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Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank was born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Anne, her sister Margot, and her parents, Otto and Edith, moved to the Netherlands. The Franks were among 300,000 Jews who fled Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939.
The young diarist is the subject of a permanent display at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
The family settled in Amsterdam. Otto established his own company, while Anne and Margot Frank were enrolled in school. Edith's mother, Rosa, came to live with the family until her death in 1942.
Only four of Otto Frank's employees knew of the people in hiding, including Otto's Austrian-born secretary, Miep Gies. These brave individuals risked their own lives to smuggle food, supplies, and news of the outside world into the secret apartment, whose entrance was situated behind a movable bookcase. All were aware that, if caught, they could face the death penalty for sheltering Jews.
In 1980, the Dutch postal service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Anne Frank.
The exact dates of Anne Frank's death and that of her sister Margot are not recorded. But their grave stone is found at the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and is always decorated with fresh flowers.
Sources: (History) (Smithsonian Magazine) (The Guardian) (Jewish Women's Archive)
See also: Inspirational women who changed history
The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect in New York City was founded in 2012. The center attempts to inspire tolerance by highlighting the dangers of intolerance, anti-Semitism, racism, and discrimination by sharing with the world the life and thoughts of Anne Frank. Pictured is a copy of the first edition of her diary.
Anne Frank's diary and the 1955 play was adapted for the screen as 'The Diary of Anne Frank' (1959). The film was positively received by critics and is still often considered the best film adaptation of the book. Millie Perkins (pictured) portrays Anne. Shelley Winters won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and later donated her Oscar to the Anne Frank Museum.
On the morning of August 4, 1944, the secret annex was discovered by the Gestapo. Leading the raid was SS commander Karl Josef Silberbauer (1911–1972). They were acting on information supplied by an anonymous tipster. The informant has never been identified. Pictured is Silberbauer, who in 1963 and by then an inspector in the Vienna police, was exposed as the official who arrested the Franks, their fellow fugitives, and their protectors.
In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands. Overnight, the Nazis and their Dutch collaborators made life increasingly restrictive and dangerous for Jewish people there. Anne celebrated her 13th birthday on June 12, 1942. She received a gift of an autograph book, but decided instead to use it as a diary. She began writing in it shortly afterwards, her first entries describing life for the Dutch Jewish population under German occupation.
Those who helped conceal the secret annex from the Nazis—Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl—all survived the war. It was Miep Gies (pictured) who'd collected Anne's diary (a series of five notebooks) and other loose papers and later passed them onto Otto Frank.
With the numbers of Dutch Jews deported to extermination camps rising exponentially, the Frank family went into hiding on July 6, 1942, in an attic apartment behind Otto Frank's business, located at Amsterdam's Prinsengracht 263 (pictured).
In 1957, the Frank's house at Prinsengracht 263 was scheduled for demolition. The premises had fallen into disrepair (pictured) and was unoccupied. A citizens' group that included Otto Frank, and which became the Anne Frank Foundation, successfully campaigned to save the building. The refurbished Anne Frank House opened on May 3, 1960.
Otto Frank is pictured opening the reconstructed bookcase that covered the entrance to the secret annex in the Anne Frank House.
The Franks were joined in hiding by Otto's business associate Hermann van Pels, along with his wife Auguste and their son Peter, who were also Jewish. Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and friend of the family, also joined the group in the secret annex. Meanwhile, Anne continued to write about her experiences, her relationships with the members of her family, and of those around her.
Similarly, the Anne Frank Zentrum in Berlin is committed to working against anti-Semitism, prejudice, and any kind of discrimination against people. It houses a permanent exhibition, 'Anne Frank. Here & Now,' which presents Anne Frank's life story by using artifacts, archive photos, and photos from the Frank family albums.
Past visitors to the Anne Frank Zentrum include Hanneli Goslar (pictured), a close childhood friend of Anne Frank seen here identifying herself in a pre-Second World War photograph. Hanneli was also sent to Bergen-Belsen, around the same time as Anne, but survived.
A sapling from the horse chestnut tree that Anne Frank wrote about in her diary and which once stood near the building where she and her family hid is seen after it was planted next to the Children's Memorial at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem in March 2012. Saplings from the same tree have also been planted in various locations in the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan.
One of the more unusual tributes to Anne Frank is the naming of an asteroid discovered on March 23, 1942 as 5535 Annefrank. Pictured is the asteroid in 2002.
Dozens of other films and documentaries adapted from Anne Frank's diaries have been produced over the years, including 'Anne Frank: The Whole Story,' for which Hannah Taylor-Gordon received both Golden Globe and Emmy Award nominations for her performance as Anne Frank. Ben Kingsley won a Screen Actors Guild Award for his performance as Otto Frank. More recently, the documentary 'No Asylum: The Untold Chapter in Anne Frank's Story' (2016) draws on a collection of Otto Frank's previously unpublished correspondence as its source material.
The Franks, the Van Pels family, and Pfeffer were transported to the Westerbork transit camp (pictured in 2004) in northeastern Netherlands. The facility served as a staging ground for the deportation of Jews. In September 1944, the group were transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination and concentration camp complex in German-occupied Poland.
Anne and her sister Margot survived their brief tenure at Auschwitz. They were later sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northern Germany. Anne's mother Edith perished at Auschwitz, as did Herman van Pels. His wife, Auguste, most likely died at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. Peter van Pels died at the Mauthausen concentration camp, Fritz Pfeffer at Neuengamme concentration camp. Otto Frank survived Auschwitz.
The Anne Frank Education Centre was established in 1997 in the neighborhood of Dornbusch in Frankfurt am Main, where Anne Frank was born. The facility promotes tolerance and educates people about the consequences of Nazism, discrimination, and racism.
The same bookcase as it looks today. The house, expanded later to incorporate neighboring premises and a museum, remains unfurnished so that visitors can walk freely through the premises.
First published in 1947, the book was subsequently published in France and Germany in 1950, and in 1952 in the United Kingdom and the United States as 'Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.' The book, which went on to sell tens of millions of copies worldwide, is the most famous account of the Holocaust and has been labeled a testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit.
In 1963, Otto Frank and his second wife, Elfriede Geiringer-Markovits, set up the Anne Frank Fonds as a charitable foundation, based in Basel, Switzerland. In archival science, a fonds is the aggregation of documents that originate from the same source. Otto Frank designated the foundation as his sole heir and legal successor.
As early as 1955, Anne Frank's short but extraordinary life was being replayed on stage. 'The Diary of Anne Frank,' a dramatization by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, opened on Broadway in October of that year. It subsequently won a Pulitzer Prize and Best Play Tony Award. A 1997 version starring Natalie Portman as Anne received two Tony nominations.
Upon his return to Amsterdam, Otto Frank collected his daughter's writings and helped compile them into a manuscript.
Numerous memorials to Anne Frank can be found all over the world. A statue of the diarist stands in Amsterdam's Merwedeplein Square near the apartment where the Franks lived from 1934 until 1942. It's here on July 22, 1941 that the only known footage of Anne Frank was taken, a fleeting video of the youngster seen leaning over a balcony to get a better look at a wedding party on the street below. The poignant video is posted on the Anne Frank Museum's YouTube channel.
Anne Frank's smiling face peers out to those paying their respects at the Monument to the Memory of Children - Victims of the Holocaust at the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, Poland.
Click through for an appreciation of Anne Frank and her short but remarkable life.
Anne and Margot were among approximately 60,000 prisoners kept in appalling conditions at Bergen-Belsen. In early 1945, a typhus epidemic spread through the camp, killing 17,000 prisoners. Both sisters succumbed, their bodies dumped into a mass grave. In a cruel twist of fate, Bergen-Belsen was liberated by British forces just a few weeks later, on April 15, 1945.
Anne Frank: A legacy that continues to inspire
A recent anti-Semitic protest highlights the enduring importance of Anne Frank's story
LIFESTYLE History
Almost 80 years after her death, Anne Frank's legacy is still intact. The story of how she and her family hid from the Nazis during the Second World War and the diary she kept throughout their concealment has made Anne Frank one of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. She perished as a prisoner in 1945 at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her legacy, however, has endured, and today the young teenager's memoirs from her two years in hiding live on forever as testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit.
Click through for an appreciation of Anne Frank and her short but remarkable life.