The liberation of Auschwitz

On 27 January 1945, Red Army units entered the Auschwitz concentration camp. There, they came upon about 7,000 prisoners, often more dead than alive. One of them was Otto Frank, Anne’s father. He only weighed 50 kilogrammes. In his first letter to his mother in Basel, Switzerland, he emphasised that he had been very, very lucky. Otto’s journey back to Amsterdam took four months. As it turned out, he was the only one of the eight people from the Secret Annex who had survived the Holocaust.