Anne Frank

Annelies Marie Frank (, ; 12 June 1929 – c. February or March 1945) was a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary in which she documented life in hiding under Nazi persecution during the German occupation of the Netherlands.

She is a celebrated diarist who described everyday life from her family hiding place in an Amsterdam attic.

Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929.

Frank was born Annelies or Anneliese Marie Frank on 12 June 1929 at the Maingau Red Cross Clinic in Frankfurt, Germany, to Edith and Otto Heinrich Frank.

She had an older sister, Margot.

The Franks were liberal Jews, and did not practice all of the customs and traditions of Judaism.

They lived in an assimilated community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of various religions.

Edith and Otto were devoted parents, who were interested in scholarly pursuits and had an extensive library; both parents encouraged the children to read.

At the time of Anne's birth, the family lived in a house at Marbachweg 307 in Frankfurt-Dornbusch, where they rented two floors.

In 1931, the family moved to Ganghoferstrasse 24 in a fashionable liberal area of Dornbusch, called the Dichterviertel (Poets' Quarter).

Both houses still exist.

In 1933, after Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party won the federal election and Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich, Edith Frank and the children went to stay with Edith's mother Rosa in Aachen.

Otto Frank remained in Frankfurt, but after receiving an offer to start a company in Amsterdam, he moved there to organize the business and to arrange accommodation for his family.

He began working at the Opekta Works, a company that sold the fruit extract pectin.

Edith travelled back and forth between Aachen and Amsterdam and found an apartment on the Merwedeplein (Merwede Square) in the Rivierenbuurt neighbourhood of Amsterdam, where many more Jewish-German refugees settled.

In November 1933, Edith followed her husband and a month later Margot moved to Amsterdam.

Anne stayed with her grandmother until February, when the family reunited in Amsterdam.

The Franks were among 300,000 Jews who fled Germany between 1933 and 1939.

After moving to Amsterdam, Anne and Margot Frank were enrolled in school—Margot in public school and Anne in the 6th Montessori School.

In 1934, when she was four-and-a-half, she and her family moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands, after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control over Germany.

She spent most of her life in or around Amsterdam.

Anne joined the 6th Montessori School on 9 April 1934; in 1957, it was posthumously renamed "Anne Frank School".

Despite initial problems with the Dutch language, Margot became a star pupil in Amsterdam.

Anne soon felt at home at the Montessori school and met children of her own age, like Hanneli Goslar, who would later become one of her best friends.

In 1938, Otto Frank started a second company, Pectacon, which was a wholesaler of herbs, pickling salts, and mixed spices, used in the production of sausages.

By May 1940, the Franks were trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands.

Anne lost her German citizenship in 1941 and became stateless.

Despite spending most of her life in the Netherlands and being a de facto Dutch national, she never officially became a Dutch citizen.

As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, they went into hiding in concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Anne's father, Otto Frank, worked.

The hiding place is notably referred to as the "secret annex".

Until the family's arrest by the Gestapo on 4 August 1944, Frank kept and regularly wrote in a diary she had received as a birthday present in 1942.

Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps.

On 1 November 1944, Frank and her sister, Margot, were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (presumably of typhus) a few months later.

They were estimated by the Red Cross to have died in March, with Dutch authorities setting 31 March as the official date.

Later research has alternatively suggested that they may have died in February or early March.

Otto, the only survivor of the Frank family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that Anne's diary had been saved by his female secretaries, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl.

He decided to fulfil his daughter's greatest wish to become a writer.

One of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl (originally Het Achterhuis in Dutch, ; English: The Secret Annex), in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944 — it is one of the world's best-known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.

He published her diary in 1947.

It was translated from its original Dutch version and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl, and has since been translated into over 70 languages.