Anne Frank life and biography

Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (12 June 1929 in Frankfurt am Main – early March 1945 in Bergen Belsen) is one of the most renowned and most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Acknowledged for the quality of her writing, her diary has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films.

Born in the city of Frankfurt am Main in Weimar Germany, she lived most of her life in or near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. By nationality, she was officially considered a German until 1941, when she lost her nationality owing to the anti-Semitic policies of Nazi Germany. She gained international fame posthumously following the publication of her diary which documents her experiences hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.

The Frank family moved from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933, the same year as the Nazis gained power in Germany. By the beginning of 1940 they were trapped in Amsterdam due to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in the hidden rooms of her father Otto Frank's office building. After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were eventually transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where they both died of typhus in March 1945.

No one could have ever guessed that a red diary given to Anne Frank on her thirteenth birthday would result in one of the most widely-published, widely-read accounts about the Holocaust ever published. The Diary of Anne Frank went on to be acted out in theater, dramatized on film, and sang in opera. It would be one of most heart-felt, real accounts of any person who went through such atrocity under the Nazi Regime – and it all came from the innocent, yet maturing heart of a teenager.

Born in Germany to reformed Jewish parents, Anne Frank had one sister named Margot. She had Catholic friends and attended schools that promoted her literary education. At a young age, Anne knew she wanted to be a published author. Her father encouraged her to read the books in his expansive collection. Little did she know that her ambitions would someday be posthumously fulfilled in an account that not only discusses what was happening outside, in war-torn Europe, but also what was happening internally with the conflicts and hardships of living hidden, in closed-in quarters with several other people for two years.

After moving from Germany to the Netherlands, Otto Frank, Anne’s father, had started a small company and was doing well in Northern Europe. No one thought the German occupation would reach as far north as it did. However, within a couple years, the family received word that they were to report to the Immigration Office in order to be sent to work camps. Otto Frank had been making a back-up plan over the last several months. He and his family would fake an escape to Switzerland but actually remain in hiding in Otto Frank’s three-room apartment, hidden in the attic of his office.

When an unknown informant tipped off the Nazis that two Jewish families were in hiding, they were discovered and taken to Gestapo Headquarters. Following, they were separated by sex, and sent to work camps. Anne Frank was almost sent to a gas chamber, but she had just turned fifteen years old and was spared. Anne and her sister Margot both became ill and died in March of 1945, just a few weeks shy of the camp being liberated by British forces.

Otto Frank was the only member of the family to survive. He returned to the small apartment in the Netherlands to find Anne Frank’s Diary. Even though he and Anne shared a special bond, he had no idea Anne had been recording what her family and the world were going through. Upon his daughter’s wishes to be a published author, Otto was eventually able to have Anne Frank’s diary published. Following, it was translated into several languages and has been a part of required reading for school curriculum for decades – reminding teenagers today how real, savage, and hard it was to live in a time not so far away. 

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne's diary began as a private expression of her thoughts and she wrote several times that she would never allow anyone to read it. She candidly described her life, her family and companions, and their situation, while beginning to recognise her ambition to write fiction for publication. In March 1944, she heard a radio broadcast by Gerrit Bolkestein—a member of the Dutch government in exile—who said that when the war ended, he would create a public record of the Dutch people's oppression under German occupation. He mentioned the publication of letters and diaries, and Anne decided to submit her work when the time came. She began editing her writing, removing sections and rewriting others, with the view to publication. Her original notebook was supplemented by additional notebooks and loose-leaf sheets of paper. She created pseudonyms for the members of the household and the helpers. The van Pels family became Hermann, Petronella, and Peter van Daan, and Fritz Pfeffer became Albert Düssell. In this edited version, she also addressed each entry to "Kitty," a fictional character in Cissy van Marxveldt's Joop ter Heul novels that Anne enjoyed reading. Otto Frank used her original diary, known as "version A", and her edited version, known as "version B", to produce the first version for publication. He removed certain passages, most notably those in which Anne is critical of her parents (especially her mother), and sections that discussed Anne's growing sexuality. Although he restored the true identities of his own family, he retained all of the other pseudonyms.

Otto Frank gave the diary to the historian Annie Romein-Verschoor, who tried unsuccessfully to have it published. She then gave it to her husband Jan Romein, who wrote an article about it, titled "Kinderstem" ("A Child's Voice"), published in the newspaper Het Parool on 3 April 1946. He wrote that the diary "stammered out in a child's voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence at Nuremberg put together". His article attracted attention from publishers, and the diary was published in the Netherlands as Het Achterhuis in 1947, followed by a second run in 1950.

It was first published in Germany and France in 1950, and after being rejected by several publishers, was first published in the United Kingdom in 1952. The first American edition was published in 1952 under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and was positively reviewed. It was successful in France, Germany and the United States, but in the United Kingdom it failed to attract an audience and by 1953 was out of print. Its most noteworthy success was in Japan where it received critical acclaim and sold more than 100,000 copies in its first edition. In Japan, Anne Frank quickly became identified as an important cultural figure who represented the destruction of youth during the war.

A play based upon the diary, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, premiered in New York City on 5 October 1955, and later won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was followed by the 1959 movie The Diary of Anne Frank, which was a critical and commercial success. The biographer Melissa Müller later wrote that the dramatization had "contributed greatly to the romanticizing, sentimentalizing and universalizing of Anne's story." Over the years the popularity of the diary grew, and in many schools, particularly in the United States, it was included as part of the curriculum, introducing Anne Frank to new generations of readers.

In 1986, the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation published the "Critical Edition" of the diary. It includes comparisons from all known versions, both edited and unedited. It also includes discussion asserting its authentication, as well as additional historical information relating to the family and the diary itself.

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