Books Written by Anne Frank

A Jewish girl, born in Germany in 1929, who hid from the Nazis with her family in Amsterdam for two years and kept a diary there. She was arrested in August 1944 and died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945, aged 15. Her father published the diary in 1947, and as The Diary of a Young Girl it became one of the most widely read books about the Holocaust.

On 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, the second daughter of Otto and Edith Frank. After the Nazis came to power in 1933 the family emigrated to Amsterdam, where Anne joined her parents and sister in February 1934.

Annelies Marie Frank. Her family and friends called her Anne, and in the diary she calls her father by his nickname, Pim.

She was Jewish, and German by birth. In 1941 Nazi Germany stripped Jews living abroad of their citizenship, so she was stateless when she died; she never became a Dutch citizen. German was her first language, but she grew up in Amsterdam, went to Dutch schools and wrote her diary in Dutch, and in hiding she also studied English and French.

97. She was born on 12 June 1929, so she would have turned 97 in June 2026. She died at 15, in February 1945.

No. Nothing in her diary or in the accounts of the people who knew her suggests she was blind or deaf; in hiding she read, wrote and studied every day. The question is probably a mix-up with Helen Keller, the American writer who was deaf and blind and whose life story is also widely taught in schools.

The diary does not use either word. In an entry of 6 January 1944, which her father left out of the 1947 edition and which is restored in the Definitive Edition, Anne describes feelings of attraction towards a girlfriend; in the same months she writes about falling in love with Peter van Pels. Some readers see her as bisexual on the strength of these passages; the diary itself does not settle the question.

761 days: from 6 July 1942 to 4 August 1944, just over two years. Anne was 13 when the family went into hiding and 15 when they were arrested.

In the Secret Annex (in Dutch, het Achterhuis): the rear part of the building at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam, where her father’s company, Opekta, had its offices and warehouse. The entrance was hidden behind a movable bookcase. The building is now the Anne Frank House museum.

To escape deportation. On 5 July 1942 her sister Margot, then 16, received a call-up to report for a labour camp in Germany. Her parents had been preparing a hiding place, and the family went into hiding the next morning.

Eight people: Anne, her parents Otto and Edith and her sister Margot; Hermann and Auguste van Pels and their son Peter, who joined them on 13 July 1942; and the dentist Fritz Pfeffer, who arrived on 16 November 1942. In the diary Anne gives several of them pseudonyms, such as “Van Daan” for the Van Pels family and “Albert Dussel” for Pfeffer.

Five people from Otto Frank’s business circle: Miep Gies, her husband Jan Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler and Bep Voskuijl. They brought food, books and news for over two years. Kleiman and Kugler were arrested in the raid and sent to camps, but both survived the war, as did Miep, Jan and Bep; Miep Gies, who saved the diary, died in 2010 aged 100.

On the morning of 4 August 1944 the Sicherheitsdienst raided Prinsengracht 263. A team led by SS-Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer, with Dutch police officers, arrested all eight people in hiding, together with the helpers Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler. What led the police to the building has never been established; Silberbauer himself was traced by Simon Wiesenthal in 1963.

Nobody knows for certain. The warehouse manager Willem van Maaren was long the main suspect and was investigated by the Dutch police after the war, but no evidence was found against him; other names suggested over the years include Lena Hartog, Tonny Ahlers and Nelly Voskuijl. In 2016 the Anne Frank House suggested the raid may have grown out of an investigation into illegal work and ration-coupon fraud in the building, without ruling out betrayal. In 2022 The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan, based on a cold-case team’s work, named the Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh; historians widely rejected its evidence, and the Dutch publisher apologised and withdrew the book.

The eight were held in Amsterdam for a few days and taken on 8 August 1944 to Westerbork transit camp. On 3 September they were put on the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the end of October 1944 Anne and Margot were moved to Bergen-Belsen in Germany, while their mother stayed behind in Auschwitz.

Of typhus, in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in February 1945. The camp was badly overcrowded, with little food, water or heat, and typhus spread through it; Margot died first, and Anne shortly after. She was not killed in a gas chamber: she died of disease caused by the camp’s conditions.

Probably in February 1945. The Dutch authorities recorded her date of death as 31 March 1945, but research published by the Anne Frank House in 2015 concluded that Anne and Margot most likely died in February, weeks before British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945.

15. She was born on 12 June 1929 and died in February 1945, a few months before her 16th birthday.

In Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Lower Saxony, northern Germany; before that she had been held in Westerbork and Auschwitz-Birkenau. She and Margot were buried in one of the camp’s mass graves. The exact spot is unknown; a memorial stone for the two sisters stands at the Bergen-Belsen memorial site.

Only her father, Otto Frank. Her mother Edith died of exhaustion in Auschwitz on 6 January 1945, and Margot died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen shortly before Anne. Of the others from the annex, Hermann van Pels was gassed in Auschwitz in the autumn of 1944, Fritz Pfeffer died in Neuengamme on 20 December 1944, Auguste van Pels died in the spring of 1945 and Peter van Pels died in Mauthausen in May 1945.

She was given the diary, a red-and-white checked autograph book, for her 13th birthday on 12 June 1942 and started writing in it that month. Her last entry is dated 1 August 1944, three days before the arrest; it opens with her describing herself as “a bundle of contradictions”.

Yes. Anne wrote it herself, by hand, between 1942 and 1944; her father edited the first published edition but did not write it. A court ruled it authentic in a case Otto Frank brought against a man who called it a fabrication, and the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation’s forensic study, published in 1986, confirmed the handwriting, paper and ink.

No. The claim goes back to a 1980 report by the German Federal Criminal Police (BKA), which found ballpoint ink only on two loose scraps of paper and some page numbers added after the war. Anne wrote with a fountain pen; in an entry of 11 November 1943 she mourns it, a present from her grandmother, after it was accidentally burned in the stove.

Neither, strictly: it is a diary, a non-fiction first-hand record written as events happened, and historians treat it as a primary source. Anne did shape it as literature: from May 1944 she rewrote her entries with publication in mind, gave people pseudonyms and addressed her letters to an imaginary friend, Kitty.

An imaginary friend. Kitty was a character in Cissy van Marxveldt’s Joop ter Heul books, which Anne loved; she first appears in the diary on 22 September 1942, and from December 1943 Anne addressed every letter to “Dear Kitty”.

Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl gathered Anne’s notebooks and loose pages from the annex after the arrest. Miep kept them unread and gave them to Otto Frank in July 1945, once it was confirmed that Anne had died. Otto compiled the first edition, published as Het Achterhuis by Contact in Amsterdam on 25 June 1947; the English translation followed in 1952.

It depends on the edition. The Bantam paperback of the Definitive Edition, for example, lists 400 pages; earlier editions are shorter, because the Definitive Edition restores passages that were cut in 1947.

In Amsterdam. Otto Frank left Anne’s manuscripts to the Dutch state when he died in 1980; they are on loan to the Anne Frank House, where the red-and-white checked diary is on display in the museum.

It wasn’t banned across Florida. In 2023 Vero Beach High School in Indian River County removed Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation (2018) from its library after a complaint by a local Moms for Liberty leader, who said it minimised the Holocaust; the adaptation includes passages on sexuality from the diary. The diary itself stayed on the district’s shelves.

One diary, which she partly rewrote as a book, plus short stories, fairy tales and essays, an unfinished novel and a notebook of quotations. These have been published as nine books and editions, listed on this page, from Het Achterhuis (1947) to Anne Frank: The Collected Works and Liebe Kitty (both 2019).

Het Achterhuis (1947), Tales from the Secret Annex (first selection 1949), The Diary of a Young Girl (1952), The Diaries of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition (1986), The Definitive Edition (1991; English 1995), The Revised Critical Edition (2003), Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation (2018), Anne Frank: The Collected Works (2019) and Liebe Kitty (2019).

The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, edited by Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler and translated by Susan Massotty. It is fuller than the 1947 and 1952 editions and is the standard reading text.

Her diary, published in Dutch as Het Achterhuis (1947) and in English as The Diary of a Young Girl (1952). By 2014 more than 35 million copies had been published, and the Anne Frank House lists translations in more than 70 languages.

Version A is Anne’s original diary (June 1942 to August 1944); version B is her own rewrite, begun on 20 May 1944 after a radio appeal to keep wartime diaries; version C is the text Otto Frank compiled from both for the 1947 edition. He corrected her language and, partly at the publisher’s suggestion, left out passages about her sexuality and some critical remarks about her mother; most were restored in the Definitive Edition.

He was liberated in Auschwitz by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945 and returned to Amsterdam in June 1945, where he learned that his daughters had died. He published Anne’s diary in 1947, founded the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel in 1963, and in 1953 married Fritzi Geiringer, a survivor from Amsterdam, which made her daughter Eva Schloss, who had known Anne as a child, Anne’s posthumous stepsister. Otto Frank died near Basel on 19 August 1980; Eva Schloss died in London in January 2026, aged 96.

Anne’s older sister, born on 16 February 1926 in Frankfurt. Her call-up for a labour camp on 5 July 1942 made the family go into hiding the next day. She also kept a diary, which has not survived, and she died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in February 1945, shortly before Anne.

Peter (1926–1945) was the son of Hermann and Auguste van Pels, and Anne grew close to him in 1944, as the diary describes. He brought his cat, Mouschi, into the annex. Nobody knows what became of the cat: the only account, from Miep Gies, is that he ran away during the arrest and hid. Peter died in Mauthausen in May 1945.

Hannah (Hanneli) Goslar, her friend from their first school years in Amsterdam, and Jacqueline van Maarsen, whom she met at the Jewish Lyceum in 1941. Hannah was also deported and spoke to Anne through a fence in Bergen-Belsen in early 1945, shortly before Anne died; she survived, settled in Jerusalem and died in 2022.

At Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam, the building where Anne hid; the museum entrance is at Westermarkt 20. Tickets are sold only on annefrank.org: every Tuesday at 10am (Amsterdam time) tickets are released for visits six weeks later. A visit takes about an hour. The museum opened on 3 May 1960.

Yes. The best known is The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), directed by George Stevens, for which Shelley Winters won an Oscar. It was based on the play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which opened on Broadway in 1955 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Later versions include the miniseries Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001), the BBC’s The Diary of Anne Frank (2009), the German film Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank (2016), Ari Folman’s animated Where Is Anne Frank (2021) and the series A Small Light (2023), about Miep Gies; where they stream varies by country.