Security Police prison on Euterpestraat in central Amsterdam where the hiders and helpers were taken.

THE HELPERS AND HIDERS: AFTER THE ARRESTS


What happened to the characters from the Diary of Anne Frank after the arrest of those in hiding?

 

Helpers

Hiders

 

Miep Gies
When the families were taken away, Miep still attempted to save them through trips to SS office and offering bribes. She returned to the attic hiding space and picked up the personal items that were left behind. Miep is the reason that we have Anne’s diary today.

Miep took over the business at Opekta while Kleiman, Kugler and Otto were detained. She also attempted to bribe the Gestapo to release the Franks, van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer. Her husband Jan helped in the Dutch resistance, which was not known by any of the people hidden in the Secret Annexe.

Otto returned to Amsterdam after he was liberated and lived with the Gies. It was after Otto finally learned the fate of his family that Miep gave him Anne’s diary.

Miep later stopped working and concentrated on her family. Jan retired from Gies & Co. in 1955 when Otto and Kugler both retired from Pectacon. 

Jan died on the 26th of January 1993.

Johannes Kleiman
He helped take care of the families in the attic for two years and was arrested by the Gestapo when they were turned in by an anonymous informant. Kleinman spent six weeks in several camps and prisons before being released.

After the war ended Kleiman was very involved in the beginning the Anne Frank Foundation and took people on tours of the house. He died on January 30th, 1959, Otto read a line out of Anne’s dairy at the funeral, “When Mr. Kleiman comes in, the sun begins to shine.” His death came after a lot of hard work, right before the House was opened as a museum but his wife attended the opening of the House.

Victor Kugler
His wife, Laura Maria Buntenbach-Kugler, did not know that he was helping to hide the families in the house so he suffered the stressful and dangerous situation without support.
He was interrogated at the Gestapo Headquarters on the Euterpestraat, and then transferred the same day to a prison for Jews and 'political prisoners' awaiting deportation.

Kugler was moved from prison to camps and work sites, often made to march from place to place under hard conditions. On one of these marches there was a bombing raid and Kugler took advantage of the confusion to escape. He was hidden by a farmer for a few days, borrowed a bicycle and made his way back to Hilversum, which he reached in April 1945. He hid there until the liberation of the Netherlands on May 5, 1945.

After Victor’s first wife died, he emigrated to Canada where he remarried, Lucie (Loes) van Langen, and worked as a electrician.

Victor Kugler died on the 16th of December 1981.

Bep Voskuijl
Bep was very close to Anne and everyone in the Secret Annex: their deaths deeply affected her.

Bep and her husband, Cornelius van Wijk, were part of a larger group of friends that accompanied Otto to the Dutch opening ceremony of the play ‘A Diary of Anne Frank’. She along with Miep and Mrs. Kleiman were presented to the Queen and Princess Beatrix.

Although she was very shy about giving interviews she continued a close relationship with Otto for many years. Bep had a large family with four children with one her daughters named after Anne.

Bep Voskuijl-van Wijk died in 1981.

 

 

Otto Frank
Otto was separated from his family in Auschwitz and suffered from illness during his internment. He was sent to the infirmary in the last days of WWII and was left for dead, missing the death march that took many prisoners lives.

Otto returned to Amsterdam after a long journey only to find no word about his family. After inquiring in many different places for news he found out that his wife and daughters had not survived. Once they knew that Anne had not survived, Miep turned Anne’s diary over to Otto who got her diary published, according to her wishes, in 1947.

Otto remarried in 1953 to a neighbor Elfriede Geiringer-Markovits (Fritzi) and moved to Basel, Switzerland. When he heard that the office building where he and his family hid for two years was scheduled to be torn down, he began the Anne Frank Foundation (1957) in order to acquire the space and turned the building into a museum in 1960. The Anne Frank-Fonds in Basel was set up in 1966 to protect his daughter’s name and deal with royalties from the diary which benefits several charities.

Several lawsuits were fought against various claims that the diary did not exist.

Otto Frank died on August 19th, 1980 after a battle with cancer, he was ninety-one years old.


Edith Frank-Holländer
Soon after they arrived in Westerbork Edith, Anne and Margot were sent to the women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The three women were very close and relied on each other for comfort. Anne was no longer angry with her mother and became close to her. In addition to her daughters, Edith had a group of friends some of whom they met in Westerbork.

Edith tried her hardest to provide her daughters and keep them safe. When the girls where separated from Edith she slowly lost her strength and fight against depression and disease. Edith died on the 6th of January 1945.

Margot and Anne Frank
After they were discovered in the hiding place, Margot and Anne were with their mother until they were selected to move camp and they were sent to Bergen-Belsen. In each camp that Anne and Margot were sent to they found a group of women who were from the Netherlands and they formed a makeshift family.

The tight knit groups of Dutch prisoners traded information and sightings of family members. Word travelled through the camp and Anne was reunited with close friends in the camp. Her friend Lies from Amsterdam found Anne in the camp but soon lost contact.

Both sisters fell ill with typhus and Margot died either in late February or early March 1945, despite Anne attempting to care for her. Seven months after her arrest in early March 1945, Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

 

The Other Hiders from the Secret Annexe

Fritz Pfeffer
Pfeffer was placed in the men’s camp Auschwitz with Otto and Peter van Pels. In October 1944 Fritz Pfeffer was then deported to Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany.

Fritz died at Neuengamme on December 20, 1944. Charlotte Kaletta posthumously married Fritz Pfeffer on April 9, 1953. Werner Pfeffer, Fritz's son, survived the war and moved to the United States in November 1946, changing his name to Peter Pepper.

Hermann Van Pels
Hermann Van Pels was the first of the Secret Annexe's inhabitants to die at the hands of the Nazis. Hermann arrived at Auschwitz with the rest of the hiders, and was put on hard labour duty. Then, only a few weeks after his arrival, he was killed in one of the camp's gas chambers. Otto Frank later told of the point he realised what had happened to his friend: "I'll never forget the time in Auschwitz when the seventeen-year-old Peter van Pels and I saw a group of selected men. Among those men was Peter's father [Hermann]. The men marched away. Two hours later a truck came by loaded with their clothing." Around 1 million people died at Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

 

Auguste Van Pels
Auguste was transported to Bergen Belsen where she came into contact with Anne and Margot for the first time since they were all in Westerbork. Auguste was part of Anne and Margot’s group of friends who took care of each other. 
 
She was then selected to work as a slave labourer and evacuated to the Buchenwald camp, in eastern Germany. Son after the prisoners were again moved to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. While there are some contradicting information regarding Auguste’s final location it is known that she had died before May 8, 1945 in Germany or Czechoslovakia. 

Peter Van Pels
After they were arrested Peter was taken to Auschwitz with his father, Fritz Pfeffer and Otto Frank. In 1974 Otto Frank recalled that in Auschwitz Peter van Pels had a job with the postal department and was able to get extra food clothing. Peter was evacuated when the Russians were approaching the camp. Otto attempted to keep Peter with him in the hospital so he would not join the march out of the camp but was not successful.  After an endless march from Auschwitz Peter ended up in Mauthausen, where he died on May 5, 1945, three days later the camp was liberated.