Anne Frank, or Annelies Marie Frank in her full name, was born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and is known for a diary about the two-year period during the German occupation of the Netherlands.
At the beginning of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist regime, Anne’s father Otto Frank (1889–1980), a German businessman, took his wife and two daughters to live in Amsterdam.
In 1941, after German forces occupied the Netherlands, Anne was forced to transfer from a public school to a Jewish one. On June 12, 1942, she received a diary on the occasion of her 13th birthday. RIGHT Britannica.
When Anne’s sister Margot faced deportation, the Franks went into hiding on July 6, 1942, in the warehouse of Otto Frank’s grocery business. With the help of a few friends, including Miep Gies, who smuggled food and other supplies, the Franks and four other Jews lived in a “secret annex”.
The Frank family hid from the authorities for two years
During this time, Anne wrote sanctimoniously in her diary, recounting daily life in the hideout, from common annoyances to the fear of capture. Anne wrote about typical teenage problems as well as her hopes for the future, including wanting to become a journalist or writer.
The last entry in Anne’s diary was written on August 1, 1944. Three days later, the annex was discovered by the Gestapo, acting on a tip from Dutch informants.
The Frank family was transported to Westerbork, a transit camp in the Netherlands, and from there to Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland. Anne and Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen the following month.
Anne Frank’s diary became a bestseller
The Dutch government determined that both Anne and Margot died of a typhus epidemic in March 1945, just weeks before the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, but researchers in 2015 revealed new research, including analysis of archival data and first-person accounts, indicating that the sisters may have died in February 1945. Otto Frank was found interned at Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945.
Friends who searched the hideout after the family’s capture later gave Otto Frank the papers left behind by the Gestapo. Among them he found Anne’s diary, which was later published under the title “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl”. The book was originally published in 1947 in Dutch. The book was later translated into more than 65 languages. Anne Frank’s father lived until 1980.