Born Annelies Marie Frank, June 12th, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany. Anne is one of the most discussed victims of the Holocaust. She was a young diarist, receiving her first diary on her thirteenth birthday. She wrote about her life inside the secret annex, where her family hid from the Nazis, and her struggles while being a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp. 

Anne was born in Germany, but lived her life in Amsterdam, Netherlands after the Nazis gained control over Germany.  The Franks were trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation that was in the Netherlands. On July 6th, 1942, Anne Frank and her family moved into their hiding place. This hiding place was known as the “secret annex”, translating to Achterhuis in Dutch. Before Anne and her family departed, they left their apartment in shambles to make it appear that they had left abruptly. The door to their new home was covered by a bookcase so they remained unexposed. Anne wrote about the van Pels family’s kids and how Fritz Pfeffer was intolerable and Auguste van Pels was foolish. A group of German police stormed the secret annex, on the morning of August 4th, 1994. Then, three days later, the Franks, van Pelses, and Pfeffer were placed in the Westerbork transit camp which had over 100,000 Jews.

Since they were found in hiding, they were considered criminals and were then transported to the Punishment Barracks for hard labor. The Franks and other families at Westerbork were sent on the last trip to Auschwitz, the worst of all of the concentration camps during World War II. Auschwitz is a German Nazi camp where Jewish people were killed in gas chambers, worked tirelessly, and where they slept, diseases spread rampantly. When the Frank family arrived, the Nazis separated the men from the woman and children. Out of the 1,100 passengers on their train, 550 people, including children ,younger than 15, were sent directly to the gas chambers.

Anne ,just turning 15 three months earlier, was not sent to the chambers. She soon realized that everyone from the secret annex where she and other families were living, hadn’t been sent to the gas chambers besides her father, who was in his mid-fifties and not very strong. Anne was forced to strip naked, had all of her hair shaved off, and was tattooed with a identification number on her arm. Women in these camps were used for slave labor, unwillingly made to haul rocks and dig rolls of sod. At night, prisoners were shoved in jammed barracks, where Anne became severely infected with scabies.

After being transported to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where tents were pitched and disease increased rapidly as the population grew, Anne Frank passed, a few days after her sister, Margot. It is hard to tell what she died from, because there was so many people had diseases. Even though Anne thought her father had died at Auschwitz, Otto had survived and returned back to Amsterdam where he waited for his family to return but they never did. Anne’s diary was published in 1947, and has now been translated in 60 different languages and made into plays and movies. Her writings are important because of the first-hand account, from a child’s perspective, of what Jews went through during WWII. It will live on to be a famous throughout the world and so will Anne Frank.