Otto Frank made little mention of his time in Auschwitz during his lifetime .

Forced labour

Daily life in Auschwitz I was mainly hard labour in often extreme (weather) conditions. Like the Hungarian-born Joseph Spronz, Otto Frank first ended up in the Kommando Kiesgrube, which involved working in a pebble quarry.^[1] He was then moved to the Straßenbau, which involved the prisoners being marched to work outside the camp every day, and attending roll call in the morning and evening to be counted. According to Fritzi Frank, Otto Frank worked in the Straßenbau together with Hermann van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer.^[2]

When frost meant work at the Straßenbau had to stop, Otto Frank was moved to the Kartoffelschälkommando . According to him, this was better work. The prisoners had to wash potatoes and peel the large potatoes. These they went into a mincer together with the turnips, beetroot and fodder turnips, forming the basis for the 'soup'. The work was seated and indoors, which meant it was less cold and generally less hard work than outside. Moreover, prisoners could sometimes secretly eat some of the peel, giving them some vitamins.

In the Häftlingskantine , inmates of the Kartoffelschälkommando could redeem some kind of voucher they had earned from work. A Raucherkarte was found in Otto Frank's estate. This shows that B.9174 (Otto Frank) stayed in Block 5a and had coupons to spend on smoking items in Häftlingskantine 1.^[3]

Saving the mind

Sal de Liema (1914-2004) and Otto Frank met about a week after they arrived in Auschwitz on the same 3 September 1944 train from Westerbork. In an interview with documentary filmmaker Jon Blair, Sal de Liema talked about his friendship with Otto Frank and how they tried to 'save their minds':

'Let's say: do you remember the melody of Beethoven's 9th symphony? And then we started singing it to each other. Just to escape the anxiety, to think about something else for a while. We talked about Van Gogh, Rembrandt: '[...] Have you ever been to the Rijksmuseum?' [...] And I really think that helped.'^[4]

'Saving the mind' was important for survival in Auschwitz. The people who became lethargic and indifferent were nicknamed Muselman, and were often selected first to be murdered in the gas chamber.^[5]

Infirmary

Otto Frank witnessed various situations in which the prisoners were humiliated and abused.^[6] He himself, as he told Ernst Schnabel, was once beaten so hard while working at potato peeling that he was broken both physically and mentally. The next day he could no longer muster the strength to get up and his campmates called in a Dutch doctor. This doctor was Samuel Kropveld and he, together with another doctor, ensured that Otto Frank ended up in an infirmary in November 1944.^[7] Here Otto met Joseph Spronz from Hungary, who, like him, had worked at the pebble quarry.^[8]

In a letter to his niece Milly Stanfield, Otto Frank recounted that two fellow prisoners played cello and violin in the infirmary barracks at Christmas 1944.^[9]

According to a list of the sick present around the time of the liberation of Auschwitz, drawn up by a doctor from the Polish Red Cross, Otto Frank was in the infirmary barracks, in Block 18.^[10] Otto Frank repeatedly attributed his survival to the fact that he ended up in hospital - thus being safeguarded from hard work, beatings and cold - and to the help of Peter van Pels who: 'hat wie ein Sohn alles getan, um mir zu helfen. Täglich brachtte er mir zusätzliche Nahrung.'^[11]

Otto said in 1978 that he saw Peter van Pels almost every day. ^[12]When Auschwitz was evacuated in mid-January 1945 due to the approaching Red Army, Peter and Otto said goodbye to each other. Peter went along with one of the so-called death marches, while Otto stayed behind in the sick barracks.^[13]