Anne Frank

Their life

A gifted young writer who chronicled two years hidden in an Amsterdam annex during the Nazi occupation with honesty, humor, and startling self-awareness. Her diary — kept from ages 13 to 15 — became one of the most read and most loved books of the twentieth century.

Known for

• The Diary of a Young Girl
• Life in hiding in the Secret Annex
• Voice of Holocaust victims
• Sharp, self-aware coming-of-age writing
• One of the most translated books in history
• Enduring symbol of resilience

The road they walked

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929, the younger daughter of Otto and Edith Frank, a secular Jewish family with roots in German banking and civic life. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Franks read the signs correctly and left for Amsterdam the following year, joining a wave of Jewish refugees who believed the Netherlands would stay safe. For a few years it did: Anne grew up bilingual, quick-witted, and social, attending a Montessori school and building the ordinary childhood of a Dutch schoolgirl, even as the news from Germany darkened around her.

That safety ended in May 1940, when Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands. Anti-Jewish decrees followed in steady, deliberate steps — schools, cinemas, parks, professions closed off one by one — until, by 1942, deportations to labor and death camps had begun in earnest. On July 6, 1942, days after Margot Frank received a call-up notice for a labor camp, the family disappeared into a set of hidden rooms above Otto's business on the Prinsengracht canal, later known as the Secret Annex. They were joined by the van Pels family and dentist Fritz Pfeffer, eight people in all, sustained for over two years by a small circle of Otto's employees — Miep Gies chief among them — who risked their lives to bring food, news, and books.

It was in that cramped, silent world that Anne became a writer. She had received a diary as a gift for her thirteenth birthday, just before going into hiding, and filled it and successive notebooks with an unusually sharp, funny, self-questioning record of adolescence under siege — her family's tensions, her first stirrings of love, her fierce ambitions, her fear. In 1944, hearing a Dutch government broadcast urging citizens to preserve wartime diaries and letters, she began revising her own entries with an eye toward publishing them after the war as a book she planned to call 'Het Achterhuis' ('The Secret Annex'). She never got the chance to finish that revision herself.

How their story ended

On August 4, 1944, acting on a tip whose source has never been conclusively identified, German security police raided the Annex and arrested everyone hiding there. Anne was deported first to Auschwitz and then, in late 1944, to Bergen-Belsen, where conditions had collapsed into starvation and disease. She died there of typhus in early 1945 — historians place her death, along with her sister Margot's, in February or March, though the exact date is unknown — only weeks before the camp was liberated by British troops in April. Of the eight who had hidden in the Annex, only her father, Otto, survived the war; he returned to Amsterdam, found Anne's diary saved by Miep Gies, and published it in 1947.

In their words

We attribute every quotation to the person we believe said it, and cite the source where we can place it. If you spot a misattribution or a factual error, please tell us — we will check it and correct the record.

Tables where Anne sits

The Educator’s Circle

For those who teach, coach, and grow other people.

The Undimmed

For doing the defining work when body or circumstance closes in.

The Writers’ Room

For the craft of words and the courage to tell the truth with them.

From the Journal