Anne Frank was a German Jewish teenager who documented her life in hiding during WWII in her diary. Her family moved to Amsterdam to escape Nazi persecution, but were eventually discovered and sent to concentration camps. Anne died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen at age 15. Her diary was saved by Miep Gies and published by her father after the war. The Diary of Anne Frank remains one of the most widely read books in the world.
Anne Frank is the famous German Jewish teenager who documented her life in hiding from the Nazis during WWII by writing in her diary. The Diary of Anne Frank was first published in 1947 as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and remains one of the most widely read books in the world. The documentation of Frank’s life during the holocaust is a personalized account of the oppression and fascism under Nazi rule as seen by a child.
Annelies Marie Frank was born on June 12, 1929 in Weimar, Germany to Otto Frank and Edith Hollander Frank. She had a sister who was two years older than her named Margot. Although the Franks were Reform Jews, the children lived in a neighborhood that was not exclusively Jewish. Her father served as a German officer during World War I.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party won the elections in Frankfurt and immediately spawned anti-Semitic movements. The Frank family became concerned about the effects of the Nazi Party on Germany and moved to Amsterdam, where Otto Frank became a businessman. Frank was leading a normal life for a girl, attending a Montessori school and developing a passion for writing.
On his thirteenth birthday, he received an autograph book from his father that he had previously shown him in a shop window. He immediately began to transmit his private thoughts and observations to the pages of the book, which he used as a diary. By this time, the German occupation government had already begun the persecution of Jews, forcing Jewish children to attend Jewish schools.
Just one month after starting his diary, Frank and his family were forced into hiding after his sister, Margot, received notice to report to a labor camp. They only moved themselves and what clothes they could wear on their backs to two small but hidden rooms above the building where Otto Frank had worked. With the help of Otto Frank’s closest business associates and friends, the Franks hid from increasing persecution by the Germans to avoid concentration camps.
The whole time she was in hiding, Anne was busy putting on paper the things she heard and saw and felt. Her last diary entry was 4 August 1944. On that day, German troops stormed the Frankish hideout, carrying off the Franks and others who had come to forcibly join them. Some ended up in prison, while Anne and her sister were sent to work in concentration camps. Anne was sent to Bergen-Belsen in October and died of typhus the following spring shortly before her sixteenth birthday.
Little did Anne Frank know, but a woman named Miep Gies, who had lived openly in the Franks’ hideout in Amsterdam, saved Anne’s diary the day German troops took the Franks away. Geis gave the diary to Anne’s father upon learning that she was dead. Her father sought to have her diary published, partly to enlighten the world about the effects of the Nazi Party, prejudice and war, but also to see his daughter’s dream of becoming a published writer fulfilled.
Anne Frank: A Young Girl’s Diary was first published in 1947. Since then, her personal account of hidden life during the Holocaust has received further publications and was made into a film, The Diary of Anne Frank in 1959.
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