So the Russians took us away from Auschwitz, and the only way
we could travel was eastward, always in cattle trucks, till we ended up in Odessa, and there we waited for the end of the war.

And we were, of course, very anxious to get back to Amsterdam, and in Odessa we waited for a
troop transport ship to come.

which came eventually and
then we went to Marseille   and then all the way up through France to
Belgium and eventually back into Amsterdam.

So from end of January till June we were all the time traveling really.

Otto knew that his wife Edith had passed away but   he still believed there was some hope
for his two daughters Anne and Margot.

But he didn’t know about his two girls.

So he always said he had great
hope that they would be alive.

And we, of course, as well, my father and brother.

Eva,
her mother, Otto Frank and hundreds of others would sail   from Odessa in the Ukraine to
Marseille in southern France.

From Marseille, they traveled north back to Amsterdam.

They arrived in Amsterdam in June 1945, six months after they were
liberated from Auschwitz.

The Amsterdam they came back to was not the
same place they had left the previous year.

The threat of the Nazis was no longer there, but their occupation had taken its toll.

It had suffered a lot, of course.

The last year was the hunger winter, because the Germans took everything the
Dutch produced to feed their own people.

And many, many thousands of Dutch people
perished from starvation.

So we were not well received, actually.

Not because they didn’t want us to come back, but because they had suffered and they didn’t really know what to do with
more people who needed help.

Returning to Amsterdam, Otto Frank found that his family home in
the Mvaderplan was no longer available.

He couldn’t move back in his own apartment
because other people had moved in.

He had nowhere to go.

Survivors came back.

It was like arriving here from another planet.

So Otto moved in with Miep Gies, who was one of the helpers.

It was still around the
corner from the Merida Plan.

Eva and her mother, however, found that their apartment was
still there for them to move into.

We were lucky we were able to
get into our own apartment, because when we came to Amsterdam it was a
furnished apartment belonging to a Christian.

and she gave it back to us.

And we waited for news of our family.

Finding refuge with Miep Gies, Otto Frank was still unaware
of the fate of his daughters.

The thought of being reunited
with them kept his hopes alive.

So he went to the Central
Station every day where.

.

.

People arrived from wherever they had been and whatever camp they had been
in order to look for them, in order to know about their
fates or about the whereabouts.

And he came to visit everybody who was connected   with Anne or Margot and to try to
find out if they knew anything.

There were lists of people
who went to different camps.

He appealed in a newspaper.

for news of his daughters and we
still have that advertisement.

And then he was introduced to two women who were in Bergen-Belsen in the same
barrack as the Frank girls.

Otto Frank came to tell us
as well that he had heard   that both his girls had perished in Bergen-Belsen.

Eva and her mother had also been living in
hope that Eric and Heinz would be found, but they would receive the same news as Otto.

In July, we got the notification from the Red Cross that both my father and brother
had perished in Mauthausen.

several days before the American
army came to liberate that camp.

Edith Frank, having witnessed her children being taken
away from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, died in the January of 1945.

Both Anne and Margot were to
die within days of each other, with Anne having to witness
her older sister’s death.

From the eight people who were in hiding
in the annex of 263 Prinzengracht, Only one survived.

That was Otto Frank.

When
he came first to tell us that the girls had died, he looked as if he couldn’t
carry on with his life.

He went back to tell Miep.

And Miep went to the drawer where
she’d been keeping Anne’s diary.

And she said to him, here you are, Mr.

Frank.

Here is the legacy of your daughter.

She went into the secret
annex after those who were in hiding were captured and taken away from here.

And she managed to save lots of the diary papers.

Miep knew that within a couple of days, everything would be taken away.

She kept them with her until after the war.

And when she learned that Anne would not return, she gave these papers, notebook sheets to Anne’s father.

Miep hadn’t read it.

It was Anne’s private diary.

Otto went into another room and quietly read it.

He came out ashen-faced and said, Miep, I never knew my daughter.

Otto and Elfriede would begin
to see more of each other, offering support from their
shared experiences and losses.

One of the first people to hear Otto
read extracts from Anne’s diary was Eva.

A few days later he came with the diary and opened the packet very carefully
and he read a few sentences, but he always burst into tears.

He couldn’t read it in one go and
it took him three weeks to read it, he told us that.

He agonised for a long time as
to whether he should publish it.

She wanted to be a writer, she wanted to be a published writer.

But at the end of the day, it was a private diary.

And she said things that were maybe
not suitable for other people to read.

She wasn’t very nice about her mother.

Everybody told him he should publish it, and especially a history professor
told him he has to publish it, it’s his duty.

Otto was paying more and more
visits to Eva and her mother.

During these encounters, Eva would start to witness Otto’s philosophy, which would be the driving
force for his life’s work.

And Otto came very often.

My mother cooked him a meal.

He was very lonely.

We talked a lot, and he told me, me that he who had lost everybody really he
had no hatred he said you know if you hate you’ll be so miserable otto frank dedicated
the rest of his life to the diary of am i think what is remarkable was that he managed
to do so in a very special way not just being that a memory of what had happened
and how his family had suffered, but very much as a message to young
generations to build a new future.

Otto would find that global recognition
would initially come from America, firstly with a hit Broadway stage show
and then an Academy Award winning film, Obsessions of Anne’s, which would seem fitting for her legacy.

Otto Frank had lost everything.

The hope he carried with him as he made
the epic journey back to Amsterdam was soon evaporated when he heard the devastating
news of the death of both his daughters, Anne and Margot.

At the same time, Otto was given the diary which Miep Gies had kept.

Eva Schloss with her mother would
witness firsthand the rise of what would become one of the world’s
most regarded works of literature.

one of the world’s most tragic
stories and the creation of a symbol of hope and equality
in the face of persecution.

I knew they liked each other, Otto and my mother, but I had no idea how close they were.

I was a very difficult teenager.

I didn’t want to do any housework.

I was quite obstinate.

I was too miserable.

Otto came and, you know, they talked and he helped me a lot.

Then when I finished with school, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

And Otto and my mother decided
I should become a photographer.

which I couldn’t really
care what I was going to do, but I agreed.

So Otto said it would be good if
you would go abroad for a year, which I did to London.

Otto came to visit me quite a
lot and he kept an eye on me.

So he already took the part a
bit of a sort of stepfather.

Otto and Elfriede grew closer and closer
over time and would marry in 1953.

Eva received the news whilst living in London.

He said, well,
your mother and me have fallen in love, and they were married for 27 years, so longer than they were
married to their first spouses.

Otto had already decided that the
Diary of Anne Frank must be published.

He showed it to a few people
and gauged their opinions.

And then a professor called Jan Romijn
from the University of Amsterdam read it.

And he published an article in the.

.

.

newspaper Het Parool, saying that everybody should read this diary.

It was this article that led to
the first publication on June 25th, 1947.

A third of the diary was actually taken out, removed for two reasons.

First of all, Otto wanted to preserve the memory
of his late wife and the others in hiding from some of the not quite
nice things Anne said about them.

But also, the publishing company itself deemed some of
the things that Anne wrote about as unsuitable.

When the diary was first published, it had not such a great impact.

It was very much a book like.

.

.

many other books that dealt with
the occupation of the Netherlands.

When the Dutch book came out, he gave it to everybody who had known Anne.

It was very, very generous, of course, because he wanted everybody to read it.

And it was published in a time
that people focused on the future.

They wanted to forget about what
happened here between 1940 and 1945.

They had suffered a lot and people wanted to you know,
to forget about it.

In Europe, people didn’t really want to
talk about what had happened, about Auschwitz or anything like that.

But of course, the diary is not really about this.

So only after the mid-50s, the diary became a great success.

It came out in 1952 in America.

Great difficulty finding an
American publisher as well, because people said, well,
who is interested in a diary of a young girl? The publisher who picked it
up in America was Doubleday.

They had taken a risk as no one really knew
whether there would be any interest in it.

It took an article by the novelist Meyer
Levine to really popularize the book.

Meyer Levine became a friend of
Otter and who loved the diary.

He wrote a big article in the New York Times how wonderful it was and it became an
immediate bestseller in America.

The stage play was dramatized
by Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett and opened in the Court
Theatre on Broadway on October 5, 1955, and was played by Susan Strasberg.

The production grew and grew in popularity, which was helped in part by the attendance
of many Hollywood stars at the time.

Ava witnessed its instant success.

The play was a great success in New York first, then in London, then it was translated, was in Germany.

Then a film was being made? The
film was released   in 1959 to great critical and commercial acclaim.

It was directed by George
Stevens and the screenplay was written also by Goodrich and Hackett.

The lead of Anne Frank was
played by Millie Perkins.

However, it was Shelley Winters who won an Academy
Award for her portrayal of August van Pels.

The world wanted to know more about Anne Frank, and Otto was eager to tell her story
and continue to spread her philosophy.

Many Americans came to Amsterdam and always   knocked on the door of the
house and wanted to see where Anne had been hiding.

It was considered a great idea to think
about preserving that hiding place, but not as a museum.

Otto’s vision was to see Anne’s legacy as one of bringing people together.

The foundation goes back to 1957 in order to
purchase the house and to open it to the public, so it took three years to prepare it.

What he did invest his time and energy bringing together people from around the world
for international student conferences.

Anne Frankhaus was first a
study group for young people, people from all over the The world came together and
they had conferences to talk about what they can do to change the world.

The basic feature of this house is its emptiness, which was the deliberate decision of Otto
Frank that this place should remain empty.

It represents the absence of Anne Frank.

The success of the play, the film and the opening of the house fueled the proliferation of
readers of the original diary.

As people were getting to read the diary, particularly youngsters, they related so much to Anne, and they started writing to Mr.

Frank.

They saw him in the diary as a very caring person.

Having known Otto for 27 years, I can see, you know, he was really a humanitarian and an.

.

.

being two years cooped up with him
helped her a lot to become who she was.

The point of entry when you read
the diary is usually your own life.

When I’m inspired by Anne Frank, it’s not because my life is
similar to hers in any respect.

And that goes for actually everyone.

So it’s about a book that
was able to inspire people, although their lives are
completely different from her life.

Through her, of course, the world is learning about what has happened.

And that is, of course, very,
very important.

We have her diary as a kind of silent
messenger of someone who is not there anymore, and who is not there anymore because
of what has been done to her.

So we have to explain to young
people how dangerous it is if we are prejudiced against other human beings.

In preserving the memory of his daughter and
also the act of persecution inflicted on her, Otto, through single-minded determination, managed to elevate Anne Frank from a young, talented writer, the victim of a terrible chain of events, to become not just a face, but the symbol of the Holocaust.

She has also become a figure of acceptance, forgiveness, and equality, universal themes which all
human beings can relate to.

Her thoughts evolved into Otto’s philosophy, which today is still maintained through the
Anne Frank Foundation and the Anne Frank House, reaching out to millions across the world.

Behind the global popularity of her
story is the diary of a young girl, an individual with her own aspirations and ideas, who happened to be caught in
extraordinarily tragic circumstances.

 

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