🇩🇪Anne
Frank

She received the diary on her thirteenth birthday — a red-and-white plaid notebook with a lock and a small key. Anne Frank began writing in it on June 12, 1942, the same day she received it. The entries begin with the ordinary concerns of a bright, observant, opinionated girl in Amsterdam: her friends, her crushes, her teachers, the small dramas of school. She wrote with fluency and wit, noting the absurdities of adult behavior, the frustrations of being young, the gap between what people said and what they meant. She was thirteen. She could not have known that within a month, her world would close down entirely.

The Frank family — Otto, Edith, and daughters Margot and Anne — had fled Nazi Germany for the Netherlands in 1933, when Anne was four years old. By 1942, the German occupation of the Netherlands had made the situation for Jewish families catastrophically dangerous. On July 5, 1942, Margot received a call-up for a Nazi labor camp. The following morning, the Frank family disappeared into the Secret Annex: a set of rooms hidden behind a bookcase in Otto Frank's office building at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. They were joined by four others — the van Pels family and a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer. Eight people, 450 square feet, two years and one month, in total silence during working hours. Anne kept writing.

The diary she kept during those twenty-five months in hiding is one of the most intimate documents of the twentieth century. She wrote about hunger and boredom and the constant terror of discovery. She wrote about her complicated feelings about her mother, her deep admiration for her father, her growing love for Peter van Pels. She wrote about wanting to be a writer — she had heard a Dutch radio broadcast encouraging people to keep diaries that might one day be published as historical records of the occupation, and she began revising her entries with publication in mind, writing in a sharper, more literary register, creating a narrator named "Kitty" as an addressee. She was fourteen, then fifteen, editing her own work toward a vision of what it could become.

On August 4, 1944, German security police raided the Secret Annex. All eight inhabitants were arrested. The helpers were imprisoned; Otto Frank survived Auschwitz. Edith Frank died there in January 1945. Margot and Anne were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus within days of each other in February 1945, just weeks before the camp was liberated by British forces. Anne Frank was fifteen years old.

Miep Gies, one of the helpers who had brought food and supplies to the Annex, had gathered Anne's papers from the floor after the arrest and locked them in her desk drawer. She gave them to Otto Frank after the war. He spent years reading the diary, recognizing in it a literary document far beyond anything he had expected. In 1947, Otto Frank published Het Achterhuis — The Secret Annex — through Contact Publishing in Amsterdam. The English translation appeared in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl. By the end of the twentieth century, it had sold more than thirty-five million copies in over seventy languages, making it one of the most widely read books in human history.

What the diary achieves that no historical account of the Holocaust could is the restoration of an individual interior life to an event defined by its erasure of individual lives. Six million murdered Jews are a number that the human mind struggles to hold. Anne Frank is a person — impatient, funny, vain, curious, desperately serious about her ambitions, seventeen-year-old-before-fifteen-year-old in her desires and her insights. Reading her, you understand the scale of what was destroyed by understanding what one person contained. She wanted to be a writer. The diary she kept while in hiding is one of the most important books ever written. Both of those things are true simultaneously. She was a prodigy who wrote to survive, who wrote to matter, and who in dying became the voice through which the world has tried to understand the magnitude of what she and six million others lost.