Anne Frank

Anne Frank was a Jewish girl born in Germany. She was a victim of the Holocaust. After her death, people all over the world came to know her because she kept a diary. In it, she wrote about her life in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands. She often wrote about her family's daily life in their hiding place, a secret annex in Amsterdam, from 1942 until they were arrested in 1944.

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929. In 1934, when she was four and a half, her family moved to Amsterdam. This happened after Adolf Hitler of the Nazi Party was chosen to lead Germany. By May 1940, Germany had taken over the country, so her family could not leave Amsterdam. In 1941, Frank lost her German citizenship and became stateless. She had spent most of her life in the Netherlands and was a de facto Dutch national, but she never officially became a Dutch citizen. As Jewish people were increasingly persecuted in July 1942, the family went into hiding in a secret annex. It was hidden behind a bookcase in the building where Frank's father, Otto Frank, worked. Two years later, on 4 August 1944, the Gestapo arrested the family.

After their arrest, the Franks were taken to Westerbork transit camp and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau. On 1 November 1944, Anne and her sister Margot were moved from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They died there a few months later, probably of typhus, an illness. The Red Cross estimated that they died in March 1945, and Dutch authorities set 31 March as the official date. Later research has suggested that they may have died in February or early March.

Otto Frank was the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust. He returned to Amsterdam after World War II. He learned that Anne's diary had been saved by his secretaries, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Anne had often said she wanted to become a writer, so he decided to publish her diary in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl. It has since been translated into over 70 languages. Because of this book, Anne became one of the most talked-about Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It is one of the world's best-known books, and it has inspired several plays and films.

Early life

Anne Frank was born Annelies Marie Frank on 12 June 1929 at the Maingau Red Cross Clinic in Frankfurt, Germany. Her parents were Edith and Otto Heinrich Frank. She had an older sister, Margot. The family were Reform Jews, so they did not follow every Jewish custom and tradition. They lived in an assimilated community, where people of many different religions lived together. Her parents loved learning, had a large library, and encouraged their children to read. In 1931, the family moved to a house in a fashionable part of Frankfurt called the Dichterviertel ("Poets' Quarter"). That area is now part of Dornbusch.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party won the federal election, and Hitler was made chancellor of the Reich. Edith and the girls went to stay with her mother in Aachen. Otto moved to Amsterdam to start work at the Opekta Works, a company that sold pectin, a fruit extract. Edith followed him and found an apartment in the Rivierenbuurt neighbourhood, where many Jewish refugees from Germany settled. Anne stayed with her grandmother until February, when the whole family was together again in Amsterdam.

In Amsterdam, Anne joined the 6th Montessori School in 1934 and soon felt at home there. She met Hanneli Goslar, who later became one of her best friends. In 1938, Otto started a second company, Pectacon, which sold pickling salts and mixed spices. Hermann van Pels, a Jewish butcher who had fled Osnabrück, worked there as a spice advisor. In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands. The occupation government began treating Jewish people unfairly under strict rules, including required registration and segregation. Otto tried to arrange for the family to move to the United States, but the visa was never processed. The US consulate in Rotterdam was destroyed in German bombing in May 1940. In July 1941, Anne was filmed watching a neighbours' wedding from her balcony. This is the only known film of her from her lifetime. After the summer of 1941, Anne was no longer allowed to attend the Montessori School, because Jewish children had to go to Jewish schools. She then attended the Jewish Lyceum, a Jewish secondary school in Amsterdam.

Gallery

Period chronicled in Anne's diary

On her thirteenth birthday, 12 June 1942, Anne received an autograph book. She named it "Kitty" and started using it as a diary. In her entry of 20 June 1942, she listed many of the rules that limited the lives of Dutch Jewish people. In mid-1942, Jews in the Netherlands began to be taken away. Anne's older sister Margot was told to report for a work camp by the Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) on 5 July. Because of this, the Frank family had to go into hiding ten days earlier than they had planned. Before they left, Anne gave her friend Toosje Kupers a book, a tea set and a tin of marbles. On 6 July, the family moved into their hiding place above an office on the Prinsengracht.

Helpers, including Miep Gies, Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman and Jan Gies, brought food and news of the war. They also helped keep the people in hiding safe. On 13 July 1942, the Van Pels family joined them. In November, Fritz Pfeffer, a family friend, arrived too. Tensions grew quickly in the crowded space. Anne was closest to her father. Over time, she grew closer to Margot. She often had mixed feelings about her mother, but later came to treat her with more respect; see ambivalence. The sisters studied while they were in hiding, and Margot took a Latin course by correspondence. Anne wrote about her hopes of becoming a journalist. Her last diary entry was on 1 August 1944.

Arrest

On the morning of 4 August 1944, German uniformed police (Grüne Polizei) entered the Secret Annex. They were led by SS-Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer of the Sicherheitsdienst. The Franks, the Van Pelses, and Pfeffer were taken to RSHA headquarters. They were questioned and kept there overnight. On 5 August, they were moved to a crowded prison called the Huis van Bewaring (House of Detention) on the Weteringschans. Two days later, they were sent to the Westerbork transit camp. Because they had been found in hiding, they were treated as criminals and sent to a punishment barracks for hard labour. Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman were put in a prison camp at Amersfoort, in the province of Utrecht. Kleiman was freed after seven weeks. Kugler was held in Dutch camps and prisons until the war ended. Miep Gies was questioned and threatened, but she was not held. Bep Voskuijl escaped with a few documents that could have caused trouble for their secret food-trading contacts. Afterwards, the two secretaries returned to the Secret Annex and found Anne's papers scattered on the floor. They gathered them, along with several family photo albums. Gies decided to give them back to Anne after the war. On 7 August, Gies offered Silberbauer money to help free the prisoners, but he refused.

There are several theories about how the Secret Annex was discovered. In 2015, Flemish journalist Jeroen De Bruyn and Joop van Wijk suggested that Nelly, the aunt of Bep Voskuijl, might have betrayed them. In 2016, the Anne Frank House pointed to a possible investigation into ration-card fraud instead, though it did not rule out betrayal. A 2018 book suggested Ans van Dijk, a Dutch Jew who betrayed other Jews to the Gestapo, as a possible informant. In January 2022, a team of investigators proposed Arnold van den Bergh as the suspected informant. He was a member of Amsterdam's Jewish Council and died in 1950. Their story was told in Rosemary Sullivan's book and reported by the BBC. However, several scholars who study World War II and the Holocaust doubted the investigators' methods. The New York Times reported that the evidence was "far too thin." One negative claim about Van den Bergh was that he received a payment in guilders from the sale of Jacques Goudstikker's art business. A later report said the sources for this claim were flawed, and the Dutch version of the book was recalled.

Deportation and life in captivity

On 3 September 1944, the people hiding in the Secret Annex were sent away on the last train from Westerbork to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The trip took three days. Also on the train was Bloeme Evers-Emden, a woman from Amsterdam who had become friends with Margot and Anne in 1941. Bloeme later talked about the Frank sisters in the television documentary The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank (1988) by Dutch filmmaker Willy Lindwer, and in the BBC documentary Anne Frank Remembered (1995).

At Auschwitz, the men were separated from the women and children, so Otto Frank was taken away from his family. Anne had turned 15 three months earlier. She never learned that everyone from the Secret Annex had survived that first sorting. Life was very hard for the family. The women had to work during the day and sleep in crowded huts at night. Anne's skin became badly infected with scabies, and her mother gave some of her own food to her daughters. In October 1944, Anne was not allowed to go on a transport to the Liebau labour camp in Lower Silesia, so her mother and sister stayed with her.

In late October 1944, Anne and Margot were moved to Bergen-Belsen. Edith Frank was left behind and died. At Bergen-Belsen, sickness spread quickly as more prisoners arrived. Anne was briefly reunited with two friends, Hanneli Goslar and Nanette Blitz, who were also in the camp. Both women survived the war and later shared their memories of Anne. Blitz remembered that Anne was bald, very thin, and wrapped in a blanket. Anne told her that she hoped to write a book based on her diary when the war was over.

Death

Anne Frank died at the Bergen-Belsen camp in February or March 1945. The exact cause is not known, but there is evidence that she died from typhus, a disease that spread through the camp. Gena Turgel, a survivor who knew Anne at the camp, told the British newspaper The Sun that Anne was very sick. Other illnesses, including typhoid fever, were also common. Witnesses said that Margot became very weak and died, and that Anne died a day later. The exact dates were not recorded. For a long time, people thought the sisters died only a few weeks before British troops freed the camp on 15 April 1945. Research in 2015 suggested they may have died as early as February. Both sisters were buried together in a mass grave.

After the war, only a small number of the Jews taken from the Netherlands were believed to have survived. Some Jews remained in the Netherlands, and many of them were helped by the Dutch underground. Most of these people survived. Otto Frank survived his time in Auschwitz and returned to Amsterdam in June 1945. Jan and Miep Gies sheltered him while he searched for his family. He learned that his wife, Edith, had died. After several weeks, he found out that Margot and Anne had also died. Many of the girls' friends had died too. Sanne Ledermann, who is often mentioned in Anne's diary, died along with her parents. Her sister, Barbara Ledermann, a close friend of Margot's, survived.

Main article: The Diary of a Young Girl

After the war, in July 1945, Miep Gies gave Anne's notebooks to her father, Otto Frank. Anne had kept the diary as a private place for her thoughts, and she had begun to hope she could one day become a writer. In March 1944, she heard a radio broadcast saying that letters and diaries would be collected after the war, so she decided to share her own work when the time came. She edited her writing and gave the people in the hiding place made-up names. Otto Frank later arranged for the diary to be published. A writer's article in the newspaper Het Parool helped it get attention, and it was published in the Netherlands in 1947. It was then published in other countries. A play based on the diary won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and it was followed by a film, The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). Over time, the diary became part of school lessons in many places.

Readers have praised the diary's writing for many years. Eleanor Roosevelt called it one of the wisest and most moving writings about war that she had ever read. John F. Kennedy spoke about Anne in a 1961 speech, and Nelson Mandela said that he had found encouragement in her diary while in prison. Some people later claimed that the diary was not genuine, but courts and a detailed study of the handwriting and materials found that it was authentic. Some passages that were left out of the first edition have since been added to newer editions.

Legacy

In 1957, a group of Dutch people, including Otto Frank, started the Anne Frank Stichting. They wanted to save the Prinsengracht building from being torn down and open it to the public. The Anne Frank House opened on 3 May 1960. It shares information online and holds exhibitions. It is one of the main places visitors go in Amsterdam. In 1963, Otto Frank and his second wife, Elfriede Geiringer-Markovits, started the Anne Frank Fonds, a charitable foundation based in Basel, Switzerland. Otto gave the rights to the diary to the Fonds. In 1997, the Anne Frank Educational Centre opened in Frankfurt, the city where Anne had lived with her family until 1934.

The apartment on Merwedeplein, where the Frank family lived from 1933 until 1942, was privately owned for many years. It was restored to how it looked in the 1930s and opened in 2005. The Canon of the Netherlands is a list of important topics in Dutch history. It was prepared by a committee led by Frits van Oostrom. Anne Frank is one of its fifty topics. The Canon was given to Maria van der Hoeven in 2006, and it is used to teach Dutch history.

In November 2007, the Anne Frank tree, a horse-chestnut that Anne could see from the Annex, became sick with a fungal disease. Arnold Heertje said, "This is not just any tree. The Anne Frank tree is bound up with the persecution of the Jews." A court ordered people to look for a way to save it, and a steel structure was built to support it. However, strong winds blew the tree down on 23 August 2010. Later, eleven young trees grown from it were shared with museums and schools through a project led by the Anne Frank Center USA. One was planted at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis in April 2013. Her life and writings have also inspired many films, books, and songs, such as the choral work Annelies by Marcus Paus. The only known film footage of Anne herself is a silent 20-second film of a neighbour's wedding. It is shared on YouTube.

In 1999, Time named her among the heroes and icons of the 20th century. Madame Tussauds unveiled a likeness of her in 2012. In 2009, UNESCO added her diary to its Memory of the World International Register.

More than 270 schools around the world are named after her. These include the 6th Montessori School in Amsterdam, which Anne attended until 1941, and the Anne Frank Inspire Academy in the United States. A children's human rights memorial was placed in Buenos Aires in 2024. In 2023, a plan to name a daycare centre in Tangerhütte, Germany, after her was dropped after people around the world criticised it. On 25 June 2022, a Google Doodle honoured her. On 12 June 2026, the Anne Frank Center USA started a project on TikTok and Instagram to introduce young people to her story.

In January 2026, after Operation Metro Surge by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Minnesota governor Tim Walz compared children who were scared of immigration enforcement to Anne Frank. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum said that comparing today's political disputes to her experience was not accurate. Some other Jewish leaders defended Walz. They said he was talking about the fear that immigrant children felt, not comparing it to the Holocaust.