Anne Frank may have been just 13 when she began her diary, but she went on to become an internationally acclaimed author, penning the most famous document of the Holocaust. Over 30 million copies sold worldwide in over 70 languages and every year, more than a million people visit the building where Anne hid during the Holocaust. So how did Anne’s diary go from a pile of papers in a ransacked attic to the global phenomenon that became a symbol of the six million Jewish people murdered during the Holocaust? We look at the extraordinary story of Anne Frank and her diary.
Anne Frank was a German-Jewish teenager born 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany. Her family moved to Amsterdam in the Netherlands when she was 5. They were forced to go into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during the Holocaust of World War II.
Anne received a red and white checkered diary as a gift on her 13th birthday and began recording entries on 13 June 1942. She originally planned to use the diary as a place to write down her innermost thoughts and observations about her friends, family and school. However, it soon became an incredible record of the Holocaust, as Anne and her family (her father Otto, mother Edith and older sister Margot) went into hiding less than a month after she received the diary, on 6 July 1942.
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