Biography of Anne Frank
By Radiyah Shakur
 Annelies Marie Frank is undoubtedly one of the most well-known teenagers in modern-day history. Anne, a German-Jew, kept daily entries in her famous diary of the 25 months she and seven other Jews spent in hiding in Amsterdam between June 1942 and August 1944.
Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main in Germany on 12 June 1929. In 1933, Hitler and his anti-Jewish Socialist Party came into power. In response to Hitler’s anti-Semitic decrees, Anne’s parents Edith and Otto Frank decided there was no future in Germany for their two daughters. Shortly after, Otto Frank relocated his business to Amsterdam, and then sent for his family a few months later.
The Frank family moved in to a house in southern Amsterdam in 1933. Anne began attending a Montessori school nearby, where she excelled and made many friends. For seven years, Anne grew up with out many cares in safer Holland.
In 1940, however, the protection that Holland was able to provide came to an end when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. Within five days Holland surrendered to the invading German forces. During this time it was essential for Jews to arrange hiding spaces with non-Jews if they were to escape deportation to concentration camps. Similarly, finding such hiding spaces was difficult; consequently Anne’s father decided to convert the annex of his office building.
On 6 July 1942 the Frank family went into hiding and moved into the ‘’Secret Annex’’. For more than two years during World War II, Anne Frank recorded her daily life in exile.
On 4 August 1944, the Secret Annex was raided after a Dutchman betrayed their hiding place to the Nazis. Anne, her family, and the others living with them in the cramped rooms were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. One month later, Anne and her sister were transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. There Anne and her sister both contracted Typhus and died within a short period of one another in March 1945, merely a few weeks before liberation.
Anne Frank’s diary was saved during the war by one of the family’s helpers, Miep Gies, and was first published in 1947. Since, the diary has been translated into 67 languages, and remains one of the most widely read books in the world.
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