Anne Frank
June 12, 1929 — February 1945 — Germany / Netherlands
Anne Frank was a Jewish teenager who kept a diary during more than two years in hiding with her family in occupied Amsterdam during World War II. Discovered by the Nazis and deported to concentration camps, she died at Bergen-Belsen in February 1945, weeks before the camp's liberation. Her diary, published by her father after the war, has been translated into more than seventy languages and become the most widely read firsthand account of the Holocaust.
Frankfurt Childhood and Flight to Amsterdam
Annelies Marie Frank was born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, to Otto Frank, a businessman, and Edith Holländer. Anne had an older sister, Margot. The family was secular Jewish, culturally assimilated, and middle-class. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Otto Frank moved the family to Amsterdam, where he established a pectin and spice business. Anne grew up as a Dutch child, attending the Montessori school; she was ebullient, talkative, and popular. The German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940 brought immediate anti-Jewish measures — stars, curfews, school restrictions. In July 1942, when Margot received a summons to a labor camp, the family went into hiding in a concealed apartment behind Otto's office on the Prinsengracht canal — the "Secret Annex" (Achterhuis).
Two Years in Hiding
For 761 days, from July 1942 to August 1944, eight people lived in complete concealment: the Franks, the van Pels family, and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer, helped by four Dutch employees of Otto's business. Anne received a diary as a birthday present on June 12, 1942 — just before they went into hiding — and she wrote in it almost daily. The diary captures the extraordinary psychology of someone coming of age in impossible circumstances: the friction of eight people confined together, Anne's sharp observations of her companions and herself, her romantic feelings for Peter van Pels, her ambitions to become a writer, her philosophical wrestling with hope and despair. She revised and edited her own entries, envisioning eventual publication. On August 4, 1944, the annex was raided by German police, apparently following a tip from an unknown informer. All eight were arrested.
Did You Know?
Anne was a dedicated and self-conscious writer who actively revised her diary. After hearing a radio broadcast from the Dutch government-in-exile in March 1944 urging citizens to preserve diaries and documents as historical evidence, she began systematically rewriting her entries — giving pseudonyms to people, polishing language, cutting embarrassing passages — in anticipation of postwar publication. This revised version, combined with her original diary, forms the basis of most published editions.
Deportation, Death, and the Diary's Survival
The eight residents of the Secret Annex were transported first to Westerbork, then to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they arrived in September 1944. Anne and Margot were later transferred to Bergen-Belsen. Both died of typhus in February 1945, and Edith Frank died at Auschwitz in January. Otto Frank was the sole occupant of the annex to survive the war. After liberation he sought his daughters, only to learn they had died weeks before Bergen-Belsen was liberated in April. Miep Gies, one of the helpers, had retrieved Anne's diary and loose papers after the arrest; she gave them to Otto without reading them. He published a condensed version in 1947 — Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex). Translated, adapted for stage and screen, and read by tens of millions, the diary made Anne Frank the human face of the Holocaust's six million Jewish victims.