Anne Frank

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1929 and moved with her family to Amsterdam as Nazi persecution intensified. After anti-Jewish measures narrowed her life under German occupation, the family went into hiding in the annex at Prinsengracht 263 in July 1942. Frank continued writing there until the hiding place was raided on 4 August 1944. She died in Bergen-Belsen in February 1945 after deportation through Westerbork and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The surviving writings are broader than a single private diary. Frank also made short stories and reminiscences, began the novel Cady's Life, and copied admired passages into a Book of Beautiful Sentences. In spring 1944, after hearing a radio appeal to preserve wartime testimony, she began transforming earlier entries into a continuous book titled Het Achterhuis. She revised heavily, omitted and added material, and produced about 50,000 words on more than 215 loose sheets before her arrest interrupted the work.

Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl preserved Frank's notebooks and papers after the arrest and later gave them to Otto Frank. The 1947 Het Achterhuis was a posthumous compilation: Otto combined Anne's original diary, her unfinished authorial rewrite, and some short stories, and corrected language errors. That editorial history matters when distinguishing Frank's authored texts from a particular published edition. French and German translations followed in 1950 and English editions in 1952; the diary is now available in more than 75 languages.

The diary entered both literary culture and public memory. Early Dutch readers emphasized the clarity and emotional force of Frank's witness, while TIME's 1952 review described the book as an unusually moving account of the Second World War. Later classroom use, museum interpretation, theatre, film, music, dance, and digital retellings extended the work's reach. Those later productions remain adaptations or commentary, not additional writings by Frank.