Auguste van Pels

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Auguste van Pels, July 1941

Auguste van Pels (September 29, 1900 - spring 1945) was a German-Jewish refugee who hid with Anne Frank during the Nazi Occupation of the Netherlands, and who subsequently died in one of the many Nazi concentration camps. In Anne Frank's posthumously published diary all names apart from those of the Frank family were changed to preserve the privacy of those mentioned. Auguste van Pels was assigned the pseudonym Petronella van Daan.

[edit] Life

Auguste 'Gusti' Röttgen was born in Buer, Germany into a lower middle class Jewish household. The family may have held a liberal approach to religion, as Anne Frank observed Auguste's unfamiliarity with Jewish history, and also quoted her intention to be baptised after the war.^{[citation needed]}

She married Hermann van Pels on December 5, 1925 and moved into an apartment on the Martinistrasse, Osnabruck, near the Dutch and German border, where their only child Peter was born on November 8, 1926.

Several members of the Röttgen and van Pels families moved west to escape the anti-semitic laws being passed in Germany and its territories, and chose Holland for its sympathetic stance on asylum-seekers. Auguste and Hermann followed their siblings to Amsterdam in June 1937 and found an apartment on the south side of the city, in a neighbourhood which was accommodating many of the Jewish refugees from Germany. There they met their neighbours, the Frank family, and in 1938 Hermann joined Otto Frank's firm Pectacon as a specialist in herbs and sausage production. Soon the families were frequent guests in each other's houses.

As the prospect of war drew closer, Auguste and Hermann applied to emigrate to the United States in 1939 but, unlike some of Hermann's siblings, were refused entry. A year later the German Army invaded the Netherlands and within months the anti-Jewish laws came into effect.

The only known existing photographs of Auguste van Pels were taken at the wedding of Miep and Jan Gies on July 16, 1941 in Amsterdam. The Gies family later assisted in the concealment of the van Pels family when they joined the Franks in hiding in the secret rooms in Otto, Hermann and Miep's office building on July 13, 1942.

Anne Frank's diary covers the twenty-four months the two families and Fritz Pfeffer spent in hiding, and Anne devotes much space to descriptions of the tension between Auguste and Hermann and her own ambivalent relationship with Auguste,including the fact that her and Ms. Van Pels struggle in their relationship. It has been suggested that Auguste's flirtatiousness and exuberance were characteristics Anne disliked about herself and for that reason attracted much of her ire.

They remained hidden from the Nazis for two years. Auguste was arrested in hiding on August 4, 1944 with her husband and son, and the five other occupants of the hiding place, along with two of their protectors, and detained in the Euterpestraat Gestapo Headquarters before being transferred to the Amstelveenseweg prison until August 8, when they were moved to the Westerbork transit camp for deportation to the Nazi extermination camps. After several weeks in the punishment barracks, where all Jews discovered in hiding were assigned, she was selected for transit to Auschwitz on September 3 and upon arrival there three days later was permanently separated from her husband, who was later gassed, and son, who died in Mauthausen.

Auguste was sent to the women's camp and remained there until November 26 when she was transported out of Poland and into Bergen-Belsen in Germany. There she was reunited with Margot and Anne Frank, who had been there several weeks. She remained in touch with them until she was selected to work as a slave labourer and evacuated from the camp on February 6, 1945 to the Raguhn labour unit, run from the Buchenwald camp, near Halle in eastern Germany. The unit was liquidated on April 8 and the prisoners were marched to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. The Red Cross, who investigated the deaths of all Dutch victims of the Holocaust, estimated that Auguste van Pels died either during this march or shortly after arriving. They were certain that she was not alive when the camp was liberated on May 8, 1945.

For the cinematic dramatisation of the play based on Anne Frank's diary Shelley Winters won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Auguste (referred to in the film, as she was in the published version of the diary as 'Mrs van Daan'). Winters donated her statuette to the Anne Frank House.