Anne Frank, (Annelies Marie Frank) was born June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany. When the Nazis came to power, her parents, Otto and Edith Frank, moved with Anne and her older sister Margot to Amsterdam. Anne led a happy life in Amsterdam, until the German Occupation of the Netherlands in 1941, when strict rules were put in place for the Jews. In 1942, when Margot received a call-up notice for a work camp, the family went into hiding, in a “secret annex” above Otto Frank’s office. They lived in hiding with 4 other people for two years. Anne captured their lives as well as her dreams for the future in her diary. In 1944 they were betrayed and were transported to Westerbork, and then to Auschwitz. Anne and Margot were later sent to Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp, where they both died, just weeks before the camp’s liberation in 1945. Otto Frank was the sole survivor of the inhabitants of the secret annex. In 1947, he published Anne’s diary, as “The Diary of a Young Girl”. The Diary, which has been translated into more than 65 languages, is the most widely read diary of the Holocaust, and Anne is probably the best known of Holocaust victims.
