Annelies Marie Frank, better known as Anne Frank, the second daughter of Otto Heinrich Frank and Edith Holländer, was born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
The family lives in a mixed community of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens and the children grow up with friends of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish faiths.
After Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, the family left Frankfurt for Amsterdam in late 1933 to escape Nazi persecution. As the persecution of Jews intensified, the family went into hiding in July 1942 in a secret flat in the annex of Otto Frank's company Opekta.
Anne is 13 years old at the time. She receives a diary for her thirteenth birthday. She starts writing straight away: "I hope I can confide in you about all sorts of things (...) and I hope you will be a great help to me. In this book she describes her experiences from 12 June 1942 to 1 August 1944.
During this time, Anne reads and studies and continues to keep her diary. In it, she describes events in chronological order, confides her feelings, her fear of living in hiding, her beliefs, her ambitions (among them to become a journalist and writer), themes she does not feel she can share with anyone.
Anne decides to publish a book after the war, for which her diary is to provide the basis. She begins to rewrite, correcting or deleting passages she finds uninteresting and adding others from her memory. After two years in this refuge, the group is denounced and deported to the Nazi extermination camps.
Seven months after her arrest, Anne dies of typhoid fever in the Bergen-Belsen camp, a few days after the death of her sister Margot. Her father Otto, the only survivor of the group, returns to Amsterdam at the end of the war and learns that Anne's diary has been saved. Knowing that Anne wanted to become a writer, he decides to publish it.
Sources :
● http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank.
● http://www.annefrank.org/