Anne Frank

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929 to a Jewish family. After the Nazis took power in 1933, the family moved to Amsterdam, where her father, Otto, ran a company that sold pectin. Germany occupied the Netherlands in 1940, and anti-Jewish laws followed.

In July 1942 the family went into hiding in rooms behind her father's office, later joined by four other people. Employees of the firm brought them food. Anne kept a diary she had received for her 13th birthday, and in 1944 she began to rewrite it for publication after a radio appeal to save wartime records. On 4 August 1944 the group was found and arrested. Anne and her sister, Margot, were sent to Auschwitz and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where both died of typhus in early 1945, weeks before British troops liberated it. Anne was 15.

Otto Frank was the only one of the eight to survive. Miep Gies, one of the helpers, had saved the diary, and he published it in 1947. The Diary of a Young Girl has been translated into more than 70 languages.