Anne Frank's Diary Published

In 1947, a Dutch publisher in Amsterdam released Het Achterhuis ("The Secret Annex"), the diary kept by a Jewish teenager named Anne Frank while her family hid from the Nazis. The book became one of the most widely read testimonies of the Holocaust. Its power lies in its ordinariness: a lively, self-critical girl writing about family quarrels, first love, and her ambitions, all under the shadow of persecution.

Anne was born in Frankfurt in 1929. After the Nazis came to power in Germany, her father, Otto Frank, moved the family to Amsterdam in the early 1930s. The German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940 brought increasingly harsh anti-Jewish measures. In July 1942, after Anne's older sister Margot received a call-up notice, the Franks went into hiding in a concealed set of rooms behind Otto's business premises. They were joined by four other Jews, and a small group of trusted helpers, including Miep Gies, supplied food and news. Anne had received a diary for her thirteenth birthday that June and wrote in it throughout their confinement, later revising parts with a view to possible publication after the war.

The hiding place was discovered in August 1944. Exactly who betrayed the family, or whether the discovery was accidental, remains unresolved despite several investigations. The occupants were deported, and Anne and Margot were eventually sent to Bergen-Belsen, where both died of typhus in early 1945, only weeks before the camp's liberation. Otto was the only member of the group to survive. Miep Gies had saved Anne's papers, and she gave them to Otto on his return.

Otto Frank edited the writings, drawing on Anne's original diary and her own rewritten version, and omitted some passages concerning family tensions and her sexuality. The Dutch edition appeared in 1947, with a German translation and a French one following, and an English edition in 1952. The play and film adaptations of the 1950s brought it to still wider audiences. Later, fuller editions restored much of the material Otto had cut.

The diary has been translated into dozens of languages and sold in the tens of millions of copies. It has become a common entry point for young readers learning about the Holocaust, though some critics note that its hopeful passages can obscure the fate Anne ultimately met. The Amsterdam hiding place is now a museum, and the diary remains a reminder of the individual lives behind the scale of the genocide.