Anne Frank was born in 1929.

It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. 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.

—Anne Frank, from The Diary of a Young Girl, July 15, 1944

Hidden away in an annex of rooms above her father’s office in Amsterdam for over two years during the Holocaust, German-Jewish teenager Anne Frank wrote her thoughts, hopes and fears in a diary that would eventually become one of the most widely-read books in the world. Anne, her family and four others in hiding with them were eventually betrayed to the Nazis. They were arrested on August 4, 1944, less than a month after Allied forces invaded Western Europe. Anne and her family were sent to Auschwitz on the last transport ever to leave Westerbork transit camp. Anne Frank died at the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen in 1945 at the age of 15, becoming one of over a million children under the age of 16 to die in the Holocaust. Within three months of Anne’s death, Germany surrendered to Allied forces and the war in Europe ended. Not long before her hiding-place was discovered by the Nazis, Anne rewrote the many notebooks that made up her diary, intending to have them published as a book. After Anne’s capture, her diary was protected by a woman who had helped the Frank family during their years in hiding. In 1947, Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust, made her dream come true by publishing her diary.

ReadWriteThink
Students explore a variety of resources—texts, images, movies, artwork—to learn more about the Holocaust in Investigating the Holocaust: A Collaborative Inquiry Project (6–8).

EDSITEment
In Anne Frank: Writer (6–8), students identify the writing strategies Anne Frank employed in The Diary of a Young Girl and apply these and similar strategies to their own writing.

Anne Frank: One of Hundreds of Thousands (6–8) invites students to connect Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl to the historical events of World War II.

ARTSEDGE
Children of War (5–8) explores the effects of war on children by examining diaries, journals and letters written by children during times of war. Through class discussion and studying various texts of actual events, students examine the similarities and differences of children’s experiences during wartime in different parts of the world, as well as the power of documenting these experiences in writing.