Russian soldiers liberate Otto Frank from Auschwitz, January 27th, 1945
Otto Frank, father of the diarist Anne Frank, had been immured in the Nazi death camp for five months.
Five months later, Frank does not know if his family members are alive or dead. He hears ecstatic shouts outside his barracks. “We’re free,” the prisoners are shouting. Soviet troops are marching into the camp. They move from barracks to barracks, shocked at what they see. As Frank rises from his sickbed, his thoughts immediately turn to finding his family. But he will never find them. His wife, Edith, has died of starvation. His daughters were transferred to Bergen-Belsen. Margot died soon afterward. Anne was done in by a typhoid epidemic that would kill 17,000 inmates. She was just fifteen years old.