Legendary
Anne Frank
Kept the diary, written in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, that became the most read account of the Holocaust.
1929 Frankfurt – 1945 Bergen-Belsen · Germany, then the Netherlands
Who they were
A Jewish girl born in Frankfurt whose family moved to Amsterdam in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution. When the Germans occupied the Netherlands and began deporting Jews, the family went into hiding.
What they found or built
She was given a diary for her 13th birthday on 12 June 1942. Less than a month later, on 6 July 1942, the family went into hiding in the Secret Annex behind her father's business at Prinsengracht 263.
Eight people hid there for just over two years, fed by helpers from the office. In 1944, after a Dutch government-in-exile radio appeal to keep wartime diaries, she began rewriting her diary as a book.
On 4 August 1944 the hiding place was raided. Anne was deported to Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen, where she and her sister Margot died of typhus in early 1945, weeks before the camp was liberated.
Her father Otto, the only one of the eight to survive, published the diary in 1947 as Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex). It has since been translated into more than 70 languages.
Why it mattered
Six million murdered is a number too large to feel. One girl's voice, funny, angry and hopeful, made the Holocaust personal for tens of millions of readers, many of them children her own age.
The diary is also simply good writing: a teenager teaching herself to be a writer, under a pressure few writers have ever faced.
In their own words
“It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals … Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
Sayings we left out
The exact date of her death is not known; the Anne Frank House places it in February 1945.