Anne Frank is perhaps the most famous victim of the Holocaust and her diary, written when she was a teenager in hiding from the Nazis, helped spread understanding of the Holocaust around the world. She was born in Frankfurt in 1929 and came to Amsterdam with her family in 1933 following Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. Her parents Otto and Edith were liberal Jews. Anne and her sister Margot were educated in integrated schools until the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, when all Jewish children were placed in Jewish-only educational institutions.
By 1942, the killing and deportation to the camps of Jews from the Netherlands had begun. Anne’s family, after unsuccessfully applying for refuge in America, went into hiding. They, with four other Jews, lived in what Anne called the “Secret Annex.” This was a small cove behind a bookcase in her father’s business premises.
Their only outside contact was with six trusted non-Jewish friends and employees of Otto’s who brought them provisions and news. The thirteen-year-old Anne spent much of her time writing in her diary. Her early entries focused on the German persecution of Jews but she also wrote, with growing maturity and skill, about her daily life, her relationships, feelings, and beliefs.
Her last diary entry was on August 1, 1944. Three days later, possibly after a tipoff by informants, the Secret Annex was discovered by German police. The Franks were interrogated, then sent to the Westerbork transit camp in northeast Netherlands. In September 1944, they and over 1,000 other Jews were crowded onto a cattle train and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. More than half of the members of the transport were gassed immediately upon arrival. Anne, her mother, and her sister were sent to a slave labor camp for women. Otto went to a male labor camp. Disease was rampant. Edith, who transferred nearly all her meager food rations to her seriously ill daughters, died of starvation. Anne and Margot were moved to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They died there in 1945, probably due to a typhoid epidemic that ravaged the camp. Anne was 15 years old.
Anne had often written about her desire to be an author. Her father, Otto, the only member of the Secret Annex to survive the war, honored that wish. Anne’s diary, which had been rescued and kept safe by one of the family’s helpers, was published in Dutch in 1947 as The Secret Annex. As discussion of the Holocaust increased over the years, the diary’s readership grew into the millions. It was published in America as The Diary of a Young Girl and became part of the reading list for many schools.
The diary has been translated into over 70 languages and Anne is considered by many to be a symbol or embodiment of the tragedy of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the importance of Anne Frank also lies in her individuality, in the power of her writing, and the honesty of her voice.