Authors Like Anne Frank

Marie Bashkirtseff

Russian Empire, lived in France · Journal (1887); in English I Am the Most Interesting Book of All (1997)

Bashkirtseff was born in 1858 near Poltava, in what is now Ukraine, and lived most of her short life in France, where she trained as a painter. She began her diary at about thirteen and kept it until shortly before she died of tuberculosis in Paris in 1884, aged 25. Her family first published it in 1887 in a cut and censored form, removing what they thought unflattering, and it influenced later diarists including Katherine Mansfield and Anaïs Nin.

Etty Hillesum

Dutch · An Interrupted Life (1981), Letters from Westerbork (1986)

Hillesum was born in Middelburg in 1914 and was a 27-year-old student in Amsterdam when she began her diary in March 1941. From July 1942 she worked at the Westerbork transit camp, and from July 1943 she was interned there; she was deported to Auschwitz on 7 September 1943, throwing a last postcard from the train, and died there on 30 November 1943. An abridged edition of her diaries, Het verstoorde leven, was published in 1981.

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Hélène Berr

French · The Journal of Hélène Berr (2008)

Berr was born in Paris in 1921 and kept her journal from April 1942 to February 1944, while studying and living under the anti-Jewish laws of occupied Paris. She was arrested with her parents on 8 March 1944, deported, and died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen on 10 April 1945, five days before the camp was liberated. Her journal was published in France in January 2008 and in English the same year.

Renia Spiegel

Polish · Renia’s Diary (written 1939–42; English 2019)

Spiegel was born in 1924 in what was then south-eastern Poland and began her diary in January 1939, aged fifteen, filling it with poems and drawings as well as entries. In July 1942 she was forced into the Przemyśl ghetto; her boyfriend, Zygmunt Schwarzer, smuggled her out and hid her, but she was found and shot on 30 July 1942, aged eighteen. Schwarzer survived Auschwitz and gave the diary to her mother in the United States in 1950; it was first published in English in 2019.

Miep Gies

Austrian-born Dutch · Anne Frank Remembered (1987, with Alison Leslie Gold)

Gies was born in Vienna in 1909 and became a Dutch citizen on her marriage to Jan Gies in 1941. She worked for Otto Frank’s company and, with colleagues, supplied the eight people in the annex with food and support from July 1942 to August 1944, using ration cards her husband obtained illegally. After the arrests she and Bep Voskuijl gathered up Anne’s papers and kept them safe, and she gave them to Otto Frank after the war. She was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations in 1972 and died in 2010, aged 100.

Eva Schloss

Austrian-born British · Eva’s Story (1988), After Auschwitz (2013)

Schloss was born Eva Geiringer in Vienna in 1929, the same year as Anne, and her family settled in Amsterdam near the Franks. They went into hiding in 1942 and were betrayed and arrested on her fifteenth birthday in May 1944; she and her mother survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, while her father and brother did not. Her mother later married Otto Frank. Schloss co-founded the Anne Frank Trust UK and died in London on 3 January 2026, aged 96.

Elie Wiesel

Romanian-born American · Night (1956; English 1960)

Wiesel was born in Sighet, then in Romania, in 1928 and was fifteen when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz in May 1944; his mother and younger sister were killed there, and his father died at Buchenwald. Night, his short memoir of that year, first appeared in Yiddish in 1956, in French in 1958 and in English in 1960. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and died in 2016.

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Ruth Klüger

Austrian-born American · weiter leben (1992); in English Still Alive (2001)

Klüger was born in Vienna in 1931 and was deported with her mother to Theresienstadt in 1942, at the age of ten, and later to Auschwitz and Christianstadt, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen. She became a professor of German literature in the United States. Her memoir appeared in German in 1992 and in English as Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered in 2001, and it is critical of the museum culture that has grown up around the Holocaust. She died in California in 2020.

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Zlata Filipović

Bosnian · Zlata’s Diary (1993)

Filipović was born in Sarajevo in 1980 and kept her diary from September 1991 to October 1993, from the age of ten, through the siege of the city. It was first published in France and has been translated into more than thirty languages. She has lived in Dublin since 1995 and co-edited Stolen Voices (2006), an anthology of young people’s war diaries.

Marjane Satrapi

Iranian-French · Persepolis (2000–2003)

Satrapi was born in Rasht, Iran, in 1969 and was nine when the 1979 revolution began. Persepolis, a graphic memoir drawn in black and white, follows her childhood in Tehran under the new Islamic Republic and during the war with Iraq, her teenage years at school in Vienna and her return. It was first published in French in four volumes, and her animated film of it shared the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007.

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