Anne Frank

Annelies Marie Frank was born on 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, to Edith Frank and Otto Heinrich Frank. She had an older sister, Margot. The Franks were Reform Jews who lived in an assimilated community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, and Anne’s parents encouraged reading in a home with an extensive library. Her childhood began in the years when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were rising to power, and that change soon altered the course of her family’s life.

After Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, the family began leaving Germany. Otto Frank moved to Amsterdam to organize a business and find a place for them to live. Edith and Margot followed, and Anne, who had stayed for a time with her grandmother, joined them in February 1934. In Amsterdam, Anne attended the 6th Montessori School, where she soon felt at home and made friends, including Hanneli Goslar. The family was part of a large movement of Jews who fled Germany between 1933 and 1939.

Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. The occupation brought restrictive and discriminatory laws against Jews, followed by mandatory registration and segregation. Otto Frank tried to arrange emigration to the United States, but his visa application was never processed after the US consulate in Rotterdam was destroyed by German bombing and the paperwork was lost. In 1941 Anne lost her German citizenship and became stateless. That same year, after the summer holidays, she learned she could no longer attend the Montessori School because Jewish children had to go to Jewish schools. She then entered the Jewish Lyceum in Amsterdam.

For her thirteenth birthday on 12 June 1942, Anne received an autograph book with red-and-white checkered cloth and a small lock. She decided to use it as a diary and named it “Kitty.” She began writing almost immediately. In July 1942, as persecution of the Jewish population increased and systematic deportations began, the Frank family went into hiding in a secret annex concealed behind a bookcase in the building where Otto Frank worked. From 1942 until their arrest in 1944, Anne regularly described her family’s everyday life in that hiding place during the German occupation of the Netherlands.

The Gestapo arrested the family on 4 August 1944. The Franks were transported to concentration camps. On 1 November 1944, Anne and Margot were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where they died a few months later, presumably of typhus. The Red Cross estimated that they died in March 1945, while Dutch authorities set 31 March as the official date; later research has suggested February or early March.

Otto Frank was the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust. After World War II, he returned to Amsterdam and found that Anne’s diary had been saved by his secretaries, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Moved by Anne’s repeated wishes to become an author, he published the diary in 1947. It first appeared in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl, translated from the original Dutch Het Achterhuis, meaning “the back house” or “The Secret Annex.” Since then it has been translated into more than 70 languages and has served as the basis for several plays and films. Readers still return to Anne Frank’s words because they record, in a young person’s clear daily voice, life under persecution and the human detail inside history.