Anne Frank

Anne Frank was a German-Dutch Jewish diarist whose account of hiding from the Nazis during World War II has become one of the most widely read and important documents of the Holocaust.

Anne Frank was thirteen when she and her family went into hiding in a concealed apartment in Amsterdam in July 1942. She kept a diary throughout the more than two years they remained in hiding, writing with an extraordinary combination of adolescent self-awareness, literary ambition (she hoped to be a writer), and honest engagement with the fear, boredom, and interpersonal tensions of life confined to a secret annex. She was fifteen when she was discovered and deported to Auschwitz, then Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in early 1945.

The Diary of a Young Girl is not primarily a document of horror; it is a record of an interior life. Anne’s entries are funny, perceptive, sometimes petty, and increasingly searching about identity, womanhood, and the future she was trying to imagine for herself despite everything. That combination — the ordinariness of adolescence pressed against the extraordinary terror of its context — is what has made the diary so enduring and so painful. The reader knows what Anne does not: that the future she describes will not arrive.

The diary has sometimes been criticized — most notably by Philip Roth’s character Nathan Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer — for the ways it has been used to present a sanitized, universalized account of the Holocaust that softens its specificity. Those critiques point to real limits in how the diary has been received and taught. But the diary itself, as Anne wrote it, is a profoundly human document: the record of a real girl whose voice, intelligence, and desire to be seen continue to reach across eight decades.