Anne Frank: How Her Diary Was Written

Born in 1929 in Frankfurt Germany, Anne Frank was the youngest daughter of Edith and Otto Frank, a happy and prosperous Jewish family, until Adolf Hitler rose to power in January of 1933.

The Franks Flee to Amsterdam

In short order, the Nazi government began instituting punitive measures aimed at persecuting Germany’s Jews, prompting Otto Frank to move to Amsterdam in advance of his family’s arrival, setting up a small but successful business that made a thickening agent used in the production of jam. The family reunited in February of 1934—including Anne’s older sister Margot—but when Wehrmacht forces invaded the Netherlands in May of 1940.

From 1942 to 1944, the Nazis and their Dutch collaborators deported more than 100,000 Jews to extermination camps in Eastern Europe, forcing the Franks to go into hiding during the summer of 1942, concealing themselves in an attic apartment behind Otto’s business whose entrance was hidden behind a movable bookcase.

Anne and the Annex

Four others soon joined the Franks in hiding, making the Secret Annex, as Anne referred to the place, a tense relationship at best, made worse by a complete lack of fresh air or outdoor activities, as well as their need to remain silent during daytime hours to avoid detection by the workers below.

Living in constant fear of being discovered by the Nazis, the shut-in’s survival relied on Otto’s employees, who risked their lives smuggling food, supplies and news into the secret apartment. In an attempt to rise above her frustrations, fears and anxieties, Anne began recording her feelings and insights in a diary, writing about typical teenage emotions, arguments with her mother and sister, as well as mature insights about the inhumanity of war.

Although the anonymous tipster has never been identified, after 25 months in hiding, the Secret Annex was discovered by the Gestapo on August the 4th, 1944, leading to their removal by train, first to a holding camp in the northern Netherlands, then onto Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

How Did Anne Frank Die?

At first spared from the gas chambers, Anne and Margo were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany, where they both died from typhus in February of 1945, just weeks before British forces liberated the camp on April 15th.

Anne’s father was the only one to survive the Nazi’s unspeakable crimes against humanity, later finding publishers in the Netherlands and the United States that would make The Diary of a Young Girl an international yet gut-wrenching best seller.

Of the many pearls of wisdom recorded in her diary, perhaps the most notable in light of the holocaust is her prognostication:

“What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it [from] happening again.”

Anne Frank