She described herself as a “little bundle of contradictions,” a willful, lively teenager who clashed with her mother, worried about her changing body, and dreamed of a better future. And in the decades after she died in a Nazi concentration camp, Anne Frank would also become one of the world’s most famous writers—known for the diary she kept for two years in hiding during World War II.
Anne was just one of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945; just one of the estimated three-quarters of Dutch Jews who perished in concentration and death camps; and just one of the up to 1.5 million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust. But her words, and her life, have become potent symbols of the Shoah, of which she is arguably the most well-known victim.
Published in 1952, an estimated 30 million copies of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl have been sold to date. But who was Anne Frank, and why is her diary still discussed—and argued over—today?
