www.annefrank.org,uk

Anne Frank was born in June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany. She was born during the dramatic changes in Germany, which disrupted many other happy quiet German Jewish lives. The German economy struggled terribly in the 1920’s and as soon Adolf Hitler was chosen to be the leader in 1933, Germany turned anti-Semitism. Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s dad felt no longer safe when Hitler had the lead and decided to move to Amsterdam in 1933. After years of enduring anti-Semitism in Germany, everything seemed to fall back in place. Otto Frank became the manager of the Dutch Opekta Company, the Franks relieved for once and able to enjoy freedom again. Anne Frank started to attend Amsterdam’s sixth Montessori school in 1934 and lived throughout the 1930s, a happy and normal childhood. But that all changed on May 10, 1940, when the German invaded The Netherlands and won the battle defeating the Dutch forces in three days. Beginning in October 1940, the Nazi’s forced anti-Jewish measures on The Netherlands. Every Jew had to wear a yellow star of David, they were forbidden to owning businesses. Anne Frank and her sister were forced to go an only Jewish school; they were segregated from other backgrounds and ethnicity. The Nazi occupiers applied anti-Jewish rules, Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David at all times and they were also forbidden from owning businesses. Otto Frank managed to keep hold of his company by officially signing ownership over to two of his Christian associates, Jo Kleiman and Victor Kugler, whilst running the company from behind the scenes. Anne Frank's famous diary On June 12, 1942, Anne Frank got a red diary for her 13th birthday. She wrote her first page to her imaginary friend named Kitty, that same day: "I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support." Weeks later, on July 5, 1942, Margot received an official summons to report to a Nazi work camp in Germany. The very next day the family started to hide in living quarters in the empty space at the back of Otto frank's company, the place is referred to the secret annex. The name is given as an code were Jewish people hide. They were accompanied in hiding by Otto's business partner Hermann van Pels as well as his wife, Auguste, and son, Peter. Otto's employees Kleiman and Kugler, as well as Jan and Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, provided food and information about the outside world. The families Franks hided for two years from the Nazi’s and never once stepped outside the dark, damp, enclosed space of the building. During the time Frank wrote a lot daily in her diary, to pass the time away. Some of her entries showed the betrayed the depth of despair into which she occasionally sunk during day after day of confinement. "I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die," she wrote on February 3, 1944. "The world will keep on turning without me, and I can't do anything to change events anyway." However, the act of writing allowed Frank to maintain her emotional sanity and spirits. "When I write, I can shake off all my cares," she wrote on April 5, 1944. In addition to her diary, Frank filled a notebook with quotes from her favourite authors, original stories and the beginnings of a novel about her time in the Secret Annex. Her writings reveal a teenage girl with creativity, wisdom, depth of emotion and rhetorical power far beyond her years. Seized by the Nazis On August 4, 1944, a German secret police officer followed by four Dutch Nazis stormed into the Secret Annex, arresting everyone that was hiding there. They had been revealed and unmasked by an anonymous tip, the identity of their betrayer is till unknown till this day. The occupiers of the Secret Annex were shipped off to Camp Westerbork, a concentration camp in the north-eastern Netherlands, and arrived by passenger train on August 8, 1944. They were moved to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland in the middle of the night on September 3, 1944. When they arrived at Auschwitz they separated men and women. This was the last time that Otto Frank ever saw his wife or daughters. After several months of hard labour hauling heavy stones and grass mats, Anne and Margot were again transferred during the winter to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Their mother was not allowed to go with them, and Edith Frank fell ill and died at Auschwitz shortly thereafter, on January 6, 1945. At Bergen-Belsen, food was scarce, sanitation was awful and disease ran rampant. Anne Frank and her sister both got infected by typhus in the early spring and died within a day of each other sometime in March 1945, only a few weeks before Russian soldiers freed the camp. Anne Frank was just 15 years old at the time of her death, one of more than 1 million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust. Otto Frank was the only member of the frank family to survive. At the end of the war, he returned home to Amsterdam, searching desperately for news of his family. On July 18, 1945, he met two sisters who had been with Anne and Margot at Bergen-Belsen and delivered the tragic news of their deaths. 'The Diary of a Young Girl' When Otto returned to Amsterdam, he found Anne's diary, which had been saved by Miep Gies. He eventually gathered the strength to read it and was amazed by what he discovered. "There was revealed a completely different Anne to the child that I had lost," Otto wrote in a letter to his mother. "I had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings." Otto sought to have selections from his daughter's diary published as a book, and The Secret Annex: Diary Letters from June 14, 1942 to August 1, 1944 was published on June 25, 1947. "If she had been here, Anne would have been so proud," he said. The Diary of a Young Girl, as it's typically called in English, has since been published in 67 languages. Countless editions, as well as screen and stage adaptations, of the work have been created around the world. The Diary of a Young Girl remains one of the most moving and widely read first-hand accounts of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust. Anne Frank's diary endures, not only because of the remarkable events she described, but also due to her extraordinary gifts as a storyteller and her indefatigable spirit through even the most horrific of circumstances. For all its passages of despair, Frank's diary is essentially a story of faith, hope and love in the face of hate. "It's utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death," she wrote on July 15, 1944. "I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquillity will return once more."