Anne Frank was a young Jewish girl whose diary became one of the most widely read accounts of life under Nazi rule. She was born in Germany in 1929, but her family moved to the Netherlands in 1933 to escape the growing persecution of Jews. For several years, life in Amsterdam was relatively normal, and Anne attended school, read widely and wrote stories in her notebooks. After the Germans occupied the country in 1940, however, restrictions on Jews quickly became severe.
In July 1942, Anne's older sister Margot received an order to report to a labour camp. Fearing the worst, the family went into hiding in a secret apartment behind the office of Anne's father's business. Four other people soon joined them, and for the next 25 months the eight hid together in rooms concealed by a movable bookcase. A small group of non-Jewish friends risked their own lives to bring food and news.
Anne, then thirteen, had received a diary for her birthday shortly before going into hiding. She wrote in it almost every day, recording conflicts within the crowded apartment, her changing feelings about her parents, her hopes for a writing career and her thoughts on the war. The writing was personal at first, but she later began revising her entries with the idea of publishing them after the war as a book.
In August 1944, the group was betrayed and arrested. Anne died of disease in the Bergen-Belsen camp early in 1945, weeks before the camp's liberation. Her father, the only survivor of the family, returned to Amsterdam, found her diary where she had left it, and arranged for it to be published. The book has since been translated into more than seventy languages.