Anne Frank

Anne Frank kept a diary in hiding in Amsterdam for two years and died in Bergen-Belsen at fifteen; the book has since sold tens of millions of copies in more than seventy languages. Born in Frankfurt in 1929 to a liberal Jewish family, she moved to the Netherlands in 1934 after Hitler came to power, where her father Otto ran a company selling pectin and spices. Germany invaded in May 1940, and Dutch Jews were progressively excluded — from trams, from public swimming pools, from ordinary schools, and finally required to wear the yellow star. She received a red-checked autograph book for her thirteenth birthday on 12 June 1942 and began writing in it. On 6 July, after her sister Margot was ordered to report for labour, the family moved into the Achterhuis, the concealed rooms behind Otto's business premises on the Prinsengracht, joined by four others. Four employees, among them Miep Gies, supplied and protected them for twenty-five months. The diary is not a chronicle of persecution so much as of adolescence conducted in impossible conditions: quarrels with her mother, a first attachment to Peter van Pels, ambition to be a writer, and self-examination of considerable maturity. She began revising it for publication after hearing a Dutch minister broadcast from London asking people to preserve their war records. They were betrayed on 4 August 1944 by someone never identified. Anne and Margot were sent to Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen, where both died of typhus, probably in February 1945, weeks before liberation. Otto was the only survivor. Miep Gies had kept the papers and gave them to him; the diary was published in 1947.

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