Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who became famous
for the diary she wrote during the Second World War.
She was born in the German city of Frankfurt in 1929.
She had a sister, Margot, who was three years older.
Things were going badly in Germany.
Unemployment was high, and many people were poor.
At the same time, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party
were gaining support by promising to solve the country's problems.
The Nazis hated the Jews and blamed them for the problems.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, hostility to the Jews increased.
Anne's parents, Otto and Edith, decided to flee to the Netherlands.
They settled in Amsterdam, here, on Merwedeplein.
Anne soon felt at home. She went to school.
Learned Dutch, and made new friends.
Six years later, war broke out across Europe.
In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland
and in 1940, the German army occupied the Netherlands.
The Nazi occupiers made life increasingly difficult for Jews.
Jews have to wear a Jewish star, Jews have to hand in their bicycles.
Jews are not allowed in the tram, Jews are not allowed to ride in cars.
Jews must attend Jewish schools, and so on and so forth
In the summer of 1942
after Anne's sister, Margot, was ordered to report for a so-called labour camp
the Frank family went into hiding
behind Otto's business on the Prinsengracht.
They were joined there later by the Van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer.
The eight people in hiding were helped by loyal staff and friends of Otto's:
Miep and Jan Gies, Johan Voskuijl and his daughter Bep
Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman.
Meanwhile, the Nazis had tightened their grip, organising raids
arresting and deporting Jews to so-called labour camps.
In reality, these were concentration and death camps.
In her diary, Anne wrote about living in the hiding place
the war, and her thoughts and feelings.
I feel bad for lying in a warm bed
while my dearest friends are out there somewhere
thrown or fallen to the ground. And that only because they are Jews.'
An appeal by the Dutch government in London
inspired Anne to rework her diary entries into a book.
Before she finished, however, their hiding place was discovered
and all eight were captured on the 4th of August, 1944.
They were deported to the concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, two of the helpers
found the diaries Anne had left behind. Miep kept them in case Anne ever came back.
But she didn't come back.
In February 1945, Anne and Margot died of typhus in appalling conditions
in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Anne was 15.
Of the eight people, only Anne's father, Otto, survived the war.
When he read Anne's diaries after the war, they made a deep impression.
He discovered how much writing had meant to her.
'No one who doesn't write can know how fine it is.
And if I don't have the talent to write for newspapers or books,
well then I can always go on writing for myself.'
Otto read how Anne had hoped to publish a book, so he carried out her wish.
Anne's story about life in hiding and the war is read all over the world.
Her diary has been translated into more than 70 languages.
The hiding place is now a museum
and welcomes more than a million visitors a year.