Tag: Anne Frank

Annelies Marie Frank (German: [ˈanə(liːs maˈʁiː) ˈfʁaŋk] , Dutch: [ˌɑnəˈlis maːˈri ˈfrɑŋk, ˈɑnə ˈfrɑŋk] ; 12 June 1929 – c. February or March 1945) was a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary in which she documented life in hiding under Nazi persecution during the German occupation of the Netherlands. She is a celebrated diarist who described everyday life from her family hiding place in an Amsterdam attic. One of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl (originally Het Achterhuis in Dutch, lit. 'the back house'; English: The Secret Annex), in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944 — it is one of the world's best-known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.

Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929. In 1934, when she was four-and-a-half, she and her family moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands, after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control over Germany. She spent most of her life in or around Amsterdam. By May 1940, the Franks were trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands. Anne lost her German citizenship in 1941 and became stateless. Despite spending most of her life in the Netherlands and being a de facto Dutch national, she never officially became a Dutch citizen. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, they went into hiding in concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Anne's father, Otto Frank, worked. The hiding place is notably referred to as the "secret annex". Until the family's arrest by the Gestapo on 4 August 1944, Frank kept and regularly wrote in a diary she had received as a birthday present in 1942.

Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps. On 1 November 1944, Frank and her sister, Margot, were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (presumably of typhus) a few months later. They were estimated by the Red Cross to have died in March, with Dutch authorities setting 31 March as the official date. Later research has alternatively suggested that they may have died in February or early March.

Otto, the only survivor of the Frank family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that Anne's diary had been saved by his female secretaries, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. He decided to fulfil his daughter's greatest wish to become a writer. He published her diary in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch version and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl, and has since been translated into over 70 languages.