Anne Frank

Anne Frank was a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary while hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam between 1942 and 1944. She and the seven others hiding with her were discovered and deported, and she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945, aged 15. Published by her father after the war, her diary became one of the most widely read books in the world and gave a single, individual voice to the millions murdered in the Holocaust.

Annelies Marie Frank was born on 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt am Main, the younger daughter of Otto Frank, a businessman from an old Frankfurt Jewish family who had served as an officer in the German army in the First World War, and his wife Edith Holländer. Her sister Margot was three years older. The family were liberal, assimilated Jews with a large library, and both parents encouraged their daughters to read.

After Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933 and the persecution of Jews began, Otto Frank decided to leave Germany. He moved to Amsterdam and set up a business selling pectin, used in making jam, later adding a second firm trading in herbs and spices. Edith and the girls followed, Anne last, in February 1934. They settled in an apartment on the Merwedeplein in the south of the city, where many Jewish refugees from Germany lived. Anne went to a Montessori school, learned Dutch and made close friends. Her parents' attempts to emigrate to the United States or Britain came to nothing.

In May 1940 Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands. The occupiers introduced anti-Jewish measures step by step: Jews were registered, barred from parks, cinemas and public transport, forced to hand over their businesses, and required to wear a yellow star. In 1941 the Franks were stripped of their German citizenship, leaving them stateless. Anne and Margot had to move to a Jewish secondary school.

For her 13th birthday on 12 June 1942 Anne was given a red and white checked autograph book, which she used as a diary, addressing many entries to an imaginary friend she called Kitty. On 5 July Margot received a summons to report for a so-called labour camp in Germany. Her parents, who had already been preparing a hiding place, took the family into hiding the next morning.

The hiding place was in the rear part of the building at Prinsengracht 263, which housed Otto Frank's business, and was later concealed behind a hinged bookcase. A week after the Franks arrived, they were joined by Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their son Peter, and in November 1942 by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist. Four of Otto Frank's employees, Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler and Bep Voskuijl, with Jan Gies and Bep's father, supplied them with food, books and news, at great risk to themselves.

The eight people spent more than two years in a few small rooms, keeping silent during working hours. Anne wrote about the fear of discovery, the bombing raids, the shortages and the constant friction of life at close quarters, but also about her own growing up: her difficult relationship with her mother, her closeness to her father, her changing feelings about Margot, a brief romance with Peter, and her thoughts on religion, women's lives and human nature. She wanted to become a journalist or writer. In March 1944 she heard a radio broadcast from the Dutch government in exile in London, in which the minister Gerrit Bolkestein called for wartime diaries and letters to be collected after the war. She began rewriting her diary with publication in mind, as a book to be called Het Achterhuis, The Secret Annex.

On 4 August 1944 German and Dutch police led by the SS sergeant Karl Silberbauer raided the annex and arrested all eight people, as well as Kleiman and Kugler, who were sent to camps but survived. How the hiding place was discovered has never been established. Suggestions over the years have included a warehouse worker, a sister of Bep Voskuijl, and a Jewish woman who worked for the Germans; a 2016 study by the Anne Frank House raised the possibility that police had come to investigate ration fraud. A 2022 cold-case investigation that named Arnold van den Bergh, a member of Amsterdam's Jewish Council, was widely rejected by historians, and the Dutch edition of the book was withdrawn.

The group was sent to the Westerbork transit camp and, on 3 September 1944, on the last transport from there to Auschwitz-Birkenau in occupied Poland. Of the 1,019 people on the train, 549, including every child under 15, were murdered on arrival. Anne, who had turned 15 that June, was selected for labour. At the end of October she and Margot were moved to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany, where overcrowding, starvation and disease killed tens of thousands. Edith Frank died in Auschwitz in January 1945. Margot and then Anne died at Bergen-Belsen of typhus, probably in February 1945, a few weeks before British troops liberated the camp in April. Of the eight people in the annex, only Otto Frank survived, liberated at Auschwitz by the Soviet army in January 1945.

Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl had gathered up Anne's papers after the arrest, and when it was confirmed in July 1945 that Anne was dead, Gies gave them to Otto Frank. He compiled a version from Anne's original diary and her revised manuscript, leaving out some passages about sexuality and her criticism of her mother, and it was published in Dutch in 1947. It appeared in German and French in 1950 and in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl, and has since been translated into more than 70 languages. A stage version won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1956, and a Hollywood film followed in 1959.

Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis have repeatedly claimed that the diary is a forgery. A forensic examination commissioned by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in 1986 confirmed that the handwriting was Anne's and that the paper, glue and ink were consistent with the period, and a critical edition with all the versions was published.

The building on the Prinsengracht opened as the Anne Frank House museum in 1960 and receives more than a million visitors a year. The diary is read in schools around the world and in 2009 was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. Its power lies largely in its ordinariness: the voice of a lively, observant, often funny teenager whose hopes are recognisable to readers of any background. Some historians and writers have cautioned that, because the published diary ends before the deportations, it can soften the reality of what followed, and that Anne Frank was one of about 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators during the Second World War.