Anne Frank (born June 12, 1929, Frankfurt am Main, Germany—died February/March 1945, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Hannover), Jewish girl whose diary of her family’s two years in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands became a war classic.

Anne’s father, Otto Frank (1889–1980), a German businessman, moved his wife and two daughters to Amsterdam early in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi government. After German forces conquered the Netherlands in 1941, Anne was forced to switch from a public to a Jewish school. She was given a red-and-white plaid diary for her 13th birthday on June 12, 1942. She started writing in the book that day.

“I hope I will be able to confide in you about anything, as I have never been able to confide in anybody before, and I hope you will be a wonderful source of comfort and support.”

The Franks went into hiding in the backdoor office and warehouse of Otto Frank’s food-products firm on July 6, 1942, when Anne’s sister, Margot, was facing deportation (allegedly to a forced-labor camp).

The Frank family and four other Jews—Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their son, Peter, and Fritz Pfeffer—were confined to the “hidden annex” with the help of a few non-Jewish friends, including Miep Gies, who brought in food and other supplies. During this period, Anne kept a diary, documenting day-to-day life in hiding, from little irritations to the terror of being discovered.

She talked about usual adolescent concerns as well as her future ambitions, which included becoming a journalist or writer. On August 1, 1944, Anne wrote her final diary entry. The annex was discovered three days later by the Gestapo, who were acting on a tip from Dutch informers.

On September 3, 1944, the Frank family was taken to Westerbork, a transit camp in the Netherlands, and then to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, on the last train to leave Westerbork for Auschwitz. The following month, Anne and Margot were moved to Bergen-Belsen.

Anne’s mother died in early January, only days before Auschwitz was liberated on January 18, 1945. The Dutch government determined that Anne and Margot perished in a typhus outbreak in March 1945, just weeks before Bergen-Belsen was liberated, however experts disclosed new evidence in 2015, including examination of archival data and first-hand reports, showing that the sisters might have perished in February 1945.

When Soviet troops seized Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they discovered Otto Frank sick there.

The papers left behind by the Gestapo were eventually given to Otto Frank by friends who examined the hiding site after the family was apprehended. He discovered Anne’s diary among them, which was later published as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (originally in Dutch, 1947).

It follows her emotional evolution in the face of adversity and is precocious in style and insight. “I still think, despite everything, that humans are truly wonderful at heart,” she wrote. The Holocaust Diary, which has been translated into over 65 languages, is the most widely read Holocaust diary, and Anne Frank is undoubtedly the most well-known Holocaust victim.

The Diary was also adapted into a play, which premiered on Broadway in October 1955 and won the Tony Award for Best Play as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama in 1956. In 1959, George Stevens directed a film adaptation of the book.

The play was controversial: screenwriter Meyer Levin criticised Otto Frank and his chosen screenwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, for sanitising and de-Judaizing the storey in an early version of the play (later realised as a 35-minute radio play) and accused them of sanitising and de-Judaizing the storey.

The drama was revived (with additions) on Broadway in 1997–98 after being played in high schools all around the world.

The revised English translation of the Diary, published in 1995, includes material that was cut out of the first version, making it nearly one-third longer than the first. The Frank family’s hideaway on Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht canal has since become a museum that is consistently among the city’s most popular tourist attractions.

ANNE FRANK’S QUOTES

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

“I know what I want, I have a goal, an opinion, I have a religion and love. Let me be myself and then I am satisfied. I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage.”

“Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!”

“What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.”

“I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.”