Anne Frank Receives Her Diary (1942)
On June 12, 1942 — her thirteenth birthday — Anne Frank received a small red-and-white checkered diary as a gift in Amsterdam. In it she would record her thoughts, fears, dreams, and observations across two years of hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex above her father's office. Discovered, arrested, and killed in Bergen-Belsen in February 1945, Anne never knew that her diary would become one of the most read books in the world — a testament to the humanity of a single person against the machinery of genocide.
A Family in Hiding
Annelies Marie Frank was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto and Edith Frank. After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, the family relocated to Amsterdam, where Otto ran a pectin and spice trading business. Following the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, life became increasingly restricted for Jewish families. When Anne's older sister Margot received a call-up to a Nazi labor camp in July 1942 — just three weeks after Anne's birthday — the Franks moved into the "Secret Annex," a hidden apartment behind a movable bookcase on the upper floors of the Prinsengracht 263 office building. They were joined by another Jewish family, the van Pels, and later by a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer, making eight people in all. Dutch helpers — Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, and others — brought food, news, and supplies at great personal risk.
Did You Know?
In 1944, Anne heard a radio broadcast by Dutch Education Minister Gerrit Bolkestein urging Dutch citizens to keep diaries and letters as historical documentation of the occupation. Inspired, Anne began revising and expanding her diary entries, hoping to publish them after the war under the title "Het Achterhuis" (The Secret Annex). She was thirteen when she received the diary and fifteen when she was arrested.
The Diary Itself
Anne wrote with remarkable candor and literary flair for a teenager in extraordinary circumstances. She wrote to an imaginary friend she called "Kitty," exploring her relationships with the other residents, her growing self-awareness, her ambitions to become a writer, her frustrations with confinement, her fear of discovery, and her observations on the war and human nature. Her most famous passage — "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart" — was written on July 15, 1944, less than a month before her arrest. On August 4, 1944, the Gestapo raided the annex based on an anonymous tip whose source has never been conclusively identified. All eight residents were arrested. Anne and her sister Margot were eventually transported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where both died of typhus in February 1945, just weeks before the camp's liberation.
Legacy: A Voice for Six Million
When the annex was raided, Miep Gies gathered Anne's scattered diary pages and kept them without reading them, hoping to return them to Anne after the war. Otto Frank was the sole survivor of the annex's eight residents. After liberation from Auschwitz, he returned to Amsterdam, learned of his daughters' deaths, and agreed to publish Anne's diary at Miep's urging. Het Achterhuis was first published in Dutch in 1947; the English translation, The Diary of a Young Girl, appeared in 1952. It has since been translated into more than 70 languages and sold over 35 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books in history. The Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, located in the building where the family hid, is one of the most visited sites in Europe. Anne Frank has become a universal symbol of the Holocaust's human cost — not a statistic but a person with a name, a voice, and dreams she never got to fulfill.