Anne frank brief biography of thomas

Anne Frank (12 June 1929 – February 1945) was a German-born Jewish girl who, along with her family and four other people, hid in the second and third floor rooms at the back of her father's Amsterdam company during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Helped by several trusted employees of the company, the group of eight survived in the achterhuis (literally "back-house", usually translated as "secret annex") for more than two years before they were betrayed, and arrested. Anne kept a diary from 12 June 1942 until 1 August 1944, three days before the residents of the annex were arrested. Anne mentioned several times in her writings that her sister Margot Frank also kept a diary, but no trace of Margot's diary was ever found.

After spending time in both Westerbork and Auschwitz, Anne and her elder sister Margot were eventually transported to Bergen-Belsen, which was swept by a massive typhusepidemic that began in the camp in January 1945. The two sisters died, evidently a few days apart, sometime in February 1945. Both were buried in one of the mass graves at Belsen, though it is unknown to this day exactly which of the many mass graves at Belsen contains their remains. Their "tombstone" that can be viewed at Belsen today is a cenotaph for the two sisters. Their father, Otto Frank, survived the war and upon his return to Amsterdam was given the diary his daughter had kept during their period of confinement, which had been rescued from the ransacked achterhuis by Miep Gies (below) who, out of respect for Anne's privacy, had not read it. The diary was first published in 1947, and by virtue of worldwide sales since then, it has become one of the most widely read books in history. It is recognized both for its historical value as a document of the Holocaust and for the high quality of writing displayed by such a young author. In 2010, Anne was honored as one of the most i

If her father had not published her diary after World War II, Anne Frank would have simply been one among six million Jews killed by the Nazis. But the publication of the now famous Diary of Anne Frank lifted the young girl from the anonymous mass of victims and turned her into the face of the Holocaust.

First published in 1947, the book has sold more than 25 million copies and has been translated into more than 50 languages. In 1959 her story was turned into a three-time Oscar winning film.

Anne's account of the war years is now the subject of a Japanese animation film as well as several plays and her diary is required reading in schools around the world. The hiding place of the Frank family, the present-day Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam, is also the most-visited Holocaust museum worldwide. Last year the museum registered a new visitor record with over 900,000 people.

To coincide with Anne's 75th birthday on June 12, the Anne Frank Center in Germany has released hitherto unpublished photographs from the Frank family album shot by Anne's father Otto Frank.

Putting a face on the death of millions

Anne Frank's diary offers readers a glimpse into the mind and emotions of a young girl, shortly before she was packed off to a concentration camp.

Between 1942 and 1944, Anne confided her personal thoughts and problems to the orange-and-grey checked book, which she received as a gift on her 13th birthday. The diary is a document of the desperate attempts at survival by a Jewish family during Nazi persecution.

"It's an individual fate that gave this horrible number of murdered people a face. That has made Anne Frank a symbol," says Thomas Heppener from the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam.

In 1933 after Hitler came to power, the Franks fled to Amsterdam where Otto Frank set up a company, which sold pectin used to make jelly and jams. The family led a normal life until the tranquility ended abruptly in 1940 when Germany oc

A few years ago, Deutsche Bahn, the Ger­man nation­al rail­road, announced a new fleet of high-speed trains. Their plan was to name each one after a Ger­man lumi­nary, includ­ing Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Lud­wig van Beethoven, and Anne Frank. Anne grew up in the Nether­lands and wrote her famous diary in Dutch, but she was born in Frank­furt to a Ger­man Jew­ish family.

The out­cry was imme­di­ate. ​“DB is nam­ing trains after vic­tims of depor­ta­tion by train, start­ing with Anne Frank,” one jour­nal­ist tweet­ed. Oth­ers defend­ed the choice, argu­ing that Anne has become known as a sym­bol of the ​“peace­ful co-exis­tence of dif­fer­ent cul­tures.” Even the Auschwitz Muse­um weighed in to point out that link­ing a train with Anne — who was deport­ed to Auschwitz in ear­ly Sep­tem­ber 1944 and from there to Bergen-Belsen, where she died in Feb­ru­ary 1945 — was ​“still painful for the peo­ple who expe­ri­enced these depor­ta­tions.” With­in a year, the idea was offi­cial­ly nixed by DB.

This was just one of the news items that popped up in my Google alerts while I was research­ing my new book, The Many Lives of Anne Frank. My biog­ra­phy doc­u­ments Anne’s life and inves­ti­gates ​“Anne Frank” as an idea that has devel­oped since her Diary of a Young Girl was first pub­lished in 1947. It’s easy to laugh — or groan — at the myr­i­ad, most­ly taste­less ways she’s invoked to sell every­thing from make­up to hot dogs (the ​“Anne Frank­furter”) to tam­pons (in Japan, ​“Anne’s day” is a euphemism for the start of the men­stru­al cycle, since the Diary was one of the first books in Japan­ese to address the sub­ject). Not to men­tion the Anne Frank Hal­loween cos­tumes that sur­face every few years.

But I was also sur­prised to learn how many peo­ple have been gen­uine­ly inspired by Anne — some­times in the unlike­li­est of sit­u­a­tions. F

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Anne Frank’s brilliant and complex Diary of a Young Girl (1947; definitive edition 1995) has the power to engage the reader’s deepest sympathy. It has been translated into more than sixty languages and has sold more than thirty million copies to adults and children around the world. As she moved towards self-awareness and maturity, Anne spontaneously and intuitively incorporated several kinds of books in her Diary. It belongs with the works of precocious writers, with the diaries of young girls, with accounts of the accelerated development of wise children, and with narratives of people hiding from oppressive authority and affirming their independent existence while threatened with death. Placing her Diary in the context of these literary genres illuminates the meaning of her book.

The works of the most precocious writers include Daisy Ashford’s popular The Young Visiters (1919), which she wrote when she was only nine years old; Rudyard Kipling’s journalistic sketches in the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, India, which began to appear when he was sixteen; the poems of Thomas Chatterton, William Wordsworth’s ‘marvelous boy’, who committed suicide at seventeen; the two French novels of Raymond Radiguet, who died of typhoid at nineteen; and the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, the most influential French poet of the nineteenth century, who renounced his career, at the peak of his powers, at the age of twenty. But no fifteen-year-old author in history ever wrote as well as Anne Frank.

The Portuguese Diary of a Young Girl (1942) was translated by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop as The Diary of Helena Morley (1957). Helena (1880-1970), whose real name was Alice Dayrell, was the daughter of a British mining engineer and a Brazilian mother. She grew up in the remote town of Diamantina, two hundred miles north of Belo Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerais. Helena kept her diary from 1893 to 1895 at exactly the same age – thirteen to fifteen –