Anne was born on June 12, 1929, three years after her sister, Margot, in the town of Frankfurt-on-Main in Germany. Four years later, in the summer of 1933, the Frank family moved to Holland because Hitler had come to power in Germany and had introduced strict laws which discriminated against Jews. In addition, gangs of Nazi thugs would roam the streets, beating up Jews for no reason — except that they were Jews.
Anne attended the Montessori kindergarten and grade school in Amsterdam after the Germans invaded Holland in May, 1940, but the anti-Semitic regime from which the Frank family had sought to escape in Germany caught up with them. Anne and Margot, along with thousands of other Jewish children, were no longer allowed to attend schools of their own choosing and were obliged to go to only Jewish schools. Anne herself did not mind this, readily adapting to the new environment, making new friends and finding old ones among her classmates.
Realizing how dangerous the political situation was becoming, Mr. Frank prepared a refuge where his family could go into hiding, rather than submitting to arrest by the Nazis and being dispatched to concentration camps and to almost certain death. At the beginning of July, 1942, when it would have been foolish to delay not going into hiding, the Franks, and then a few days later, a family called the Van Daans, moved into the "Secret Annexe" in the building where Mr. Frank's offices and warehouse were situated; overnight, they simply vanished from sight.
As a child, Anne was bright and lively, not considered by her parents and their friends to be as intelligent and as beautiful as her sister, Margot, but nonetheless loved for her humor and personality. Anne does not conceal her awareness of this attitude in her diary, and her resentment of it perhaps adds to the irony that it should be Anne's name, rather than Margot's, that has become known to posterity. Perhaps this early, slight adversity strengthened in Anne a resolve to shine in some way and to prove to her family and to the world that she was not just the younger sister of the beautiful and talented Margot Frank.
As anyone who has read Anne's diary knows, she was immensely gifted, both as a writer and as a person of great sensitivity. She could feel things deeply, sense the feelings of others and communicate all this to paper. Anne's personality sparkles and shines on every page of the diary — whether Anne is in the heights of ecstasy over her budding relationship with Peter Van Daan or whether she is in the depths of despair over the grim realities of her life in hiding; whether she is describing the constant irritation of being confined to the house and having to live at such close quarters with people whom she dislikes, or whether she is confessing her ambivalent feelings toward her parents and her sister.
Above all else, Anne's feelings are ordinary and so akin to those experienced by any teenager growing up and being confronted by situations and with individuals which he or she is not yet capable of dealing with in a detached or adult way. One of the most striking features that emerges from Anne's diary is the sense of the intensity of the emotions that she experiences as an adolescent.
