Anne Frank began her diary in 1942 when she was thirteen years old. It ends abruptly two years later – just three days before she and her family were dragged out of their hiding place in Amsterdam by the SS and deported to a Dutch concentration camp, from where they were loaded onto a packed cattle-wagon on the last transport to Auschwitz in September 1944. Ravaged by typhus, hunger and exhaustion, Anne and her elder sister Margot died in Bergen-Belsen a few weeks before British troops liberated the camp in April 1945.
Kept by Miep Gies, one of the Frank family’s helpers, Anne’s diary was handed over to her father Otto after the war. He was the only member of the family to have survived. His edited version of the diary was turned down by several publishers in the Netherlands, before it first appeared there in 1947. A German edition followed in 1950, after some disobliging remarks about the Germans had been removed from the text. But the book really took off when it was published by Doubleday in the US in 1952. The editor was Barbara Zimmerman, Anne Frank’s exact contemporary, who later founded the New York Review of Books as Barbara Epstein. The diary has now been translated into more than sixty languages. There is even a manga version in Japan.
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