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A diary written in hiding

Anne Frank kept a diary during two years hidden from the Nazis in a concealed Amsterdam apartment — a document that became one of the most widely read books in history.

Between June 1942 and August 1944, Anne Frank wrote in a diary she had received as a birthday present. She was thirteen when she started. She wrote in the concealed rooms above her father's Amsterdam office building, where eight Jewish people hid from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

The diary records the texture of that confinement — the arguments, the boredom, the terror of noises from the street, the conflicts and affections between eight people sharing a small space for two years. Anne also wrote about herself with unusual self-awareness: her ambitions, her opinions of the adults around her, her developing sense of who she wanted to be.

The diary ends in August 1944 when the hiding place was discovered and its occupants deported. Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March 1945, aged fifteen. Her father Otto, the only survivor of the eight, retrieved the diary from Miep Gies, who had kept it, and it was first published in the Netherlands in 1947.

What makes the diary so affecting is not its horror — the horror comes largely after it ends — but its ordinariness. A girl writes about books she has read, a boy she likes, her frustration with her mother, her sense of her own potential. The reader holds both things at once: the life being lived and the fate approaching.

Based on the work of

Anne Frank

Jewish diarist, writing in hiding in occupied Amsterdam between the ages of thirteen and fifteen

The Diary of a Young Girl · 1947

Anne Frank's diary is a primary document of extraordinary intimacy from inside one of the most documented atrocities of the twentieth century.

Read the original on Bookshop.org

Fact-checked · AI can err — read the source

The version most readers know was edited by Otto Frank, who omitted some passages; a more complete version was published in 1995 — readers' experience of the text depends on which edition they read.

AI-summarised · always labelled (EU AI Act, Art. 50).

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