Anne Frank, her sister Margot, and their parents were packed into cattle cars alongside roughly a thousand other Dutch Jews on what proved to be the final deportation train from Westerbork to Auschwitz. Anne would die of typhus in Bergen-Belsen the following February, just weeks before liberation, her diary surviving to become one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust.
The Frank family had hidden for over two years in a cramped annex above a canal-side warehouse in Amsterdam before being discovered on August 4, 1944, likely betrayed by an informant whose identity remains debated. After three weeks in the Westerbork transit camp in the northeastern Netherlands, they were loaded onto what would be the last transport ever to leave Westerbork for Auschwitz — Allied advances soon cut the rail lines.
The journey took three days in sealed cattle cars with no food, water, or sanitation. Upon arrival, the men were separated from the women; Otto Frank, Anne's father, never saw his wife or daughters again. Edith Frank died at Auschwitz. Anne and Margot were later transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where both died of typhus within days of each other in early 1945.
Otto Frank alone survived. He returned to Amsterdam to find the diary Anne had kept in hiding, preserved by his former secretary Miep Gies, who had scooped up the papers left behind after the arrest. Published in 1947, it has since sold over 30 million copies in more than 70 languages.