On this day in 1944—her thirteenth birthday—Annelies Marie ("Anne") Frank received a locking autograph book as a gift. She quickly began using it as a diary and she named it "Kitty." Within weeks, the Nazis began arresting and deporting Dutch Jews. Anne and her family would hide themselves in the upper floors of her father, Otto's, business. Before she went into hiding, she entrusted some of her treasures with the girl next door, Toosje Kupers. She asked Toosje to take care of her marbles, lest they "fall into the wrong hands." The Franks also left a note for the Kupers, imploring them to feed their cat, Moortje.
Otto Frank was a wholesaler of spices and other ingredients for making jams and sausages. He transferred ownership of the business to his trusted employees, who then hid (and tended to) the family for two years. A bookcase was slid-into-place to block the doorway to the hiding chambers. Food, throughout occupied Amsterdam, was incredibly scarce. Everyone knew the penalty for hiding Jews, yet they persevered. In the diary, Anne wrote about family life "in the attic," creating pseudonyms for the other people who joined them in-hiding. Many of Anne's entries were epistolary—written as letters to "Dear Kitty."
On 4 August 1944, the family was discovered and arrested (as were the gentile men who hid them). There are competing (and unresolved) theories about how the Nazis discovered them. The Franks were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau; Otto was separated from the females. Anne assumed that her father, not fit for hard labor, had been killed immediately. Anne's mother died of starvation at Auschwitz. Anne, and her sister, Margot—both suffering from Typhus—were transferred to Bergen-Belsen where they died in February or March of 1945. They were buried in a mass grave.
Otto Frank did survive. He returned to Amsterdam, after the war, where his secretaries gave him any photos and documents they could collect and conceal after the arrest. Included amongst the papers was Anne's diary. Toosje Kupers, Anne's friend next door, attempted to return the marbles to Anne's father. He asked her to keep them. In 2014, seventy years after Anne's arrest, Toosje Kupers gave the marbles to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam—where, today, they help to paint a poignant picture of an ordinary 13 year old girl who left us with her extraordinary legacy.
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