The Jewish girl who hid in Amsterdam and left the world's most read diary
Part of: Dutch History
Anne Frank was born on 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her family — father Otto, mother Edith, and older sister Margot — fled Germany in the early 1930s as antisemitism and economic hardship intensified under the Nazi rise to power. They settled in Amsterdam, where Otto ran a pectin trading business.
She was thirteen when she received a diary for her birthday. She could not have known she would have two years to fill it.
Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940. The Dutch army surrendered five days later. What followed was a systematic stripping of Jewish life: Jews were banned from parks, cinemas, and shops; forced to wear the Star of David; removed from schools; and eventually targeted for deportation.
Otto Frank lost his business. The family prepared for what was coming.
On 5 July 1942, Margot received a call-up to report to a "labour camp." The family went into hiding the next day — 6 July 1942 — in a concealed annex behind Otto's former office at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. Eight people hid there in total, sheltered by Otto's colleagues at great personal risk.
Anne called it het Achterhuis — the Secret Annex. She kept her diary throughout the two years in hiding, and later rewrote it as a manuscript, imagining it might one day be published.
They were discovered on 4 August 1944 — betrayed, though the identity of the informant has never been definitively established. All eight were arrested.
The family was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Edith Frank died there. In November 1944, Anne and Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Both died of typhus in February 1945 — weeks before the camp was liberated by British forces.
Anne was 15.
Otto Frank was the only member of the family to survive. He returned to Amsterdam after the war and was given Anne's diary, which his colleague Miep Gies had rescued from the Annex after the arrest.
He published it in 1947 under Anne's chosen title, Het Achterhuis. It has since been translated into approximately 70 languages and is one of the most widely read books in the world.
The Prinsengracht building is now the Anne Frank House (Anne Frank Huis), a museum that opened in 1960. It is one of the most visited sites in Amsterdam — queues regularly stretch along the canal. The annex itself is preserved as Anne and the others left it: bare walls, the famous photos of film stars Anne pinned up, the pencil marks recording the children's heights.
Anne Frank is part of the Canon van Nederland. Her story is taught in every Dutch school.
Anne Frank's story is inseparable from questions the Netherlands still wrestles with: the degree of Dutch collaboration with the Nazi occupation, the courage of those who resisted and hid Jewish neighbours, and the 75% of Dutch Jews who were killed — one of the highest rates in occupied Western Europe.
Antisemitism in the Netherlands did not end in 1945. The ongoing debates about it — including at football matches, in politics, and in public life — are impossible to understand without knowing what happened here between 1940 and 1945.
Her diary is not just a historical document. It is a reminder that the people killed were people — funny, vain, ambitious, difficult, alive.
These guides are written to help you understand the Netherlands — not to replace professional advice. We do our best to be accurate but we make mistakes and information goes out of date. For anything that affects your legal status, taxes, finances, or health, verify with an official source or a qualified advisor.