After the play….Answers to frequently asked questions

The only know video footage of Anne Frank

Did any of the helpers get arrested?

Yes, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman were also arrested and taken to the holding cell with the family. Later they were interned in a camp. Both men survived the war.

When the Nazis found Anne and her family were they sent directly to a "Death Camp?"

No. They spent 4 days locked in a holding cell in Amsterdam, and on August 8, 1944 they were transported to the Westerbork Camp.

They stayed there for the whole month of August in the "punishable barracks." They were considered "punishable prisoners" since they had not given themselves up when the call-up notices were sent, but had been captured in hiding.

Where did they go after Westerbork?

On September 3, 1944, the eight prisoners joined 1,011 others on the last train bound for the Auschwitz death

camp in Poland.

Hermann van Pels (Mr. Van Daan) is gassed

on September 6, 1944, a few days after arrival.

Otto, Peter, and Mr. Dussel go to the men barracks. Anne, Margot, Mrs. Frank, and Mrs. Van Daan are sent to the women’s barracks. Mr. Frank never sees his wife or daughters again.

Anne and Margot are sent to Bergen-Belsen, in October 1944. Mrs. Van Daan arrives at Bergen-Belsen at the end of November.

Edith Frank dies of disease and/or malnutrition at Auschwitz on January 6, 1945

Otto Frank & Auschwitz is liberated on January 26, 1945 by the Russians.

Mr. Frank made it back and arrived at Miep’s doorstep on June 3rd, 1945.

Where was Bergen-Belsen?

Bergen-Belsen was a concentration camp located in northern Germany. Bergen-Belsen was established in April 1943 as a detention camp for prisoners who were to be exchanged with German imprisoned in Allied countries.

Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British Army on April 15, 1945.

What happened to Anne and Margot?

Anne and Margot both died of typhus and starvation during February-March 1945.

Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British Army on April 15, 1945.

What happened to Mr. Dussel?He was deported to Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg and died n 20 December 1944. His cause of death was listed in the camp records as "enterocolitis", a catch-all term that covered, among other things, dysentery and cholera, both of which were common causes of death in the camps. (Charlotte Kaletta married Fritz Pfeffer posthumously on 9 April

1953. His son, Werner, survived the war in England and emigrated to the United States in 1947.)

What happened to Mrs. Van Daan?

Mrs. Van Daan, we think, was transferred before March 1945 to Buchenwald, then to the Theresienstadt ghetto. She is believed to have died either en route to Theresienstadt, or shortly after her arrival there.

What happened to Peter? He was transferred to and then

died in Mauthausen after a death march.

Mauthausen Concentration Camp records indicate that Peter van Pels was registered upon his arrival there on 25 January 1945. Four days later, he was placed in an outdoor labor group. On 11 April 1945, Peter was sent to the sick barracks. His exact death date is unknown but the Red Cross designated it as 2 May 1945. He was 18 years old.

Mauthausen was liberated three days later on 5 May 1945 by men from the 11th Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army.

What happened to Mr. Frank? 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.

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

What happens to the Helpers? 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.

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. Miep died on January 11, 2010.

What happens to the Helpers? 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.

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.

What happened to Anne’s friends? Hannah, Gabi, and her father were taken to

Bergen-Belsen. While there, she was able to see Anne, who was

in the prisoner section of the camp. Hannah was able to talk to Anne several times through the barrier, and to toss some essentials over it for her. Anne had told Hannah, at this point, that she believed both of her parents were dead, and in later years Hannah reflected that if Anne had known her father were still alive, she might have found the strength to survive until the camp was liberated.

Shortly after Hannah threw the bundle over the fence for Anne, Anne's contingent of prisoners was moved, and Hannah never heard from her again.

Hannah and her little sister Gabi were the only members of their family to survive the war, and Hannah was near death from typhus and tuberculosis when the Russians liberated the train in which she and Gabi were being transported, reportedly to Theresienstadt.

After recovering, Hannah emigrated to Israel, became a nurse, and ultimately a grandmother of ten.

What happened to Anne’s friends? Helmuth "Hello" Silberberg Hello had been living in Amsterdam with

his grandparents, but by a very convoluted series of events, including several narrow escapes from the Nazis, he was able eventually to reunite with his parents in Belgium. Belgium was also an occupied country, however, and he and his family were still "in hiding", though not under circumstances as difficult as the Franks.

The town where the Silberbergs were hiding was liberated by American forces on 3 September 1944, and Hello was free — tragically on the same day that Anne and her family left on the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz.

Hello emigrated to the United States after the war, and is today known as Ed Silverberg.He appears as Ed Silverberg in the multimedia stage presentation about the Holocaust called, And Then They Came for Me.

The Secret Annex

Was Anne's diary the only diary ever found from the Holocaust? No, there are many diaries and testimonies from the

Holocaust. Students may want to read more, such as We are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in

the Holocaust, Jacob Boas (Scholastic, 1995) Witnesses to War, Eight True-Life stories of Nazi

persecution, Michael Leapman (Viking 1998) Edith's Story, Edith Velmans, (Bantam) 2000 Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust,

Alexandra Zapruder (Yale University Press) 2002.

"How will learning about her life change the way you live yours?"