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Auschwitz: The Selection, the Separation, and What Otto Survived
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On the Birkenau platform in September 1944, a seconds-long gesture split the Frank family forever — this is the story of what Auschwitz actually did to them. From selection through the final separation of Edith, Margot, and Anne, and Otto Frank's solitary survival.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what the selection process at Auschwitz-Birkenau actually meant in practice. A train arrived.
To understand what arrived at Auschwitz, you need to know what preceded it. For two years and one month, eight people lived inside a concealed apartment behind a hinged bookcase at two-sixty-three Prinsengracht, Amsterdam.
The journey took two days in crowded freight cars. When the doors opened at Birkenau, the platform was lit by floodlights.
It's worth being clear about what Auschwitz-Birkenau actually was by late nineteen forty-four. It was not simply a prison or a labor facility.
In late October nineteen forty-four, the SS began transferring groups of women from Auschwitz to camps further west. The German army was retreating.
The period between liberation and information was its own form of suffering. Otto Frank was freed from Auschwitz in January nineteen forty-five.
Otto arrived back in Amsterdam in June nineteen forty-five. Miep gave him the diary.
Otto Frank was the only one of the eight residents of the Secret Annex to survive. He carried that fact for the rest of his life, and he never described it as anything other than a burden alongside a responsibility.
The Auschwitz selection is where this particular thread of the story pivots. Before the platform, there was still a family unit.
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