The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank

Between June 1942 and August 1944, thirteen-year-old Anne Frank kept a diary while hiding with her family and four others in a concealed apartment above her father’s former office building in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. She wrote with the honesty and yearning of any adolescent girl — about boredom, crushes, family friction, her dreams of becoming a writer — while the world outside contracted into terror. The diary was found after the Gestapo discovered the hiding place and deported its occupants; Anne died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just weeks before its liberation. Her father Otto, the only survivor, published the diary at her wish. What resulted is not a document of horror but of extraordinary interiority — a young mind refusing to be reduced to victimhood, insisting on her own inner life even in extremis. It has been translated into over 70 languages and remains one of the most widely read books in the world.