The Frank family goes into hiding in the Secret Annex in July 1942 after a call-up notice for Margot makes it impossible to follow the family’s earlier timetable. The move, made under Nazi persecution of Dutch Jews, takes the family from a home increasingly circumscribed by anti-Jewish rules to concealed rooms in Otto Frank’s office building. In Anne Frank’s account, the change is both a practical escape from immediate danger and the beginning of a life organized around secrecy, dependence, and the effort to make a hidden space livable.

Causes and sudden decision

After the German occupation, a growing list of restrictions narrowed Jewish life. Jews had to wear a yellow star, surrender bicycles, shop only at specified hours, and avoid public transport, entertainment, sports facilities, and the streets at night. The restrictions made ordinary routines precarious, while the family’s plans were overtaken by the threat of deportation. The diary presents these rules not as background alone but as constraints that changed where the family could go, what it could carry, and how openly it could move.

The immediate trigger comes on a Sunday afternoon. Anne is reading in the sun when Margot appears, agitated, and tells her that a call-up notice has arrived. At first Anne understands the notice as intended for Otto; Margot says their mother has gone to speak with Mr. van Daan about moving to the hiding place. The prospect of Otto being sent away gives way to a second shock: Margot reveals that the notice is for her. She is sixteen, and the family understands that she cannot be allowed to go. The plan to hide, which Anne had not yet been told about, becomes urgent.

The family had originally arranged to enter hiding on July 16. Margot’s notice brings the departure forward by ten days, leaving less time to prepare and less order in the rooms they will occupy. For months, they had been moving furniture and clothing out of their apartment. The crisis does not create the plan; it forces the family to enact it sooner and under greater pressure.

Departure and arrival

On the morning of the move, Anne and her family set out in pouring rain with schoolbags and shopping bags filled with belongings. The yellow star identifies their vulnerability to people on the street, whose sympathetic looks Anne notices as they pass. Otto and Edith reveal the destination gradually as they walk: the hiding place is in Otto’s office building. The family does not travel with ordinary luggage, since a suitcase full of clothes would draw suspicion. Anne describes wearing so many layers that she is already uncomfortable before leaving home, a practical response to the need to carry more without openly carrying it.

The family’s departure is staggered. Margot rides ahead on her bicycle with Miep leading the way; Anne, Otto, and Edith follow on foot. At seven-thirty they close the door of their home. Anne’s last goodbye there is to Moortje, the family cat, the only living creature she mentions leaving behind. The domestic detail marks the scale of the break: the family leaves not only a location but familiar routines and attachments, without knowing precisely what life in concealment will entail.

Miep leads the family through the building at 263 Prinsengracht, up a wooden staircase, and into the Annex, then shuts the door behind them. Margot is already there, having arrived earlier. The hiding place is inside the office building rather than a separate home. The diary explains that only a small group in the office knows the family is coming, while warehouse workers and assistants are not informed. The location’s ordinary commercial function is essential to its concealment: the family lives behind the public-facing work of the building, dependent on keeping the secret from people nearby.

Making a place to live

The first rooms are crowded with cardboard boxes sent to the office in the preceding months. Boxes cover floors and beds; a small room is filled with linens from floor to ceiling. The family cannot simply settle in: they must clear and arrange the rooms before they can sleep in properly made beds. Edith and Margot, exhausted and distressed, lie down on bare mattresses, while Otto and Anne begin unpacking and cleaning.

The work continues through the day. They unpack boxes, fill cupboards, hammer nails, and straighten the rooms until they can fall into clean beds. They have not eaten a hot meal, but the immediate task of making the Annex usable takes precedence. This first day establishes a pattern of adaptation: hiding is not merely entering a concealed room but turning a disordered, cramped space into a functioning household under exceptional conditions.

The diary later gives the Annex a pointedly ironic description as accommodation for dispossessed people: it advertises quiet, wooded surroundings in the heart of Amsterdam, no nearby private residences, rooms with or without meals, and a free price with a low-fat diet. The mock notice borrows the language of lodging to recast a secret refuge as a place of residence. Its humor depends on the distance between the reassuring advertisement and the circumstances that have made such accommodation necessary.

Risks and the discipline of concealment

The building’s ordinary life repeatedly threatens the secrecy on which the family depends. In one later break-in, Peter goes downstairs at seven in the morning and finds both the warehouse door and the street door open. He alerts Otto, who tunes the radio to a German station and locks the private office door. The residents follow their security instructions: they do not wash or use water, keep quiet, dress by eight, and avoid the bathroom. The danger lies not only in what intruders might discover but in the sounds and ordinary movements that could reveal people upstairs.

The burglars force the exterior and warehouse doors with a crowbar, search the building, and steal two cashboxes, blank checkbooks, and coupons for 330 pounds of sugar—the Annex’s entire allotment. The loss makes the break-in more than a moment of fear: it damages the household’s already limited access to food, and replacing the coupons will be difficult. Otto suspects the intruder belongs to the same gang that had tried to open the doors six weeks earlier, tying the incident to a recurring threat rather than an isolated disturbance.

After another security crisis, the household’s routines are tightened. A night watchman, Mr. Sleegers, is hired; Peter is assigned to patrol the house from eight-thirty to nine-thirty; and a carpenter from the underground is due to build a barricade from the white Frankfurt bedsteads. The residents debate whether the watchman can be trusted, whether dogs will bark if someone approaches, and how the barricade should be made. Mr. Kugler reproaches them for carelessness, while Jan warns them not to go downstairs. These measures show how hiding turns ordinary objects, schedules, and access to rooms into security decisions.

The diary and the event’s afterlife

Anne began keeping her diary on June 12, 1942, initially for herself. After hearing Gerrit Bolkestein of the Dutch government in exile speak on the radio about preserving eyewitness accounts, she decided in 1944 that she would make a book from her diary. She began revising and editing it as version b, while continuing her original diary, version a. Her experience of entering hiding thus survives in writing at more than one stage: as a contemporary personal record and as material she later reshaped with a public readership in mind.

The last diary entry is dated August 1, 1944; two days later, the people in hiding were arrested. Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl found the diaries scattered on the floor and put them away unread. After the war, when Anne was known to be dead, Miep gave the manuscripts to Otto. He selected material from Anne’s two versions and edited it into a shorter version, version c, published as The Diary of a Young Girl. His choices reflected the length required by the publisher’s series, conventions against openly discussing sexuality in books for young adults, and his wish to omit unflattering passages about Edith and the other Annex residents.

After Otto’s death in 1980, Anne’s manuscripts went to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. Following an investigation that established the diary’s authenticity, the Institute published the versions and a critical study of the family’s background, the arrest and deportation, Anne’s handwriting, and the documents and materials. The Anne Frank-Fonds later commissioned Mirjam Pressler to prepare an expanded edition for general readers, supplementing Otto’s selection with passages from versions a and b; it contains approximately 30 percent more material. The publication history preserves the difference between Anne’s urgent first account, her considered revision, and her father’s postwar selection, making the family’s move into hiding at once a lived event and a story transmitted through successive acts of writing and editing.