Anne Frank

The diary of Anne Frank is one of the most widely read books in the world. It chronicles the life of a teenage girl over a two year period of her life. Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1929. Her family was Jewish and fled Nazi Germany in 1933 to Amsterdam where her father Otto ran a business.

Holland was occupied in 1940 and as persecution of Jewish families increased, the Frank family went into hiding in secret rooms in Otto Frank’s office building in 1942. A month earlier, Anne had been given the diary for her 13th birthday and for more than two years in hiding, she kept an account of her life hidden away from the world.

In August 1944, the family were discovered and arrested and eventually shipped out to Auschwitz. In October, Anne, along with her sister Margot were moved to Bergen-Belsen where they both died. Otto Frank was the only family member to survive the war and it wasn’t until after the war that Otto was given Anne’s diary by Miep Gies who was one of the people who had helped to hid the Frank family. In 1947, Anne’s diary was first published in Holland as “Het Auchterhuis”. In 1950, it was published in France and Germany and from there, circulation grew with publications in the UK, America and Japan.

Anne Frank House

Opened in 1960 as a museum, the Anne Frank House is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Amsterdam attracting over 1 million visitors in 2007. The Anne Frank House can be found at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam and number 265 has also been purchased by the museum. Inside the museum are various exhibits as well as the secret rooms where Anne Frank and her family hid for more than two years. Visitors to the museum have a set path to follow and some of the steps are very steep. Once, visitors come out of the museum, there is an extensive book shop. Independent visitors are strongly advised to book in advance or get there early as queues build up very quickly.

Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

40 miles north east of Hannover are the grounds of the former POW and concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen. It is here where Anne Frank and her sister Margots young lives tragically ended just weeks before in April 1945 by the British Army. 13,000 corpses were found laying around the camp unburied and the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby was with the liberators described the scenes:

“...Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.”

"This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.”

Today, there are no buildings left at Bergen-Belsen. There were burned down by the British with flame throwers because of the typhus epidemic. Instead are huge mounds where the British soldiers had hastily buried the dead. These mounds have literally thousands of bodies under them. There is an extensive permanent exhibition and education centre at Bergen-Belsen as well as a number of memorial gravestones including one of Anne and Margot Frank.

Tours for 2010

Escort tours to combining both the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and Bergen-Belsen are available through 2010. These visits are part of the itinerary of a longer Remembrance tour. Please call on 0208 816 8789 or visit the ‘Contact Us’ page to request more information, availability and prices for this or any of our other tours.