Anne Frank biography

This was the last time that Otto Frank ever saw his wife or daughters.

After several months of hard labor hauling heavy stones and grass mats, Anne and Margot were again transferred during the winter to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Their mother was not allowed to go with them, and Edith Frank fell ill and died at Auschwitz shortly thereafter, on January 6, 1945. At Bergen-Belsen, food was short,

sanitation was awful and disease ran rampant. Frank and her sister both came down with typhus in the early spring and died within a day of each other sometime in early March, only a few weeks before Russian soldiers liberated the camp. Anne Frank was just 15 years old at the time of her death, one of more than 1 million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust.

Otto Frank was the only member of his immediate family to survive. At the end of the war, he returned home to Amsterdam, searching desperately for news of his family. On July 18, 1945, he met two sisters who had been with Anne and Margot at Bergen-Belsen and passed on the tragic news of their deaths. Nevertheless, what Otto did find upon his return to Amsterdam was Anne Frank's diary, which had been saved by Miep Gries. He eventually gathered the strength to read it and was awestruck by what he discovered. "There was revealed a completely different Anne to the child that I had lost," wrote Otto in a letter to his mother. "I had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings. He sought to have selections from his daughter's diary published as a book, and The Secret Annex: Diary Letters from June 14, 1942 to August 1, 1944 was published on June 25, 1947. "If she had been here, Anne would have been so proud," he said. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, as it is typically called in English, has since been published in countless languages and editions. The diary has also been adapted for the stage and screen many times over all across the world. It remains one of the most moving and widely read firsthand accounts of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust.

Anne Frank's diary endures not only because of the remarkable events she described, but also because of her extraordinary gifts as a storyteller and her indefatigable spirit through even the most horrific of circumstances. For all its passages of despair, Frank's diary is essentially a story of faith, hope and love in the face of hate. "It's utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death," she wrote on July 15, 1944. "I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more."

© 2013 A+E Networks. All rights reserved.

© 2013 A+E Networks. All rights reserved.