Anne Frank

June 12, 1929 – February 1, 1945

Jewish girl whose diary, written while hiding from the Nazis, became one of the most widely read books in history.

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Annelies Marie 'Anne' Frank was born in 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, into a loving Jewish family. When the Nazis came to power and antisemitism turned dangerous, her family fled to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, hoping to be safe. For a few years Anne lived an ordinary childhood, going to school and making friends. But in 1940 Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands, and life for Jewish families grew steadily more frightening and restricted under a growing web of anti-Jewish laws, part of the persecution that ran through the whole Holocaust. In July 1942, to escape deportation, the Frank family went into hiding in a concealed set of rooms, the 'Secret Annex,' behind a movable bookcase in her father Otto's business premises. For just over two years, Anne, her parents, her sister Margot, and four other people lived hidden there, kept alive by a few brave non-Jewish helpers who risked their own lives to bring food and news. They had to stay silent during the day and lived in constant fear of discovery. Shortly before going into hiding, Anne had received a diary for her thirteenth birthday, and in it she recorded these years with astonishing honesty, humor, and insight, writing about her fears and hopes, her quarrels with the adults, her first love, and her dreams of becoming a writer. On August 4, 1944, the hiding place was betrayed and raided by the Nazis. The families were arrested and deported. Anne and Margot were eventually sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany, where conditions were horrific and disease was rampant. Both sisters died of typhus early in 1945, Anne at just 15 years old, only weeks before British troops liberated the camp. Of the eight people who had hidden in the Annex, only Anne's father, Otto, survived the war. He returned to find that Anne's diary had been saved by one of the helpers. Otto Frank had his daughter's diary published in 1947. 'The Diary of a Young Girl' has since been translated into more than 70 languages and read by tens of millions of people around the world. Its power lies in its intimacy: it lets readers meet the Holocaust not as a distant statistic but through the voice of one bright, ordinary, hopeful girl, one of the roughly 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. Anne's story is often studied alongside those of survivors like Elie Wiesel and rescuers like Oskar Schindler, and it endures as one of the most widely read and deeply human accounts of what the Holocaust meant for real people.

Anne Frank

Further reading