On this day 77 years ago, Anne Frank and her family were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Anne was born in Frankfurt, Germany to her parents, Otto and Edith, in 1929. She had one older sister, Margot, who was three years her senior.
In the years following Anne's birth, antisemitism was worsening in Germany, and unemployment and poverty in the Jewish communities were rising. In order to give his family relief and respite, Otto decided to move his family to Amsterdam where he founded a company that traded in pectin.
On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, sparking the Second World War. Nine months later, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, and the Dutch army surrendered five days later.
Just as they had done in Germany, the Nazis began making the Jews' lives more difficult by segregating them and harming their businesses. Eventually, Otto lost his company.
Soon, Jews were required to start wearing the yellow "Jude" star and began to disappear from the Netherlands. So, when Margot got a call-up to report for a labor camp, her parents knew this could not be good news. They decided to go into hiding to keep Margot safe.
The Frank family moved into an annex in one of Otto's old business buildings and was helped by his former coworkers. They were soon joined by a further four Jews, which made the annex cramped. During the day, any noise they made could have given them away, so they had to remain entirely silent.
The family successfully remained hidden for two years, but in 1944, someone gave away their location to the Nazis. The police arrived on August 4 ,1944 and arrested the families hiding in the annex as well as the two non-Jews who had helped them.
The Ottos were held in prisons until September 5, when they were deported to Auschwitz, and Anne, Margot and Edit were separated from Otto.
Two months after their arrival, Anne and Margot were moved to Bergen-Belsen where the two sisters contracted Typhus. They died one after the other in February of 1945, Anne at the age of 15 and Margot at the age of 18.
Otto was the only member of the Frank family to survive the Holocaust.
Just before the Franks went into hiding, Anne was given a diary for her thirteenth birthday. During her time hiding in the Secret Annex, Anne frequently wrote in her diary, which she nicknamed Kitty. When the family was arrested, the diary remained hidden in the annex. A friend of the family found the diary and returned it to Otto after the war when he returned to Amsterdam.
Otto read the diary, and it made a deep impression on him. One of the things Anne wrote was about her dreams of becoming a writer, so he gave the diary to a journalist whose husband got it published in the Netherlands in 1947. In the years since, the diary was published in countries all over the world in over 70 languages. The diary, which contained Anne's musings and descriptions of her most inner thoughts and emotions, became a classic and one of the most-sold books in the world.
Anne's story has resonated with people all over the world, and the building the Franks hid in was turned into the Anne Frank Museum, which is frequented by people of all nationalities and religions every year.