Cautionary Tales Presents: Warfare, The Life of Anne Frank
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Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. Pushkin. Hi there listeners, Tim Harford here. Cautionary Tales will be back next week, but in the meantime, we're sharing an episode from the Warfare podcast, a show from history hit. I'm a regular listener to Warfare. If you haven't listened before, it's hosted by James Rogers. James is a war historian who works with the UN, NATO and governments around the world.

The show sometimes explores the defining wars of history, such as the First and Second World War. Other episodes provide context to ongoing conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine, or even how it's related to China and Taiwan.

The episode you're about to hear isn't about some epic battle or spectacular military blunder. It's about Anne Frank. Eighty years ago, in 1942, Anne and her family went into hiding during the Second World War, trying to avoid persecution and death in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. And at this time, Anne began keeping a diary that she called Kitty, a diary that became one of the most recognised testimonies of the Jewish wartime experience.

But Anne's story doesn't begin in 1942. In this episode, James explores the life of the Franks before the war and why their story is still so relevant today. I hope you find this warfare episode from our friends at History Hit as moving and as important as I did. You can hear more from warfare wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm James Rogers, and on today's Warfare podcast, we mark the 80th anniversary of that fateful day on July 6th, 1942, when Anne and her family went into hiding by finding out about the people who hid the Franks and another family who lived alongside them.

To help with this, we have Dr. Gertchen Broek, who has been the senior historical researcher at the now-preserved Anne Frank House in Amsterdam for over 15 years. He joins us to explain the fates of those involved and to reveal the real reason why Anne and her family were eventually found by the Nazis.

Hi Gertjan, welcome to the Warfare Podcast. How are you doing today? I'm fine, thank you. Good to hear. Well, it is great to have you on the podcast, especially at this important time of the year, because this July marks 80 years since Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. And of course, we can all still visit that house today, the Anne Frank House, located just outside downtown Amsterdam. I've been there myself.

And I'm always struck by the sombre silence of all of those who are walking around the building, going through into each different room, up into the lofts, back down and into the exhibition space. It truly is a sobering and educational experience. And I suppose that sums up a bit more of what the Anne Frank House is, because it's not just a museum, is it?

It's not just a museum, it's also considered to be a place of remembrance. And most of the visiting people, they pick that up, I think they notice that. So yes, it's a place that a lot of people are impressed by visiting, just when you walk around and you are pondering and thinking over what just happened there in those years.

Absolutely. And it is a museum. It is a space where you can also learn a lot about this history, where talks can take place, where exhibitions can take place. But there's also research going on within the organisation. And you're part of that, aren't you? Yes, that's right. For a long time, the mission of the Anne Frank House was mainly educational. And that is still an important part of it. But

Since I think about 15 years, 15 to 20 years, the idea has grown that it's good for us as an organization, as an educational organization, also as a museum and also as a center of knowledge. We are supposed to know things about the life of Anne Frank and the people around her.

So the idea of forming our own body of knowledge rather than rely on what other people do and think that's important. So the head of collections at that time got the idea to have a research department as well. And she managed to get it afloat. And that was about that time that I came in. I was working there in another capacity. But I am a researcher and I'm a historian. So I was taken on board to actually perform research.

The research, not on my own, but most of the past 15 years, I think I did the main part of the research that's been done, but there are others as well. And what sort of things were you researching? What were you diving into?

Well, that's mainly every aspect of the life. But what we consider 14, what we call protagonists, main figures, and that's Anne Frank and her family and the other four people that have been hiding with them in that building. So there's another family and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer on his own. And then there's six people that tried to help them. They were in on the secret and they were trying to provide them with food and protection and help them. So that's 14 people.

And, well, we actually delve into their life stories. Where did they come from? What did they do before? What did they do after? And how? And that is the main question, I think. How did all these lives evolve and go on that made them all come together at one point in 1942 in that building and doing what they did there at the time?

And then there's also history of the corporations, the companies that were running in the building where those people worked for. The Diary of Anne Frank itself. How did it develop? How did she write it? What does she write about? Because I suppose most people do know that the book that you buy in the bookstore is, in fact, is based on an immense pile of paper as a manuscript, various books.

versions, also even some short stories and novels. This girl wanted to be a writer, but she also wanted to be a journalist. And in a lot of her approaches and the things that she writes about herself and about her experiences, you see a journalistic or at least a proto-journalistic approach at least. And so we also research into all that. When she mentions someone, the man around the corner, the lady next door,

Who does she mean? Who is that? What is their role? What is their part in the complete picture of their life story? And the general idea, to cut it all short, is that insights, the knowledge that we get from that, offer us basically a window, an outlook, not on particular her life and her diary, but of the time that she was living in and what was happening to her, what was happening around her.

Well, let's draw on your research to do exactly that, because like you rightly say, Anne Frank's story did not start in July 1942 when her family went into hiding or when she started writing her diary. Instead, it goes back much further than that, because the Frank family, although mostly associated with Amsterdam today, they were, of course, Germans. So take us through that history. What were the Frank family doing before they arrived in the Netherlands and how did they get there?

Otto Frank, Otto Frank's father, he was from a family that had been living in Frankfurt on Main quite some time. And chiefly his father worked his way up from just a businessman, so to speak. And he became part of the affluent society. The family shifted into affluence, you can say. He was a banker and successful at that.

But the family business was hit pretty hard by the Great War. So investing in war bonds and German war bonds were the best of investment after 1918. So they came into a bit of trouble there. And 1929 hit them hard as well. So I'm going with a bit quickly, I think. But so...

So around 1930, a lot of the affluence was dwindling. And of course, political developments in Germany at the time didn't make it much better. So gradually around the early 1930s and expedited by 1933, the rise to power of Hitler and his National Socialist Party,

all the sister and the brothers of Otto Frank, they all left the country and his mother too. So Otto Frank and his two brothers, they'd been fighting in the German army in 14, 18 years. And his two brothers preferred to live in the capital cities of their former enemies, Paris and London, rather than staying in Germany. I think it says a few things about the atmosphere there at the time. Otto Frank saw the chance to come to Amsterdam after

always neutral netherlands he had a business opportunity there so that was his choice they moved to the netherlands in 1933 at that time for a businessman with means and a solid business plan settling there wasn't really very hard so later in the 30s the netherlands became very strict on immigration because a lot of refugees came from austria later and from germany but

They were lucky to be so early. So they lived in the Netherlands and in Amsterdam in a relatively well-to-do area. I think a friendly area with a lot of other Germans, but also Spanish, Hungarians, Dutch, all sorts of people from upper middle class, I guess. You see, that's really interesting to know because that means that, you know, this wasn't a last minute decision to flee Germany.

It wasn't kind of putting the Frank family into a brand new situation where they knew absolutely nobody around. Instead, they'd been there almost a decade by the time that they had to go into hiding, which must have most definitely helped in trying to create a situation which, well, they could try and be kept secret, be kept safe for as long as possible.

Yes, in general you can say that people at that time used, but there were other groups they were forced to hide as well, but for other reasons obviously. And if you want to go and hide, the best thing you can do, and what the most people did, that is rely on pre-existing networks, on business associations, family relations, friendships, and that's exactly what they did too. Otto Frank had been working in the Netherlands, as you say, over eight years.

So he had his networks, he had a business, although he had to vacate that then after the occupation of the Netherlands. But he had loyal business associates that he worked with and loyal staff. So how did the situation in the Netherlands change over that almost decade period? And when did Otto Frank realize that the family would have to now go into hiding?

Well, basically you can say that people leaving, let's take two Jewish Germans, they'd had to leave, it's obvious, you have to leave Germany because there's not much of a future there. It was over time that shifted, but in the early 1930s for a lot of people that was obvious and things only deteriorated afterwards.

What can you do? You can try and migrate, you can move to another country and find safety there. A lot of people thought, well, that other country better be on the other side of the ocean, but that was always difficult. The United States didn't have a refugee policy, they had an immigration policy. So if you want to go and immigrate, you've got to jump a lot of hurdles and you've got to make sure that you don't become a liability to public means over there. So it's not that easy.

And I think most of the people that I come across in my research, German Jews living in the Netherlands, you can always find traces of documents that they tried to go to the US. And some of them could, some of them couldn't. And Otto Frank and his family tried that as well. There is a document that he says, in 1938, I applied for immigration to the US. So that's 1938.

That's a dramatic year because we don't know when in 1938. So early in 1938, you'd be on a waiting list with perhaps 20,000, 25,000 others, which is quite a lot. But later in the year, after the Anschluss of Austria in Nazi Germany, and particularly in November after the pogroms, what we call the Kristallnacht, the number of applicants for the US skyrocketed up to 350,000 or so, where the US would only allow

a bit over 20,000 German-born immigrants every year. So you see a waiting list of 10 years. Immigration is not an option. Some people try to naturalize to another nationality, into another country. That didn't help in the end either. But for a lot of people in 1942, they've been trying quite a few things to get to safety. And then in 1942, in the summer, the choice was we go report ourselves in for a transit camp.

and then we got to be sent off to labor. That was the idea at the time, although there was the pretext. Or we go and hide. And it's good to consider that in the Netherlands in the summer of 1942, almost everyone thought this thing is going to be over in what, six, eight, 10 months, a year perhaps, because the Americans will come, the British will come, and all the allies will come, and we're going to sort out these Germans. And that was a mistake.

But that was the idea. Can we go hide and sit it out or should we report in? So the plan here then was when it was realized that they would have to go into hiding, the thoughts were perhaps that they'd only have to be there for a matter of months until the Allied liberation happened.

Yes. The general assumption in analysis, you can read that in a lot of documents, in a lot of recollections of people at that time, everyone thought 1942 was already pretty long and that this can't last much longer. So over-optimistic perhaps, or perhaps that was really the thought of that day. That's hard to judge. But in general, people would think, well, if it's going to be for a year or so, we're going to do that. We can sit that out. But

But it went on for a lot, lot longer than that. And a number of helpers risked their lives to offer the Franks sanctuary. So one of the things that isn't often looked into as much is who these helpers were. Could you give us an idea of the people who did help provide the Franks sanctuary? Yes, four of them were office staff of the companies. There were two companies in the building.

One is that most people know that's Opecta. That's really a small product. It's a gelling agent for home-making jam, home cooking of jam and

So for a couple of years, that was the cork on which Otto Frank and his family were afloat, but it wasn't really much of a business. So they needed more turnover, more turnouts to keep themselves alive. And with a couple of business associates, he founded a business that traded in ingredients for the food industry. So that's spices from Asia, so colonial products, basically cinnamon, nutmeg,

that sort of stuff, but also preservants and colorants and odorants and all sorts of surrogates. And that's where Mr. van Pels from the other family in hiding comes in because Otto Frank knew a few things about marketing and business. And Hermann van Pels, he knew the trade, he knew the product. In Germany, he had a business of his own for years in the same sort of product. So he was the expert in that respect.

So four people from the office staff and one man in the warehouse. That's a bit of a dramatic thing as well. The father of one of the office workers was a warehouse man downstairs on the ground floor.

And he was in on the secret too. He was the eyes and ears on the ground, basically. And he's also the one that built the famous bookcase that camouflaged the door into the hiding place. So he provided a lot of safety, guarding the front door and such. But he fell ill. He got seriously ill. He had stomach cancer and he had to leave his job. So there was another man down there. He wasn't in on the secret. And of course, they were not going to tell him because you don't know what kind of risk you run if you tell a total stranger.

So that's when the sense of security sort of started to wane a little bit. But on the first floor, on the office floor, four office workers and the husband of one of them, the husband of Miep Gries, he was a civil servant. He worked in the civil service of the city and he also had a position as a commissioner, sort of a supervisor.

of the board of the business in the building. So you see this an office building with a company, a serious company running there where the management basically is hiding and is out of sight. No one knows they're there. And it's the staff that's trying to keep things afloat and running. And there's a mutual dependence there as well because the people behind the bookcase would secretly do work, administrative work or packing goods and all sorts of things.

to lower the expenses of the business. The business was the livelihood of the staff and it was the life insurance for the people in hiding there. Because if the building was rented, if the business should fail, they have to vacate the building and they would leave their hiding place. So there's a mutual dependence between the corporations and the staff and the people hiding on the other side.

So you mentioned there was four people in the office and then one person in the warehouse who sadly is taken ill and so reduces that capacity to try and help the Frank family. But you also mentioned that there is two families that are in hiding. So overall, how many people are being hidden in this office building?

Altogether, there were eight. There's the Frank family, father and mother and two daughters. And then there's the business associate, the experts van Pelsen I just mentioned, who knew about the trade, who knew about the goods, about the commodities, with his wife and son.

So that's seven. They were there since July 1942. And then in November, they took in an eighth man. There was a dentist, Fritz Pfeffer. The tragedy with Fritz Pfeffer, that is, was that he wanted to marry a non-Jewish woman in Germany, but he wasn't allowed because of the Nuremberg 1935 laws. And he moved with her to Amsterdam and she always passed as his legal spouse in their social surroundings.

So basically everyone thought, well, he's well off. He's in a mixed marriage. He's not in trouble as we are.

So when the Frank family and Van Pels were hiding, they who knew him were hiding in their annex, in their company building. Then they heard that Fritz Pfeffer was in trouble too. And that's how they learned that his marriage wasn't an actually official marriage. So that is a tragic circumstance as well. But then they took him in. They saw fit to have an eight person there in the building. He could also, I suppose, help share expenses.

I see. So there was a kind of humanitarian decision here to just try and help someone in need. But there was also a practical side to this as a means to try and help cover the cost of what is now a growing expense at a time that the war is also getting pretty tense, pretty severe, heightened in

in terms of the amount of violence that's being perpetrated across the continent and the amount of pressure that is being put on the Nazi forces. So it's even harder to get food, for example. And so all of this must combine together to make, as we move through 1953 and into 1954, a really, really difficult time.

It also must have been incredibly, incredibly difficult on the mental state of those who were in hiding. Now, you mentioned about the adults who are helping with the business and cover some of the extra labour there. But what about the kids? What about people like Anne? What were they doing in their spare time?

learning and reading that's the first words that come to mind but just to be precise also they did some of the work just packing goods and light administrative jobs but

Mainly the idea was because they were optimistic and they thought there was going to come an end to that and they'd be back in school one day. So they kept up with their schoolwork. They tried to learn history, languages, and do a lot of reading against getting bored. Of course, there's a hanging about and doing nothing and sit out day after day. That's mind destroying. But so reading and keeping themselves occupied and for the children basically keep up with schoolwork.

So just trying to keep things as normal as possible until the world hopefully goes back to the way it was and also look to the future. Is that what Anne's diary is about to you? Is it also about looking to the future and trying to envisage a world where there is some hope? There's visions of hope, I think, but you have to consider also, as I mentioned earlier, her manuscripts, what she all wrote and scribbled is a large pile of paper. It's not just one volume as a book.

So when she starts out writing a diary, that's even a couple of weeks before she is hiding. She starts on her 13th birthday when she's still at home. And when she starts off as a just 13-year-old, you read the writing of a 13-year-old. She just knows it's going from this to that. And it's about things that she likes. And you see her mature and you see a sort of intellectual development there as well.

At a later stage in time, she's going to rework all her writing, all her notes into something that she wants to be a novel about her experiences in hiding. That's after she hears from the Dutch government in London, the Secretary of Education and Sciences, I think he's called, in the exile, the government in London from the Netherlands, the

On the radio, the illegal radio, and he says to the people in the Netherlands, keep your notebooks, keep your calendars. If there's a sermon from a preacher or a priest, just keep that so we can document how daily life, how the experiences of the populations were during the occupations. And she hears that and she thinks, that's good. I'm going to do that. I'm going to write a novel about what I've experienced.

And so she starts writing that novel at a later stage in 1944, when she is a bit older and she has matured a bit and her writing skills are more developed. So that's when you see that, well, the talent, basically, the talent for writing and also for a journalistic approach comes to light. And it's from those chapters that basically the diaries, we know it from the bookstore, is compiled. Cautionary Tales will return with the Warfare podcast in just a moment.

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Tim Harford here, you're listening to the Warfare podcast, proudly presented by Cautionary Tales. And of course, as we move through 1944, and up until that infamous date in history, August 4th,

We see that Anne is still writing that diary. But do we know, and this is of course quite a contentious and controversial question, but do we know how they were discovered or why they were discovered, particularly on that date, on August 4th, 1944? There's been lots of reports recently around this traitor theory. Is there much accuracy in that?

Or do we just not quite know exactly what happened here? Well, one of the research topics that I've been over the years I told you about is in particular that what are the circumstances of that arrest? In my belief, the Fourth of August is just very arbitrary. But I brought out a research paper in 2016 because over time, the general idea, Otto Frank came back in the Netherlands in 1945 and he thought we were betrayed by someone and we're going to find out who...

But there was an investigation, there was even a court case against the not knowing warehouse man. You know, this is the second warehouse man that we just discussed. He was acquitted because there was no evidence against him. In the 1960s, there was a new investigation after Wiesenthal had found the SS officer who was present at the arrest.

And the general assumption is that someone made a treacherous phone call to the German authorities at the time. And in my investigative report from 2016, I have shown that that is just an assumption and there's no evidence for that. A lot of people think, well, that man said 20 years after the fact that there was a phone call made that morning. And so that must be true.

However, the man himself says in his 1963 statement, one of the first things that he said is, if my memory serves me well, there was a phone call coming in that morning. So he is not certain. But for a lot of people, they took that as evidence. And that led to, especially over the last 30 years, I think a wild goose chase. Who made that phone call? And I think I've shown in my investigative report that that phone call is not certain at all in the first place.

and that there's other avenues of thinking about scenarios that have led to the visiting of Dutch and German policemen on that day. For instance, you also pointed out that the supply of food was a large problem in this case. You know, people hiding, people are cut off from the civil society. Food supplies are overseen, supervised and distributed by the authorities.

and strictly regulated. So if you're off the grid, if you don't have ties with the civic administration anymore, so you have to be fraudulent to get food. You have to be fraudulent to be supplied. So you make yourself vulnerable to all sorts of detection. And what this investigation of the former FBI man and his team has grossly neglected and willfully, I believe, overlooked is

is that earlier in 1944, already two people from the company in that building were arrested for fraudulent trading of food coupons. So German authorities had already sniffed on the building and sniffed on the company in there a couple of months prior to that rate. And

There's no proof at this moment that I know that there is a connection between those two events, but I don't think it's very far-fetched to assume that. I think it's very lightheaded of the Rosemary Sullivan book to just plainly ignore that. And I think that's because they want to point out the culprit in a scenario where there's no culprit.

but they were merely accidentally caught up in the police investigation, totally unrelated to their presence, just don't serve that purpose. So is it more practical than that? And of course, those who want to find a culprit don't want to deal in the more basic and I suppose boring practicalities of these things. But could we go as far to say it was almost...

inevitable in this case because when you are trying to feed so many people and as we said as the screws are being tightened on all levels of society as rationing is getting harder as it becomes more difficult for people to live with inside the system let alone outside it there would have been something that flashed up something that would have given them away

That's exactly it. And so my thesis is, although not to be proven until yet, that the company, Giesenko, was under scrutiny from the authorities because their salesmen had been proven to be fraudulent. One of them is even convicted for that in 1944. So it's not far-fetched. There was a detective unit, a nationwide working detective unit that specialized in this sort of fraud. And they've been searching places all over the country, and it's more than once.

that they came across Jews hiding there as well. They weren't looking for them. They were looking for people that were slaughtering livestock illegally, people that were trading in food coupons, people that were fraudulent with food rations. So I guess there's a good chance that this happened. And not a lot of people in the Netherlands realize this.

that that was a big danger for hidden Jews as well. The general idea is you hide somewhere in an attic or in the basement or in the back room and you hope that the neighbors won't give you away. But there's a lot of more things that are jeopardizing your secret presence anywhere. Well, I suppose that this is all but one side of the story because no matter how they were discovered, it sets into action a series of tragic events.

from that August date in 1944. So tell us what happened to the Frank family. Where were they taken upon being discovered? Yes, it's a good point that you make. For the outcome, it doesn't matter whether betrayed or found by coincidence. The outcome is still the same. So what happened for them is that they were taken to a German bureau where they were briefly interrogated.

And then brought to a remand prison right in the middle of Amsterdam. There they were locked up with other Jews that were arrested recently. So that's what they did at the time. They had sort of a holding facility there and they would hold the people in there. And once they had a number of 70 or 80 or so, they would take them to the transit camp Westerbork.

in the north-northeast of the country. So there was a concentration camp or a transit camp as it was called, where the Jewish population of the Netherlands was brought over time bit by bit and from where the deportation trains left.

And so they arrived there on August 8th, 1944, four days after being arrested. And on September 3rd, just a couple of weeks later, they were taking in a train, the proverbial cattle cars to Auschwitz. They were on the last train to leave the Netherlands for Auschwitz. The last train to leave the Netherlands for Auschwitz. Now that is a powerful sentence. What happened to all of those who were found after that train had left?

They were brought to Westerbork as well, and there were people left behind in Westerbork as well. And the next day, on September 4, there was also a train leaving, but that didn't go to Auschwitz, but to Theresienstadt in what now is Czechia, the Czech Republic. And that wasn't exactly walking the park, but it was different from Auschwitz. So there were a lot of people left behind in Westerbork, and it was liberated by, I think, the Canadians or the Poles in April 1945.

So they found, I think, about 800 or 900 people still alive there. So we know that the Frank family are taken off to Auschwitz. Do we know much about their time there, what life was like for Otto, for Anne, and for the rest of the family? Well, Otto Frank is the only one who survived, who lived to tell the tale. But we do know a few things about them. There was other people that have survived Auschwitz, have seen them there as well, and have met them there as well. So they can tell quite a few things about that family.

Well, at first, at arrival at Birkenau, at the Rampe, so to speak, that's a well-known picture with a watchtower and the trains coming down. The first thing that happens is that men and women are separated. So Otto Frank was separated from his wife and daughters. Herman van Pels and his son were separated from their wives.

wife and mother. And Frits Preffer being on his own from this little group was with the other men, of course. So the women remained in Birkenau and the men were marched after being tattooed and shaven and all that, marched to what's called the Stammlager, Auschwitz I. And they were set to work. They had to dig gravel from a river and make roads, sort of that hard labor. Herman van Pels was the first one, I think, to do...

to die. So he injured his hand during work and he asked to be relieved for work for some days. And he was granted that relief. But then the risk that you run then is that you're just in the barracks being useless. And every couple of weeks, all those useless people round up and murdered. And we don't know exactly how and when, but somewhere early October, he must have died. And he's probably gassed with a lot of other people.

His son survived until January when the death marches started from Auschwitz. So everyone who could walk was forced to walk. And he was taken 50 kilometers or so and put on a train and ended up in Mauthausen in Austria. And that's where he died, totally exhausted and malnourished.

Around the day of liberation, actually, in May 1945, the Americans were already on the threshold, but not too late for him. Fritz Pfeffer was a dentist and he left Auschwitz with a bit of a mystery still, but with a group of other medical professionals involved.

at least 20 or so, we don't know for what purpose, but he ended up in the Neuenkamer camp near Hamburg and that's where he died of enterocolitis in December 1944 already. And then the women in Birkenau, Edith Frank died on early January 1945. There's a witness, a friend that she made that, a witness that had told that to Otto Frank later on, she did survive.

And in November '44 already she was separated from her daughters because at that point the Nazis started to move large numbers of women, Dutch and French mainly, and some Hungarians from Auschwitz back into Germany proper.

to a camp where they could just 'erholung' is the German word, just get fixed up a little bit because they were still fit enough to work in the war industry. All the German men were fighting on the front at that time and the factory should still be running because the war effort was tremendous. So these women were to put in to work in all those factories and Edith Frank was not fit enough to go with them so the girls were separated from her.

She stayed behind in Auschwitz and she whittled away, I guess, there. She was here when malnourished as well and died. So then Mrs. van Pels and the girls, Anne and Margot, they were moved to Bergen-Belsen. That was the camp where they should have been patched up a little bit and then distributed over other parts of Germany to set to work.

But the front lines kept shifting and shifting and one railway line after another was cut off. And so that whole idea didn't work out that very well in the end. And that's why Bergen-Belsen was by early 1945 sort of a warehouse overcrowded with 10,000s of people who had no food, no healthcare and hanging about to die basically, lots of them. And only Mrs. van Pels to be complete.

She was put on a train and put to work in a little factory near Dessau.

And after a couple of weeks, she and a lot of other women were moved further towards the St. Theresienstadt in the now Czech Republic again. And she died on the way, as people have been people testimony. She died on that train and they left her behind by the tracks during one of the stops. And Anna and Margot, as we well know, somewhere in February contracted typhoid fever and transmitted by vice in clothing, in unwashed clothing.

And thousands of thousands of people in Bergen-Belsen died of that cause. And they did too.

Otto Frank, in the end, he was in the sick bay in Auschwitz, where he luckily survived being in the sick bay. It was a bit of a death sentence, really, but a couple of hundred that did survive that, and they were liberated by the Russians, by the Soviet army, I should say. There were Russians, Ukrainians, and all sorts of Soviet soldiers in that army, and they liberated the camp, and that was how he was saved.

And you mentioned Bergen-Belsen, of course, which was liberated by the British on the 15th of April, 1945. And like you say, I mean, the scenes there, thousands of bodies lay unburied around the camp. What, 60,000, 70,000 people starving?

Mortally ill, packed together without food, water, basic sanitation, suffering from various different types of diseases, typhus, dysentery. I mean, truly a terrible, terrible place to be and highlights the stark reality of the end of the war and of the Holocaust. And you mentioned that Otto is the only one to survive.

How did it come to be that we're able to talk about this today, that we're able to hear about the Frank story, that we're able to read Anne's diary? Yes, well, the diary was left behind at the arrest and was scattered all over the floor of that paper. That is a well-known story that the German officer present at the scene, he needed something to put the valuables that he confiscated in.

And Otto Frank kept his daughter's papers in his briefcase during the night. So he scattered around the floor to put the valuables in. And the helpers, the office staff, the women that were not arrested that day, they picked up all those papers in the days after and they kept it to give it back to Anna when she would come back. Well, she didn't, but then Otto did. And when it was clear that Otto was the only one and all the others had died,

They handed over all the paperwork to him. So Otto Frank took that and it took him a while before he could set himself to actually reading it. A couple of months actually, till the end of 1945.

And when he started reading it and he somehow found out that she, parts of that book, she had intended for publication. That was her dream. She wanted to be a writer and a journalist and she wanted to publish that book. So that gave him the thought, I think. And I think it's fair to say that it was for him the sense of purpose again. So his family gone, his social circle gone, his daughters, his wife, his business down on the ground and he had to rebuild. He sort of reinvent himself and rebuild his whole life.

And having that book and the ideals that, well, he says, I want to spread my daughter's ideals. I don't know exactly, to be honest, what those ideals were, but there is something about hope and about reconciliation and we should be good and people should be good for each other and we should build a better world as a general idea. I think that's the ideals that he mentioned. And he worked for that. So he found a new purpose in life in the idea of reconciliation and

bring back the youth of all corners of the world and bring them together and let them talk and let them meet each other, let them get to know each other so we can avoid this sort of calamities and disasters in the future. I think when you look at the world today, that wasn't very successful, but still the idea is good.

And after the diary became a success, particularly in the United States. So in the Netherlands it was quite a success as well. It was first printed in June 1945 and the second print was already in December. So there was a lot of public interest, I think, for the book.

But it really took wings in the United States. And then there was a stage play in the US and there was a film made by George Stevens in the US. So there was international acclaim and international interest as well. And when the interest for his daughter's diary grew internationally, he had the idea also of maintaining the building where it had all happened.

It was a derelict building. It was always collapsing. So he took initiatives to preserve that building and to do it up again and make that, all those meetings, that's where the youth from the world could meet. That should be in that place, in his opinion. And that's what he worked for. And that's what he actually realized as well in the 1960s when the Anne Frank House was just opened for the public public.

It was every year there was also a youth center connected to it. And every year from 1960, 61, 62 to the 70s or so, there were annual youth conferences, just students coming from all over the world and discussing all sorts of things. Apartheid in South Africa, the civil rights movement in the US, the Vietnam War, all sorts of topics that people discuss. They want to make the world a better place. So I think that's why we can still visit that today.

That's exactly where Anne's message lives on, that push for hope and reconciliation around the world. Although, as we hear on this podcast all too often, it's very, very difficult to achieve in reality, it seems, but we need those spaces, just like the Anne Frank House, where those discussions can take place.

Gertjan, thank you so much for your time and for coming on the podcast today. Please tell us about where people can read more of your work and how they can engage in the work of the Anne Frank House. The best way to go, I think, is go to the website annefrank.org. You can find all sorts of information of the activities of the Anne Frank House there.

And there's also, in the header, you can look for the research, various research report that I wrote or that some of my colleagues wrote. You can find an investigative report about the arrests. You can find an article that I co-authored with an American colleague about the immigration attempts into the U.S.,

You can find all sorts of information there and also things you can possibly do yourself. Well, Gertrude, thank you so much for your time today and for your continued research on this topic. You're always welcome on the Warfare podcast. Thank you. It was my pleasure. That was James Rogers, host of the Warfare podcast. If you liked it, you know what to do. And cautionary tales will return next week.

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