Auschwitz

Auschwitz enters the account as the destination of the last transport to leave Westerbork and as a turning point in the fates of the eight residents of the Secret Annex. The postwar record traces several residents from arrival there to subsequent transfer, forced march, or death, while the diary itself records the fear and uncertainty through which news of persecution reached those in hiding. Together, these accounts make Auschwitz both a specific place in the residents’ deportation and a point from which their stories diverge across the camp system.

Deportation and Arrival

Before the deportation, the people in hiding had only fragmentary access to events outside their refuge. Information brought by Fritz Pfeffer described night raids, families being taken away, and people being transported under guard; the diary’s account conveys the limits and urgency of what a concealed witness could know. Earlier, Anne Frank had recorded that, despite the comparative safety of hiding, she felt guilty sleeping in a warm bed while friends suffered beyond her reach. Her perspective was that of a witness at a distance, receiving news rather than seeing the transports herself.

The postwar account supplies the route and date more precisely. After their arrest, the eight residents were taken first to a prison in Amsterdam and then to Westerbork, the transit camp in the north of the Netherlands. On September 3, 1944, they were deported in the last transport to leave Westerbork; they arrived at Auschwitz three days later. This chronology places Auschwitz not as an isolated episode but as the next stage in a chain of arrest, imprisonment, transit, and deportation.

The meaning of that arrival is sharpened by the contrast with the language of home and belonging in Anne’s diary. She loved the Netherlands and had hoped it would become her fatherland after she had lost her own, even as the country turned against Jewish refugees and the prospect of their expulsion returned. Auschwitz stands at the far end of that contradiction: a place reached after people who had sought refuge in the Netherlands were arrested and deported.

The Camp System and Diverging Fates

For the residents who arrived together, Auschwitz did not lead to one shared outcome. The postwar record states that Hermann van Pels died there in October or November 1944, according to Otto Frank’s testimony. His death is placed shortly before the gas chambers were dismantled; the account identifies the testimony as its source rather than presenting Anne’s diary as a record of what happened inside the camp.

Auguste van Pels was transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, then to Buchenwald, and on April 9, 1945, to Theresienstadt. The record says that she apparently went on to another concentration camp. Her death is certain, but its date is unknown. The uncertainty is part of the documented outcome: the chain of transfers can be followed only so far, and the record does not claim to know when or where she died.

Peter van Pels was forced to join a death march from Auschwitz on January 16, 1945, to Mauthausen in Austria. He died there on May 5, three days before the camp was liberated. The interval between departure and death links his fate to the forced movement of prisoners beyond Auschwitz, and to liberation arriving too late for him.

Edith Frank died at Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 6, 1945, from hunger and exhaustion. Her death is recorded separately from the later journeys of Auguste and Peter: the camp was not merely a transit point for the residents, but also the place where Edith’s life ended. The record’s precision about date and cause belongs to the retrospective account, not to the diary’s knowledge while the family was in hiding.

Jewish Identity, Persecution, and Witness

The diary’s references to Auschwitz belong to a wider record of Jewish persecution, but they should not be mistaken for a complete account of the camp. Before the arrest, Anne wrote about deportations as they were described to her: people taken from their homes, families separated, and Jews moved under threat. She also registered the painful moral distance between the relative security of hiding and the suffering of people outside. These entries preserve how news reached the concealed residents and what it meant to them, without making Anne an eyewitness to events she could not see.

That distance coexists with an insistence on collective identity. After a burglary prompted new security measures in the Secret Annex, Anne reflected that the residents were Jews without rights, burdened with obligations, and forced to endure their circumstances. She hoped that the war would end and that they would again be people, not only Jews. The reflection makes clear how persecution imposed Jewishness as a defining condition while she also sought a future beyond confinement and imposed categorization.

Her later response to reports of anti-Semitism in the Netherlands extends the question of belonging. She wrote of German Jews who had immigrated to the Netherlands before the war and were then sent to Poland, and of people saying that they should not be allowed to return once Hitler was gone. Against this rejection, she continued to express love for the country that had once taken her in. Auschwitz’s place in the account is therefore connected not only to deportation and death but also to the collapse of the security and belonging for which the family had hoped.

What the Record Can Establish

The book presents more than one kind of evidence about Auschwitz. Anne’s diary was first a private record; after Gerrit Bolkestein called for eyewitness accounts of life under occupation, she began revising it with publication in mind while continuing her original diary. The diary thus has an authorial history as well as a wartime one, and its passages about persecution need to be read in light of what a person in hiding could learn at the time.

After the arrest, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl found the diaries on the floor and kept them safe. Miep later gave them unread to Otto Frank, who selected from Anne’s original and revised versions for an edited edition. The book’s later publication history includes a fuller edition incorporating additional material, while the postwar account also records the residents’ deportations and fates. These layers matter for Auschwitz: the diary preserves Anne’s contemporary response to persecution, whereas the later record establishes the route to the camp and what happened to several residents there.

The residents’ paths after Westerbork show why Auschwitz functions as both a destination and a point of departure in the book’s historical account. Hermann and Edith died there; Auguste was transferred through other camps, and Peter was marched to Mauthausen. Their fates are not interchangeable, and the record does not erase what remains unknown. It locates the residents within a documented sequence of deportation and camp transfers while preserving the difference between what Anne could know in hiding and what was established afterward.