The Diary of Anne Frank

Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex), published in Amsterdam on June 25, 1947, is the first printed edition of the diary kept by Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who went into hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands. It was prepared by her father Otto Frank, the only one of the eight people in hiding to survive the war. The English translation, The Diary of a Young Girl, followed in 1952.¹

Anne received a red-checked diary for her thirteenth birthday on June 12, 1942. Her family had fled Germany for Amsterdam after the Nazis took power. On July 6, 1942, they hid in concealed rooms behind her father's office at Prinsengracht 263 with the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer, helped by Miep Gies and other office workers. Anne wrote about her family, her feelings and her hopes to be a writer, and she revised her entries in 1944 when she heard a Dutch minister call for diaries of the occupation. The group was arrested on August 4, 1944, and Anne died at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945, aged 15.¹

Miep Gies had saved the notebooks, and Otto Frank edited them, leaving out some passages on sexuality and on his wife. The book was a modest success at first, then a global one after the 1952 English edition and the 1955 Broadway play. It has been translated into more than 70 languages and sold over 30 million copies. The hiding place at Prinsengracht 263 became a museum in 1960, and the diary is the best-known personal account of persecution under the Nazis, taught in schools throughout the world.¹²