Anne Frank Annelies Marie Frank was a Jewish girl born in Germany who kept a diary documenting her life in hiding under Nazi persecution during the German occupation of the Netherlands. She is a well-known diarist who wrote about ordinary life from her family'shiding place in an Amsterdam attic. One of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl (originally Het Achterhuis in Dutch, lit. "the back house"; English: The Secret Annex), which documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944. It is one of the world's best-known books and has been the basis for several plays and films. Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1929. After Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took power of Germany in 1934, she and her family relocated to Amsterdam, Netherlands, at the age of four and a half. She lived the majority of her life in and around Amsterdam. By May 1940, the Franks had been besieged in Amsterdam by the German conquest of the Netherlands. Anne lost her German citizenship in 1941 and became stateless. Despite spending the majority of her life in the Netherlands and being a de facto Dutch native, she never obtained Dutch citizenship. As persecutions against Jews worsened in July 1942, they moved into hiding in hidden rooms under a bookcase in the building where Anne's father, Otto Frank, worked. Read More Read Less