Anna Frank’s Final Days After She Was Caught with Her Family in the Hiding Place – a major feature article in the ...

The American LIFE magazine, dated August 18, 1958, focuses on the critical days of Anne Frank and her family at the time they were caught in their hiding place, deported to Auschwitz, and later to Bergen-Belsen — as recounted by various witnesses who were with Anne until her final days in Bergen-Belsen. Its main headline: “What Happened After End of Anne Frank’s Diary.”  Journalist Ernst Schnabel succeeded in locating several people who saw Anne Frank during her last days in the hiding apartment, in Auschwitz, and later in Bergen-Belsen, and obtained riveting testimony from them about what befell the girl who gave humanity the most important diary written during the Holocaust years. 

On the cover photo, the magazine features the familiar portrait of Anne Frank alongside words she wrote in her diary on October 10, 1942: "This is a photo of me as I’d wish myself to look all the time. Then I might still have a chance to get to Hollywood. But now I’m afraid I usually look quite different. Amsterdam, Holland.”

In the main article of the issue, spanning approximately ten pages, journalist Ernst Schnabel reveals the story of Anne Frank and her family from the moment they were caught in their hiding place until Anne’s death in Bergen-Belsen. Schnabel interviewed 42 people who knew Anne Frank -many of whom provided information about those final months of her life. Among them were the people closest to Anne Frank, who were in the main part of the building where the hiding apartment was located at the time she and her family were taken — Miep, Mr. Kleiman (who emigrated to Toronto after the war), Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, the only one from the hiding place who survived, and Mr. Kugler. These individuals worked near the family’s hiding place and provided them with food and relayed news for about two years (they themselves were taken to prison and released shortly afterward). Miep provided details about the Gestapo raid on Anne’s apartment: “The footsteps moved along the corridor. Then a door creaked, and a moment later the door connecting to Mr. Kleiman’s office opened, and a fat man pushed his head in and said in Dutch: ‘Quiet. Stay where you are.’ At first, I didn’t know what was happening. But then, suddenly, I knew...”. The man who burst into their office ordered them not to move, and the search of the building began.

Mr. Kraler recounted: "A first sergeant in the uniform of the occupation police and three men in civilian clothing entered my office. They wanted to see the storage rooms at the front of the building. Everything will be fine, I thought, as long as they don’t want to see anything else. But after the sergeant finished checking everything, he stepped into the corridor and ordered me again to come. At the end of the corridor, they suddenly drew their pistols, and the sergeant ordered me to push aside the bookcase and open the door behind it. I said: ‘But there’s only a bookcase there!’ At that moment, he became agitated, because he knew everything. He grabbed the bookcase and pulled it - and the secret door was exposed. Perhaps the hooks weren’t properly secured. They opened the door, and I was forced to go up the stairs ahead of them. The officers followed behind me. I could feel their guns against my back. I was the first to enter the Franks’ room. Mrs. Frank was standing by the table. I made a great effort and managed to say: ‘The Gestapo is here.’”

Otto Frank recounted the same event: “I was showing Peter van Daan his spelling mistakes when suddenly someone came running up the stairs. The steps creaked, and I stood up, because it was morning, a time when everyone was supposed to be quiet. But then the door suddenly burst open, and a man stood before us, pointing his pistol at my chest. In the main room, the others had already gathered. My wife, my children, and the Van Daans stood there with their hands raised. Then Albert Dussel came in, followed by another stranger. In the middle of the room stood a uniformed officer. He stared at us. ‘Where are your valuables?’ he asked. I pointed to the cabinet where I kept my cash box. The officer took it. Then he looked around, and his eye fell on the leather satchel in which Anne kept her diary and all her papers. He opened it and shook everything out, throwing the contents on the floor so that Anne’s papers, notebooks, and journals were scattered at our feet...”.

Otto Frank went on to describe to him the family’s reaction to the discovery of the hiding place at that moment: “Now everyone packed. Otto Frank recalled the arrest: ‘No one cried. Anne was very quiet and calm, just hopeless, just like all of us. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t think to take her notebooks, which were scattered on the floor. But maybe she too had a foreboding feeling that everything was lost now, everything - and so she walked back and forth and didn’t even glance at her diary.’” At the Gestapo headquarters, the family underwent a brief interrogation. The Frank couple, the Van Daan family, and Dussel were held at the police headquarters for several days, the men in one cell, the women in another. Suddenly, all eight of them were taken to the train station and placed on a train. The guards announced their destination: Westerbork, a concentration camp for Jews in the Netherlands, about 128 kilometers from Amsterdam. The reporter attempted to reach M. (Willem van Maaren, a warehouse worker who was suspected of strange behavior and was later tried for war crimes on suspicion of revealing the hiding place of the Frank family, but without success. He denied everything), but was unable to locate his whereabouts.

He also visited the home of a woman named Mrs. de Wijk, who at the time lived in Apeldoorn and had seen Anne Frank in Westerbork during the three weeks she spent there. She told him that shortly after arriving at the camp, Anne fell ill and needed treatment, and that she never stopped talking about God. He further writes: “Mrs. de Wijk was in the same freight car as the Frank family during the journey from Westerbork to Auschwitz. ‘From time to time, when the train stopped, ’ she told me, ‘the SS guards came to the door and held out their caps, and we had to throw our money and valuables into them. Anne and Jopie would sometimes move close to the small, narrow window of the car and describe the villages we were passing through. We made the children memorize addresses where we could meet after the war if we were separated in the camp. I remember that the Franks chose a meeting place in Switzerland... On the third night, the train came to a halt, the doors of the car were violently thrown open, and the first thing the exhausted passengers saw of Auschwitz was the blinding searchlights fixed on the train. On the platform, kapos (criminal prisoners appointed to positions of authority over other inmates) ran back and forth shouting orders. Behind them, clearly outlined against the lights, stood SS officers, tall, sharply dressed, many of them with giant dogs at their sides. As people exited the train, a loudspeaker roared, “Women to the left! Men to the right!” The next day, Anne Frank’s hair was shaved off, as was her mother’s and that of the other Jewish women who had arrived with her.’” Mrs. de Wijk saw Anne Frank every day in Auschwitz. “Anne looked even more beautiful there, ” said Mrs. de Wijk. “Of course, her long hair was gone, but now you could see that her beauty was in her eyes, which seemed to grow larger as she grew thinner. Her cheerfulness had disappeared, but she was still alert and sweet…”.

Later, Anne Frank was transferred to Bergen-Belsen. The train that took Anne from Auschwitz to Belsen stopped at every second station due to air raids. In Bergen-Belsen, there were no roll calls and almost no presence of the SS at that time. Prisoners lived without hope. The fact that the Allies had reached the Rhine encouraged no one. Prisoners died daily from hunger, thirst, and disease. In the final weeks at Bergen-Belsen, as Germany was being crushed between the Russians and the Western Allies, there was hardly any food left at all. Both Anne and Margot contracted typhus at the beginning of March 1945. Margot, her sister, lay in a coma for several days. Later, while unconscious, she fell from her bunk and died. Schnabel writes: “Anne Frank’s death passed almost without warning. For Anne, as for millions of others, it was merely the final anonymity, and I have not met anyone who remembers being with her at that moment. So many people were dying. One woman said, ‘I’m sure she died because of her sister’s death. Dying is easy for anyone left alone in a concentration camp.’” Mrs. B., who shared a bleak Christmas meal with Anne, knows a little more: “Anne, who was very ill at the time, was never told of her sister’s death. But a few days later she died peacefully. Three weeks after that, British soldiers liberated Bergen-Belsen.”

The American magazine LIFE was considered one of the most prominent and influential publications of the 20th century. It was founded in 1936 by Henry Luce, and redefined photojournalism in its era. The magazine combined in-depth articles with dramatic and accessible photography, covering historical events, wars, politics, popular culture, and everyday life in the United States and around the world. It served as a visual window through which the American public became acquainted with international issues such as World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the Apollo moon landing, and more. 

96 pages. Complete issue. Good condition.