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• Books for Secondary Students - Anne Frank: Diary of A Young Girl

Books for Secondary Students - Anne Frank: Diary of A Young Girl

Anne and her diary

Anne Frank was born in Germany on 12th June 1929. She moved with her family to Amsterdam in 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany. Anne and her family were trapped in The Netherlands when the Nazi invasion began in 1940. Anne began to keep a personal diary on her thirteenth birthday. She wrote “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.” In July 1942 the Frank family and four other people went into hiding in a secret annex. At first Anne wrote the diary for her eyes only but in 1944 she heard a radio broadcast from London which said that it would be important to collect eyewitness accounts of the suffering under Nazi occupation. Anne decided that when the war ended she would publish a book based on her diary and she started to rewrite and edit it.

The group in the annex stayed hidden four two years but were finally betrayed, arrested and transported to concentration camps. Anne died of typhus in Bergen Belsen. Her Father Otto was the only survivor of the secret annex. He returned to Amsterdam and found that Anne’s diary had been saved. An edited version was first published in 1947 but more original passages have since been added to Otto Frank’s selection.

Anne is perhaps the most famous victim of the Holocaust but as an ordinary Jewish teenager she represents the millions who died because of one group’s hatred of another.

• Secondary_AnneFrank (pdf)