Anne Frank

Anne Frank was one of the most famous Holocaust victims, due to the journal she kept as a teenager while in hiding, which was later published under the renowned title The Diary of Anne Frank. Anne was born in June 12,1929, in Frankfurt, Germany. The Frank family fled anti-Semitism in Germany, to Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 1933, where they lived a relatively normal life until September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland setting in motion the beginning of World War II. On May 10, 1940, German troops invaded The Netherlands, occupying the country five days later. AFter failed attempts to emigrate to the US, Anne's parents Otto and Edith decided to take the family into hiding, together with the family of Otto's Jewish business partner Hermann van Pels and later joined by dentist Fritz Pfeffer. They remained in the secret quarters in the back of Otto's company building, which Anne referred to as the Secret Annex, for two years. During that time, in which they never left their hiding place, Anne's diary served as a form of escape for her in which she chronicled her experiences, thoughts and emotions. On August 4, 1944, the hidden eight were found and arrested by the Nazis. They were taken to a concentration camp called Camp Westerbork in the northeastern Netherlands, before being transferred to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, on September 3, 1944. After several months, Anne and her sister Margot were again moved, this time to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Both sisters died of typhus in March 1945, just weeks before British soldiers liberated the camp. Anne was 15-years-old. Otto was the only one of the eight who survived the war, and Miep Gies, an Austrian who helped the Frank family hide, found Anne's diary and gave it to Otto. Anne wrote in her diary that she hope to be a writer one day and that wanted her journal published a novel. On June 25, 1947, 'The Secret Annex' was published, followed by many more editions, translations, a play and a film. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam was made into a museum in 1960.