Anne Frank

1929-1945

Anne Frank became a world-famous diarist and World War II Holocaust victim after the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, commonly known as The Diary of Anne Frank. Fleeing Nazi persecution of Jews, the German-born girl and her family moved to Amsterdam when Anne was 4 years old. They went into hiding for two years beginning in July 1942. During this time, Frank wrote about her experiences and wishes. The family was found through an anonymous tip and sent to concentration camps in August 1944. Six or seven months later, 15-year-old Anne died from typhus at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

FULL NAME: Annalies Marie Frank
BORN: June 12, 1929
DIED: c. March 1945
BIRTHPLACE: Frankfurt, Germany
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini

Annalies Marie Frank, better known as Anne Frank, was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany. Her mother was Edith Frank. Her father, Otto Frank, was a lieutenant in the German army during World War I and later became a businessman in Germany and the Netherlands. Anne also had a sister named Margot, who was three years older than her.

The Franks were a typical upper-middle-class, German-Jewish family living in a quiet, religiously diverse neighborhood near the outskirts of Frankfurt. But Anne was born on the eve of dramatic changes in German society that soon disrupted her family’s happy, tranquil life as well as the lives of all other German Jews.

Due in large part to the harsh sanctions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, the German economy struggled terribly in the 1920s. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the virulently anti-Semitic National German Socialist Workers Party (Nazi Party) led by Adolf Hitler became Germany’s leading political force, winning control of the government in 1933.

“I can remember that as early as 1932, groups of Storm Troopers came marching by, singing, ‘When Jewish blood splatters from the knife,’” Otto later recalled.

Fleeing Germany to Live in Amsterdam

When Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 20, 1933, the Frank family immediately realized that it was time to flee. They moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands (then known as Holland), in the fall of 1933 when Anne was 4 years old. Otto later said, “Though this did hurt me deeply, I realized that Germany was not the world, and I left my country forever.”

Anne described the circumstances of her family’s emigration years later in her diary: “Because we’re Jewish, my father immigrated to Holland in 1933, where he became the managing director of the Dutch Opekta Company, which manufactures products used in making jam.”

After years of enduring anti-Semitism in Germany, the Franks were relieved to once again enjoy freedom in their new hometown of Amsterdam. “In those days, it was possible for us to start over and to feel free,” Otto recalled.

Anne began attending Amsterdam’s Sixth Montessori School in 1934, and throughout the rest of the 1930s, she lived a relatively happy and normal childhood. Anne had many friends—Dutch and German, Jewish and Christian—and she was a bright and inquisitive student.

Anne Frank at school in 1940

The peaceful life Anne had known didn’t last. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, igniting a global conflict that would become World War II. Then, on May 10, 1940, the German army invaded the Netherlands. The Dutch surrendered five days later, marking the beginning of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

“After May 1940, the good times were few and far between,” Anne later wrote in her diary. “First there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews.”

Beginning in October 1940, the Nazi occupiers imposed anti-Jewish measures in the Netherlands. Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David at all times and observe a strict curfew; they were also forbidden from owning businesses. Anne and her sister were forced to transfer to a segregated Jewish school.

Otto managed to keep control of his company by officially signing ownership over to two of his Christian associates, Jo Kleiman and Victor Kugler, while continuing to run the company from behind the scenes.

On July 5, 1942, Margot received an official summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany. The very next day, the Frank family went into hiding in makeshift quarters in an empty space at the back of Otto’s company building. They called the space the Secret Annex.

The Franks were accompanied in hiding by Otto’s business partner Hermann van Pels as well as his wife, Auguste, and son Peter. In November 1942, German-Jewish dentist Fritz Pfeffer joined the families in the Secret Annex. Otto’s employees Jo Kleiman and Victor Kugler, as well as Jan and Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, provided food and information about the outside world.

The families spent two years in hiding, never once stepping outside the dark, damp, sequestered portion of the building. Anne spent considerable time writing in a red-checkered diary her parents had given her on her 13^th birthday, less than a month before they went into hiding. Eventually, she hoped the diary could become a book and gave herself and companions fake names, such as Anne Robin, her own pseudonym, and Petronella van Daan instead of Auguste van Pels. Her reflections on life as a Jewish teenager during the Holocaust were eventually shared with the world.

On August 4, 1944, a German secret police officer accompanied by four Dutch Nazis stormed into the Secret Annex and arrested everyone who was hiding there, including Anne and her family. Their location was given away by an anonymous tip, and the identity of their betrayer remains unknown to this day.

The residents of the Secret Annex were shipped off to Camp Westerbork, a concentration camp in the northeastern Netherlands. They arrived by a passenger train on August 8, 1944. In the middle of the night on September 3, 1944, they were transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Upon arriving at Auschwitz, the men and women were separated. This was the last time that Otto ever saw his wife or daughters.

After a month of hard labor hauling heavy stones and grass mats, Anne and Margot were again transferred. They arrived at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany during the fall. At Bergen-Belsen, food was scarce, sanitation was awful, and disease ran rampant.

Their mother wasn’t allowed to go with them. Edith fell ill and died at Auschwitz on January 6, 1945.

Anne was just 15 years old when she died, one of more than 1 million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust. Her cause of death was typhus; both Anne and her sister, Margot, contracted the disease in the early spring of 1945 while at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

The definitive date of Anne’s death might never be known. According to official records and Dutch authorities, Anne died in March 1945. However, in a 2015 research article based on archival materials and eyewitness accounts, historians at the Anne Frank House argue the sisters died within a short time of each other in February 1945. In either case, they died weeks before British soldiers liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945.

At the end of the war, Anne’s father, Otto, was the the sole family survivor of the Holocaust. He returned home to Amsterdam, searching desperately for news of his daughters. On July 18, 1945, he met two sisters who had been with Anne and Margot at Bergen-Belsen. They delivered the tragic news of his daughters’ deaths.

A copy of Anne Frank’s diary on display at an exhibition in Frankfurt, Germany

The Secret Annex: Diary Letters from June 14, 1942 to August 1, 1944 was a selection of passages from Anne’s diary that was published on June 25, 1947, by her father, Otto. The Diary of a Young Girl, as it’s typically called in English, has since been published in more than 70 languages. Countless editions, as well as screen and stage adaptations, of the book have been created worldwide. Commonly referred to as The Diary of Anne Frank, it remains one of the most moving and widely read firsthand accounts of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust.

On June 12, 1942, her 13^th birthday, Anne wrote her first diary entry to an imaginary friend named Kitty: “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”

During the two years Anne spent hiding from the Nazis with her family in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam, she wrote extensive daily entries in the red-checkered diary to pass the time. Some betrayed the depth of despair into which she occasionally sunk during day after day of confinement. “I’ve reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die,” she wrote on February 3, 1944. “The world will keep on turning without me, and I can’t do anything to change events anyway.”

However, the act of writing also allowed Anne to maintain her sanity and her spirits. “When I write, I can shake off all my cares,” she wrote on April 5, 1944.

When Otto returned to Amsterdam from the concentration camps at the end of the war, he found Anne’s diary, which had been saved by Miep Gies. He eventually gathered the strength to read it. He was awestruck by what he discovered. “There was revealed a completely different Anne to the child that I had lost,” Otto wrote in a letter to his mother. “I had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings.”

For all its passages of despair, Anne’s diary is essentially a story of faith, hope, and love in the face of hate. “If she had been here, Anne would have been so proud,” Otto said.

The Diary of a Young Girl endures not only because of the remarkable events Anne described but also her extraordinary gifts as a storyteller and indefatigable spirit through even the most horrific of circumstances.

“It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death,” she wrote on July 15, 1944. “I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.”

In addition to her diary, Anne filled a notebook with quotes from her favorite authors, original stories, and the beginnings of a novel about her time in the Secret Annex. Her writings reveal a teenage girl with creativity, wisdom, depth of emotion, and rhetorical power far beyond her years.

Hidden Diary Pages Discovered

In May 2018, researchers uncovered two hidden pages in Anne’s diary that contained dirty jokes and “sexual matters,” which the teen covered with pasted brown paper. “I sometimes imagine that someone might come to me and ask me to inform him about sexual matters,” Anne wrote in Dutch. “How would I go about it?”

Anne tried to answer these questions as if she’s speaking to an imaginary person, using phrases like “rhythmical movements” to describe sex and “internal medicament,” alluding to contraception. She also wrote about her menstrual cycle, saying it’s “a sign that she is ripe,” devoted space to “dirty jokes,” and referenced sex work: “In Paris they have big houses for that.”

The pages were dated September 28, 1942, and were part of her first diary—the one she intended only for herself. “It is really interesting and adds meaning to our understanding of the diary,” said Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. “It’s a very cautious start to her becoming a writer.”

Visitors line up outside the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam.

After the end of World War II, the Secret Annex was on a list of buildings to be demolished, but a group of people in Amsterdam campaigned and set up the foundation now known as the Anne Frank House. The house preserved Anne’s hiding spot; today, it’s one of the three most popular museums in Amsterdam.

In June 2013, the Anne Frank House lost a lawsuit to the foundation Otto Frank created, Anne Frank Fonds, after the Fonds sued the House for the return of documents linked to Anne and Otto. Anne’s physical diary and other writings, however, are property of the Dutch state and have been on permanent loan to the House since 2009.

The museum, like Anne’s diary, is just one way the Jewish teenager’s legacy is preserved. In 2009, the Anne Frank Center USA launched a initiative called the Sapling Project, planting saplings from a 170-year-old chestnut tree that Anne had long loved, as denoted in her diary, at 11 different sites nationwide.

The story of Anne and her family was adapted into a Broadway play titled The Diary of Anne Frank in 1955. It lives on through multiple TV and movie adaptations.

The first of these was the 1959 movie The Diary of Anne Frank, starring Millie Perkins as Anne. The roughly three-hour film was critically acclaimed and received three Academy Awards for Shelley Winters in the supporting role of Petronella van Daan, as well as art direction and cinematography. In 1975, Winters donated her Oscar to the Anne Frank House.

Melissa Gilbert, known for her role as Laura Ingalls Wilder on Little House on the Prairie, portrayed Anne in a 1980 made-for-TV movie also named The Diary of Anne Frank. A few years later in 1988, Academy Award winner Mary Steenburgen led the television film adaptation The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank as Miep Gies. Another TV movie, Anne Frank: The Whole Story, featured Ben Kingsley and Lili Taylor in 2001.

More recently, Netflix debuted the 2021 movie My Best Friend Anne Frank, a dramatization of Frank’s real-life bond with her childhood friend Hannah Goslar. Then in 2023, the television miniseries A Small Light focused on the efforts of Miep Gies (played by Bel Powley) and her husband to protect Anne and her family.

• It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.
• When I write, I can shake off all my cares.
• Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
• A quiet conscience makes one strong!
• Although I’m only 14, I know quite well what I want. I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it might sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child, I feel quite independent of anyone.
• As long as this exists, this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?
• The world will keep on turning without me, and I can’t do anything to change events anyway.
• The weak die out, and the strong will survive, and live on forever.
• In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.
• People can tell you to keep your mouth shut but that doesn’t stop you from having your own opinion.
• Whoever is happy will make others happy.
• No one has ever become poor by giving.
• I don’t think of all the misery, but the beauty that still remains.
• It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
• After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews.
• Because we’re Jewish, my father immigrated to Holland in 1933, where he became the managing director of the Dutch Opekta Company, which manufactures products used in making jam.

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