Anne Frank

Annelies Marie Frank was a German-born Jewish girl and diarist who perished in the Holocaust. She gained worldwide fame posthumously for keeping a diary documenting her life in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands. In the diary, she regularly described her family's everyday life in their hiding place in an Amsterdam attic from 1942 until their arrest in 1944.

Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929. In 1934, when she was four and a half, Frank and her family moved to Amsterdam after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control of Germany. By May 1940, the family was trapped in Amsterdam due to Germany's occupation. Frank lost her German citizenship in 1941 and became stateless. Despite spending most of her life in the Netherlands and being a de facto Dutch national, she never officially became a Dutch citizen. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, the family went into hiding in rooms concealed behind a bookcase in the building where Frank's father, Otto Frank, worked. The family was arrested two years later by the Gestapo, on 4 August 1944.

Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps. On 1 November 1944, Anne Frank and her sister, Margot were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (presumably of typhus) a few months later. The Red Cross estimated that they died in March 1945, with Dutch authorities setting 31 March as the official date. Later research has alternatively suggested that they may have died in February or early March.

Otto Frank, the only Holocaust survivor in the family, returned to Amsterdam after World War II to find that Anne's diary had been saved by his secretaries, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. Moved by his daughter's repeated wishes to be an author, Otto Frank published her diary in 1947.

(Source: Wikipedia)