Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

On June 12, 1929, Annelise Frank was born in Germany to a well-to-do family. But as Hitler’s Nazi regime began patrolling the German streets, her father, Otto Frank lost most of his fortune and decided to uproot his family to the safe haven of Holland. Until her 11th birthday, Anne lived a relatively normal life. She attended Montessori School and had many friends of all religions. Everything abruptly changed the summer of 1940, when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. Anne, a Jew, was forced to wear the yellow Star of David and was transferred to the Jewish Lyceum the following school year.

Otto Frank, no stranger to the Nazi’s tactics, began to plan his family’s escape, fearing the worst. So, in July 1942, when Anne’s older sister, Margot, was summoned for deportation to the labor camps, the Frank family disappeared. Aided by his non-Jewish business associates, Otto Frank, his wife and two daughters took refuge, hiding out in an annex over the company’s warehouse.

Another business partner, his wife and teenage son, Peter, soon joined them. An eighth inhabitant, a family friend, moved in, not long after their arrival. Just weeks before their escape, Anne had celebrated her 13th birthday and received as a gift, a diary, which she named "Kitty." The hopes and longings, tragedies and tears, historical happenings and adolescent dreams penned within its pages later became Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, one of the most widely read pieces of nonfiction, second only to the Bible.

For 25 long and grueling months, filled with arguments and hopes of liberation, documenting the adolescent pangs of one extraordinary girl, the diary follows Anne as she matures into a young woman: her first kiss; her misunderstandings with her mother; her struggles and her triumphs and her never waning belief "that people are really good at heart."

Sadly, Anne didn’t live to see her prophesy to fulfillment. On August 4, 1944 the "Secret Annex" was raided. In March 1945, just two months prior to Holland’s liberation, Anne Frank died at Bergen-Belsen’s concentration camp. Of the eight inhabitants of the "Secret Annex," Otto Frank alone survived. Upon his return, protectorate Miep Gies presented him with Anne’s diary, salvaged from the ransacked warehouse after the Nazi's storm. Hatred and inhumanity may have cut her life short, but they were unable to silence Anne. Her words will live on for eternity in the pages of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, the voice of a generation.

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