World War II victim,
1929-
1945, famous for her
diary, published after the
war. She started the diary when she received it, on her 13th birthday (12 June
1942), and after a month of chronicling
everyday life in
Amsterdam during an
occupation by a
foreign army, the diary records her family's going into
hiding from the
Nazi soldiers and their anti-
Jewish decrees.
The family spent more than two years hiding in a "secret annex" to the building where Mr. Otto Frank had worked: Anne, her sister, her parents, another couple and their son Peter, and another adult man. Anne wrote about both what the family heard of the outside world on the radio and her own life, including family squabbles and her off-and-on interest in Peter. She was thinking about publishing the diaries after the war (they ran three volumes by 1944) and did some rewriting and editing, keeping all the versions in a suitcase.
On 4 August 1944, the secret annex was raided by Nazis and its occupants were taken to concentration camps. The police dumped out the suitcase with Anne's work and used it to carry away valuables from the living quarters; secretaries at the workplace rescued the papers. Anne died of typhus and starvation in Bergen-Belsen. Her father was the only survivor of the eight people who had hidden; his daughter's writing was given to him after the war and he managed to fulfill her plans to publish it. The first edition ("Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl") was much edited; the more recent "The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition" contains things that had been left out originally, as well as background information about her life and the war situation.
The Secret Annex is now open to visitors, as the Anne Frank Huis.