(1929-1945)
Jewish girl who perished in the Holocaust. An-nelies Marie "Anne" Frank was a Jewish girl who wrote a diary about her experiences while hiding with her family from the Nazis during World War II. Anne was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany. When she was four years old, Hitler became dictator of Germany. Her father, Otto, a banker, chose to take Anne, her sister Margot, who was three years older, and her mother, Edith, to the Netherlands.
During World War II the Germans invaded the Netherlands and instituted anti-Semitic regulations there. Jews were banned from going to the movies, libraries, museums, and many other public places. As a way of controlling their movements, Jews were not allowed to use bicycles or cars. Also, for identification purposes, Jews were required to wear a yellow six-pointed Star of David. Furthermore, non-Jewish people were discouraged from associating with Jewish people. Anne, for example, was segregated in an all-Jewish school.
On June 12, 1942, Anne’s thirteenth birthday, her father gave her a diary, which she named "Kitty." Anne kept a personal record of events in her diary between 1942 and 1945. Otto had prepared a hiding place for his family in an annex to a warehouse on Prinsengracht. Consequently, when the Germans announced that all Jews would be sent to work camps, Otto put his plan into action. Life in hiding was difficult. The family had to keep complete silence during the day for fear of being heard by workers. Living conditions became even more strained after Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their son Peter came to live in the annex, and were joined a few months later by Fritz Pfeffer, a friend of the Frank family.
At great risk, Victor Kugler, the owner of the warehouse, built a false bookcase to cover the entrance to the annex. Also at great risk, Miep Gies, on a daily basis, used forged ration coupons to buy food for the hideaways. However, on August 4, 1944, the Gestapo, following an anonymous tip, found the secret annex and arrested all eight occupants. Gies found Anne’s diary and put it in a safe place. The Frank family was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau (where Edith died). Anne and Margot were separated from their parents and were eventually sent to Bergen-Belsen where they both died of typhus shortly before the liberation of the camp. Only Otto survived.
After the war Otto published an abridged version of Anne’s diary in 1947. Since that time, millions of copies have been sold, and it has been translated into at least fifty-five languages. It has also been adapted into award winning plays and motion pictures. In 1995 an English "definitive edition" of the diary was published. However, in 1998, five previously unknown pages of the diary were discovered, which document some of the Franks’ marital problems.
