February or March [ 1 ] was a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary documenting her life in hiding amid Nazi persecution during the German occupation of the Netherlands. A celebrated diarist , Frank described everyday life from her family's hiding place in an Amsterdam attic. She gained fame posthumously and became one of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust with the publication of The Diary of a Young Girl originally Het Achterhuis in Dutch, lit.
It is one of the world's best-known books and has been the basis for several plays and films. Frank was born in Frankfurt , Germany, in In , when she was four-and-a-half, Frank and her family moved to Amsterdam in the Netherlands after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control over Germany. By May , the family was trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands.
Frank lost her German citizenship in and became stateless. Despite spending most of her life in the Netherlands and being a de facto Dutch national, [ 2 ] she never officially became a Dutch citizen. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July , the family went into hiding in concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Frank's father, Otto Frank , worked. The hiding place is notably referred to as the " secret annex ".
Until the family's arrest by the Gestapo on 4 August , Frank kept and regularly wrote in a diary she had received as a birthday present in Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps. On 1 November , [ 3 ] Anne Frank and her sister, Margot , were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp , where they died presumably of typhus a few months later.
They were estimated by the Red Cross to have died in March, with Dutch authorities setting 31 March as the official date. Later research has alternatively suggested that they may have died in February or early March. Moved by his daughter's repeated wishes to be an author, Otto Frank published her diary in She had an older sister, Margot. Edith and Otto were devoted parents, who were interested in scholarly pursuits and had an extensive library; both parents encouraged the children to read.
