Anne Frank

German-Jewish girl. Born in Frankfurt; her family fled to Amsterdam in 1933 when Hitler came to power. In July 1942, after her older sister Margot received a deportation summons, the Frank family went into hiding in a concealed annex above her father Otto's office on the Prinsengracht. They were joined by the Van Pels family and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer — eight people in roughly 450 square feet for 25 months. Four Dutch employees risked their lives to bring them food and news. For her thirteenth birthday, a month before going into hiding, Anne had been given a small red-checkered diary. She wrote in it almost daily — first as a private confidante, then, after hearing a Dutch radio broadcast asking civilians to preserve wartime diaries, with the conscious hope of one day being a writer. She revised her own entries with that hope in mind. The annex was betrayed on August 4, 1944. Anne was sent to Auschwitz, then to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in February or March 1945, weeks before the camp was liberated. She was fifteen. Of the eight in hiding, only her father survived. The Dutch employee Miep Gies had saved the diary, and gave it to him. *The Diary of a Young Girl* has been read by tens of millions of people in seventy languages. It is not a Holocaust book; it is a book about being thirteen, fourteen, fifteen — about a quarrel with your mother, a first kiss, the wish to do good, the boredom of being trapped — written by a girl who never stopped believing the world could be better than the one she was inside. Core teaching: a young person's ordinary inner life is sacred, and worth recording even when the world is ending. Key works: *Het Achterhuis* (*The Diary of a Young Girl*) — read in the definitive 1995 edition, which restores material her father initially edited out.