Anne Frank

Annelies Marie Frank was born on June 12, 1929, at the Maingau Clinic of the Red Cross in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, the second daughter of Otto Frank, a businessman from a long-established Frankfurt Jewish family, and Edith Frank-Holländer, who came from Aachen ^[1]. Her sister Margot was three years older. The family belonged to the liberal Jewish community and lived comfortably in the Frankfurt district of Dornbusch during Anne's first years.

That security collapsed quickly. Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, and antisemitic laws and street violence followed within months. Otto Frank decided the family could not stay. He moved to Amsterdam that year to set up Opekta, a company selling pectin for making jam, and by February 1934 Edith, Margot, and Anne had joined him in the Netherlands ^[1][2]. Anne was four years old when she became a refugee.

In Amsterdam the Franks settled on Merwedeplein in the River Quarter, a neighborhood that absorbed many German Jewish emigrants. Anne attended a Montessori school nearby, learned Dutch rapidly, and grew into a talkative, sociable child known among classmates for her energy and quick tongue ^[2]. For several years the family lived an ordinary middle-class life, one of the plainer Anne Frank facts often overlooked: before the war she was simply a schoolgirl with friends, film-star postcards, and report cards.

Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, and the Dutch army capitulated after five days. The occupation authorities introduced anti-Jewish measures in stages: registration, exclusion from public places, the compulsory yellow star, and a ban on Jewish children attending schools with non-Jewish pupils. In the autumn of 1941 Anne and Margot had to transfer to the Jewish Lyceum ^[1][3].

Otto Frank prepared for the worst. He transferred nominal control of his businesses to trusted non-Jewish colleagues so the firms could keep operating, and he began fitting out a hiding place in the rear portion of his company premises at Prinsengracht 263, a canal-side building whose back rooms were invisible from the street ^[3]. Dutch helpers, including his employees Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and Bep Voskuijl, agreed to supply the hidden family with food, news, and books at enormous personal risk.

On June 12, 1942, her thirteenth birthday, Anne received a red-and-white checkered autograph album that she decided to use as a diary ^[2]. Less than a month later, on July 5, Margot received a call-up notice for a German labor camp. The family went into hiding the next morning, walking through rain to the annex wearing layers of clothing because carrying suitcases would have attracted attention ^[1][3].

The hiding place, which Anne called the Achterhuis (back house), eventually sheltered eight people: the four Franks; Hermann and Auguste van Pels with their son Peter, who arrived a week later; and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer, who joined in November 1942 ^[3]. A movable bookcase, built by Bep Voskuijl's father, concealed the entrance. During office hours the occupants had to stay nearly silent, avoiding footsteps, flushing toilets, and running water so warehouse workers below would not hear them.

Anne wrote almost daily, addressing many entries to an imagined friend she called Kitty. She recorded quarrels and food shortages, her strained relationship with her mother, her growing affection for Peter van Pels, air raids over Amsterdam, and news of deportations heard on the clandestine radio ^[2][4]. She was honest about fear and boredom, and equally honest about her own faults, which gives the diary a candor that later readers found startling in so young a writer.

In March 1944 she heard a broadcast from Gerrit Bolkestein, education minister of the Dutch government in exile in London, urging citizens to preserve wartime diaries and letters for future publication. Anne began rewriting her diary on loose sheets, editing and expanding earlier entries with a book in mind, which she planned to call Het Achterhuis ^[2][4]. She also wrote short stories and collected favorite sentences from her reading. This deliberate revision is central to any serious Anne Frank biography: she was not only keeping a journal but consciously shaping a literary work.

On the morning of August 4, 1944, German security police and Dutch collaborators raided Prinsengracht 263 and arrested the eight people in hiding along with helpers Kleiman and Kugler ^[1][3]. Who tipped off the authorities, or whether the discovery followed an investigation into other matters at the address, has never been established despite repeated inquiries, including investigations by Dutch police after the war and later research commissioned by the Anne Frank House ^[3].

After days in custody in Amsterdam, the group was sent to the Westerbork transit camp, where as punished 'criminal' cases they were assigned to hard labor. On September 3, 1944, all eight were placed on the last transport ever to leave Westerbork for Auschwitz-Birkenau, a train carrying more than a thousand people ^[1][5]. On arrival the men and women were separated. Anne, Margot, and Edith remained together in the women's camp; Hermann van Pels was killed in the gas chambers within weeks.

In late October or early November 1944, Anne and Margot were selected for transfer to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany, leaving their mother behind. Edith Frank died at Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945, shortly before the Red Army liberated the camp, where Otto Frank, gravely ill, survived in the infirmary ^[1][5].

Bergen-Belsen in the winter of 1944 to 1945 was catastrophically overcrowded, without adequate shelter, food, or sanitation. Typhus spread through the camp and killed tens of thousands of prisoners in the final months of the war ^[5]. Witnesses who survived, including school friends of Anne from Amsterdam, later described meeting her at the camp fence, emaciated and shivering, and reported that she believed both her parents were dead ^[2][5].

Margot Frank died first, and Anne died shortly afterward, both of typhus. The exact dates were never recorded. The Red Cross initially fixed the deaths in March 1945, but research published by the Anne Frank House in 2015, drawing on survivor testimony and camp records, concluded that the sisters most likely died in February 1945 ^[5]. British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, weeks after the sisters had died. Anne was fifteen years old. Of the eight people from the annex, only Otto Frank survived the war ^[1].

After the arrest, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl gathered Anne's notebooks and loose papers from the ransacked annex floor and locked them away unread, intending to return them to Anne after the war. When Otto Frank learned in the summer of 1945 that both his daughters were dead, Gies handed him the writings ^[2][3]. Reading them, he discovered a daughter he said he had never fully known.

Otto prepared a typescript that combined Anne's original diary with her own rewritten version, omitting some passages about her sexuality and her sharpest criticisms of her mother. Dutch historians and journalists championed the manuscript, and Het Achterhuis appeared from the Amsterdam publisher Contact in June 1947 in an edition of about 3,000 copies ^[2][4]. Translations followed: German and French in 1950, then English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl, with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt that helped it find a vast American readership ^[4].

A 1955 Broadway adaptation won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and a Hollywood film followed in 1959, spreading Anne's story far beyond readers of the book ^[4]. When neo-Nazi propagandists attacked the diary as a forgery, the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation commissioned forensic examination of the manuscripts, and its 1986 critical edition confirmed their authenticity beyond doubt, printing Anne's versions side by side ^[4][6].

The diary has been translated into more than seventy languages and has sold tens of millions of copies, making it among the most widely read nonfiction books of the twentieth century ^[2][6]. Considered as Anne Frank achievements, this is a strange category: she achieved almost everything posthumously, through a manuscript she revised herself but never saw in print. Writers from Primo Levi to Nelson Mandela have described the book's force, and it remains a standard entry point through which students first encounter the Holocaust.

The building at Prinsengracht 263 was saved from demolition by a campaign in the 1950s, and the Anne Frank House opened as a museum in 1960 with Otto Frank's involvement. It now receives more than a million visitors each year, who climb the steep stairs behind the reconstructed bookcase into the empty rooms of the annex ^[3]. Otto Frank devoted the rest of his life to the diary and to human rights education until his death in Switzerland in 1980.

Anne's manuscripts were placed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2009 ^[6]. Schools, streets, and foundations across many countries carry her name, and her stated ambition, recorded in the annex in 1944, to go on living after her death through her writing, was fulfilled on a scale she could not have imagined. Her diary endures because it is not a monument but a voice: funny, self-critical, observant, and cut off in mid-sentence by the machinery of genocide.