A fire in the northeast of the Netherlands has destroyed a wooden barrack where Anne Frank was forced to work at the end of World War II.

The barrack was originally located at camp Westerbork, in the east of the country, where Dutch Jews were held as they were being deported to German concentration camps. In 1957 two of the barracks were sold and moved to the nearby village of Veendam, where they were used to store farming machinery. The cause of the fire is not yet known.
 

There were plans to move one of them, barrack number 57, to Westerbork, which now serves as a Holocaust memorial centre. In August 1944 Anne Frank, who became world famous for her posthumously published Diary, and her sister Margot spent a few weeks in the barracks, where the Nazis used prisoners as forced labourers. After her deportation to Auschwitz on the last transport from Westerbork, she died in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, just weeks before the camp's liberation.

Photos by Sake Elzinga / Flickr