Anne Frank- Life, Diary, Arrest & More

Who was Anne Frank?

Anne Frank was a German-Dutch diarist of Jewish descent, known for her work, 'The Diary of a Young Girl', which describes her life, while in hiding from the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Early Life

Four years before Hitler came to power, in 1929, Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany. When Anne was only four and a half years old, as the hostilities towards the Jews increased, her parents, Otto and Edith, decided to flee to Amsterdam. In 1942, two years after the German army occupied the Netherlands, the family went into hiding.

For two years, as the family of four lived in hiding with four other Jews, Anne wrote in great detail about her life in a diary. In 1944, they were arrested by the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps. In 1945, at 15 years of age, Anne passed away at the camp. Her diary was published posthumously. 

Anne Frank’s arrest

On 4 August 1944, the people in hiding were arrested by the Gestapo. The Frank family was transported to Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands. From there, they were sent to Auschwitz on 3 September.  Anne and her sister Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen in Germany the following month. Anne’s mother, Edith, died in early January, just before the evacuation of Auschwitz. Due to the terrible conditions at Bergen-Belsen, both Anne and Margot contracted typhus. They died in February or March of 1945. Otto Frank, the only survivor of those in hiding, was found hospitalized at Auschwitz when it was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945.

Anne Frank Diary in popular culture

As a story that has become so popular for the strength, hope, and determination it portrays, ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ has become a source of inspiration for many filmmakers. 

• A play by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich based on the diary won the Pulitzer Prize for 1955. 
• ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’, a 1959 film based on the play by Hackett and Goodrich earned Shelley Winters an Academy Award for her performance. Winters donated her Oscar to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam
• ‘Anne’, authorized by the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, was the first adaptation allowed to quote literal passages from the diary. 
• Alix Sobler's 2014 ‘The Secret Annex’ imagined the fate of the diary in a world in which Anne Frank survives the Holocaust.
• ‘Anne’ formed the basis for ‘Tagebuch der Anne Frank’,  a 2016 German drama film directed by German filmmaker Hans Steinbichler. 
• The 2021 film, ‘Where is Anne Frank’ by Ari Folman, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival focuses on Kitty, who sets out to find Anne Frank by reflecting back on the contents of the diary.