Anne Frank (1929-1945)

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany to Edith and Otto Frank who were both descendants of families that had lived in Germany for many generations. In 1933, with the rise to power of HItler National-Socialists Party , her parents decided that Germany was no longer safe for Jews. They moved with their two daughters, Anne and her older sister Margot, to live in Amsterdam in Holland. Anne was four years old and lived there with her family relatively peacefully up till age eleven, in 1942.

In 1940, Holland was conquered by the Nazis and after that it was no longer a safe haven for Jews. In the next two years, the lives of the Jews became increasingly limited, due to restrictions imposed by the Nazis, and Anne was forced to move from the public school where she studied,, to a Jewish school. In 1942, the Nazis began to send Jews to work camps - which were in fact death camps.

On 9 July 1942, owing to the threat of being sent to the camps, Anne's family moved into a hiding place in the building where Otto had worked. For two years the family hid there, together with another four Jews, while non-Jewish friends smuggled food and basic necessities into the hiding place. Throughout this period, Anne kept a diary in which she described what was happening to her and others, precisely and maturely but full of optimism and love of her fellow man.

On 4 August 1944, following information given to the Nazis by a Dutch informer, the "Green Police" (the Nazi Secret Police) broke into their hiding place and transported the eight people living there to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. Anne's mother, Edith, died in Auschwitz a few months later. Anne and her sister, Margot, were sent to Bergen-Belsen where they died of typhus early in 1945. Except for Otto Frank, who was found alive in Auschwitz when the Allied forces freed the camp, all those who lived in the hideout died.

After the war, Miep Gies, Otto Frank's secretary, found Anne's diary and gave it to her father who published it in 1947. Since it's first publication, the diary has been translated into more than 90 languages and the hiding place has been transformed into the "Anne Frank Museum". Otto Frank died in 1980.