In July 1942, barely three weeks after Anne’s 13th birthday, Anne’s older sister Margot was ordered by the Nazi authorities to go to a labour camp. Their father instead arranged for the family to go into hiding in a so-called ‘Secret Annexe’ above his office building.
It was in the Secret Annexe that Anne wrote her diary, which she addressed as Kitty. Over three volumes she recorded the relationships between the Frank family, the Van Pels family, and her father’s friend Fritz Pfeffer with whom they shared their confined hiding place.
An anonymous tip-off led to the discovery and arrest of the eight inhabitants on 4 August 1944. They were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp a month later. Anne died of typhus in early 1945 after being transferred to Bergen-Belsen when she was fifteen years old.
Anne’s diary, which chronicled her experiences over the two years she spent in the Secret Annexe, was published posthumously after the war under the title The Diary of a Young Girl and became one of the 20th Century’s most celebrated books.
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