The liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British troops on April 12, 1945, ended the camp’s imprisonment of those still alive there, but came too late for Anne Frank and Margot Frank: both had died during the winter typhus epidemic. The diary’s postscript places their deaths and the camp’s liberation in close succession, making the date a measure of both historical release and irretrievable loss.

The sisters’ final months

Anne Frank and Margot Frank had been transported from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen at the end of October 1944. The postscript attributes their deaths to the typhus epidemic that broke out during the winter of 1944–1945 amid the camp’s appalling hygienic conditions. Thousands of prisoners died in the epidemic, including Margot and, a few days later, Anne.

The account estimates that Anne died in late February or early March 1945. It says that the bodies of both sisters were probably placed in Bergen-Belsen’s mass graves. The qualifications matter: the text gives an approximate period and describes the burial as probable, rather than presenting either detail as certain.

Liberation and its limits

British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 12, 1945. The date concludes the postscript’s account of the sisters’ fate, but does not reverse it: liberation came weeks after their probable deaths. In the entry’s chronology, the camp’s release and Anne’s loss are inseparable, yet they are not the same event. The former ended captivity for survivors; it could not restore those already killed by the epidemic.

The diary as testimony

The significance of the liberation is conveyed through the diary’s framing as well as its chronology. Anne Frank kept a diary from June 12, 1942, to August 1, 1944, first for herself. After hearing Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile, call on the radio for postwar publication of letters and diaries documenting suffering under German occupation, she began revising her writing with the intention of making a book. She continued the original diary while producing an edited version, so the work’s history already bears the marks of both private record and deliberate preparation for readers.

After the arrest of the eight people hiding in the Secret Annex on August 4, 1944, Miep Gies preserved Anne’s diaries and later gave them, unread, to Otto Frank. He combined selections from Anne’s two versions into a shorter edition, taking account of the limits of the Dutch publisher’s series and the conventions of the 1947 publication. A later expanded edition restored additional passages from those versions. Against this publication history, the postscript’s account of Bergen-Belsen supplies the ending the diary itself could not record: it identifies the sisters’ final destination, dates the liberation, and preserves the distinction between Anne’s own wartime writing and the facts added after her death.