The Auschwitz death marches mark a later stage in the fate of the Secret Annex residents after their arrest and deportation. The account distinguishes their arrival at Auschwitz from Peter van Pels’s subsequent forced march from the camp to Mauthausen, where he died on May 5, 1945, three days before liberation. The diary’s wartime testimony and the book’s postwar record together show how the residents’ lives continued to be broken apart after deportation, while also making clear that Anne Frank’s diary could not narrate these later events: its final entry is dated August 1, 1944.

Deportation to Auschwitz

Following their arrest, the eight residents were first taken to a prison in Amsterdam and then transferred to Westerbork, a transit camp for Jews in the north of the Netherlands. On September 3, 1944, they were deported in the last transport to leave Westerbork. They reached Auschwitz in Poland three days later. This sequence places the death march that Peter later endured within a wider progression of arrest, transit, deportation, and separation, rather than presenting it as an isolated episode.

Peter van Pels’s Forced March

According to the postwar account, Peter van Pels was forced to take part in a death march from Auschwitz to Mauthausen on January 16, 1945. The dated record gives a clear chronology: he was deported with the Annex residents in September, remained at Auschwitz, and was later compelled to leave as the camp’s prisoners were moved. The account identifies the march as forced; it gives no further detail about its conditions, so its significance rests here on the fact of compelled displacement and on Peter’s fate at its destination.

Death and the Limits of the Diary

Peter died at Mauthausen on May 5, 1945, three days before the camp was liberated. His death is part of the postwar account of what happened to the people whose shared life in the Secret Annex Anne had recorded. The diary itself ends on August 1, 1944, before the residents’ arrest on August 4, and therefore cannot recount Peter’s deportation to Auschwitz or his march to Mauthausen. Those events reach the reader through the book’s later historical record, which supplies an outcome beyond the diary’s own narrative endpoint.

Witness, Record, and Publication

Anne began keeping her diary on June 12, 1942, initially for herself. After hearing Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile, call on the radio for accounts of life under German occupation, she decided in 1944 to prepare a book from her diary. She rewrote and edited one version while continuing her original diary, leaving two distinct versions: the first, unedited text and a revised text intended for publication.

After the residents were arrested, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl found the diaries scattered on the floor. Miep put them away unread and later gave them to Otto Frank, who selected and edited material for publication. The first published edition omitted some passages for reasons including length, contemporary publishing conventions, and respect for the dead. A later expanded edition restored additional material from Anne’s earlier versions. This history matters to the account of the death marches because the diary is a contemporary record of persecution and fear, but it does not cover the final sequence of deportations and deaths; those outcomes are established through the book’s retrospective documentation rather than through a later diary entry by Anne.