Anne Frank

Born in 1929 in Frankfurt am Main to a liberal Jewish family, Anne Frank was four when the Nazis came to power and her father Otto moved the family to Amsterdam for safety. For two years she lived an ordinary Dutch girlhood, roller-skating, gossiping about boys, collecting pictures of movie stars. That ended on July 6, 1942, when the family went into hiding in a concealed annex above Otto's spice-trading offices on the Prinsengracht canal. Frank was thirteen. For the next twenty-five months, eight people shared the cramped, airless rooms, dependent on a handful of Dutch protectors for food and news. Frank poured herself into a red-checked diary she had received for her birthday, revising and expanding it after hearing a radio broadcast from the Dutch government-in-exile calling for wartime diaries. Her entries moved from adolescent chatter to searching reflections on fear, identity, sexuality, and the possibility of goodness, prose startlingly assured for a girl between thirteen and fifteen. On August 4, 1944, the Gestapo raided the annex after an anonymous tip. Frank was deported to Auschwitz, then Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in February 1945, weeks before British troops liberated the camp. Otto, the sole survivor of the eight, returned to Amsterdam and found the diary scattered on the floor. Het Achterhuis was published in 1947, eventually translated into seventy languages, and became the most widely read personal account of the Holocaust.