two events are a year apart; their connection is the calendar date, not a single episode. Read together, they place the residents’ momentary access to news of military change beside the eventual deportation that ended their period in hiding. The contrast gives September 3 a stark retrospective significance: a date associated in 1943 with a shift in the war also marks, in 1944, the departure of the Annex residents from the Netherlands toward Auschwitz.