Opekta Company

Opekta Company was the Dutch jam-making-products business managed by Otto Frank after he emigrated to the Netherlands in 1933. Its office building later housed the Secret Annex, making the company both a workplace and the physical setting for the Frank family’s concealment. The diary’s account connects the business’s ordinary operations—offices, warehouse, spices, and staff—to the danger and practical arrangements of life in hiding.

Origins and Business

After leaving Germany because the family was Jewish, Otto Frank became managing director of the Dutch Opekta Company, which manufactured products used in making jam. His wife Edith went to the Netherlands in September 1933; their daughters Margot and Anne joined him later. The company thus appears in Anne’s account first as her father’s occupation and as part of the family’s life after emigration.

By the time the family considered going into hiding, Otto had been home from the office frequently because there was little for him to do there. Mr. Kleiman had taken over Opekta, while Mr. Kugler managed Gies & Co., a separate business dealing in spices and spice substitutes that had been established in 1941. The arrangement reflects how the office’s commercial work continued amid the increasing restrictions and danger facing the family.

The Office Building and the Annex

The hiding place was in the office building. The diary distinguishes the small group of office employees who knew the family was coming—Mr. Kugler, Mr. Kleiman, Miep, and the young typist Bep Voskuijl—from the warehouse workers, including Bep’s father and two assistants, who were not told. Concealment depended on maintaining this division between informed helpers and the people whose regular work brought them into the building.

The ground-floor warehouse served as both workroom and storeroom. It was divided into areas including a stockroom and a milling room, where cinnamon, cloves, and a pepper substitute were ground. Separate outside and office entrances, interior doors, and a stairway led from the business premises toward the upper office spaces. These commercial arrangements gave the building its routine, but also made safety dependent on careful movement, limited knowledge, and silence.

The building’s entrance and street access could not be separated from the family’s flight. The Franks had planned to go into hiding on July 16, after moving furniture and clothing out of their apartment over several months. Margot’s call-up notice brought the departure forward by ten days. On the journey, the family walked through pouring rain with schoolbags and shopping bags, wearing the conspicuous yellow star; only as they walked did Otto and Edith gradually explain the plan. The hiding place was not an abstract refuge but a particular office building already embedded in the family’s working life.

Occupation and Everyday Risk

The diary places the company premises within the wider restrictions imposed on Jewish people after the German occupation. The family’s movement and choices were constrained by regulations governing transport, shopping, schools, public places, and curfews. Their decision to hide was made against the prospect of being seized, and the office building became a means of avoiding that fate while the business premises continued to operate around them.

The warehouse also exposed the Annex residents to risks unrelated to their own movements. During one break-in, Peter found the warehouse door and street door open at seven in the morning. Otto, referred to in the diary as Pim, and Peter followed the building’s emergency rules: they went upstairs, kept quiet, and avoided using water. The burglars had forced the outside and warehouse doors with a crowbar, then entered the next floor after finding little worth taking in the warehouse. They stole cashboxes, blank checkbooks, and the residents’ entire sugar allotment of 330 pounds. The theft turned the ordinary stock and access points of the business into immediate threats to both security and the Annex’s already limited supplies.

After a later security scare, Mr. Kugler reproached the residents for carelessness, and Jan warned them not to go downstairs. The response included hiring Sleegers as a night watchman, arranging a patrol for Peter, restricting window and toilet use, and planning a barricade made from white Frankfurt bedsteads. These changes show how the shared building’s business and domestic spaces were governed by increasingly strict precautions. Opekta’s premises remained a place of work, but for those concealed there, every door, window, and sound could affect survival.

Significance

Opekta Company’s significance in the diary lies in the transformation of a commercial workplace into a place of refuge under occupation. The warehouse’s stock, staff, and entrances retained their ordinary purposes, yet the same layout shaped who could know about the hidden family, how supplies moved, and where danger might enter. The company building therefore links the practical world of business to the family’s forced concealment without making those worlds identical: the workers’ routines continued, while the Annex residents lived under rules that limited even basic movement and water use.

The diary preserves this history through concrete details rather than an account of the company’s later business development. Its record of the milling room, the informed and uninformed employees, the forced doors, and the stolen sugar shows how occupation was experienced at the scale of a workplace and its daily procedures. Opekta becomes consequential not simply as Otto Frank’s employer, but as the building and business context within which the family’s hidden life was sustained and repeatedly put at risk.