Other editions of book Penguin Readers 4: Diary of a Young Girl, The Book & MP3 Pack

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 12, 1929. "As we are Jewish, we emigrated to Holland in 1933," Anne writes in her diary, which she received on her thirteenth birthday. In July 1942 she and her family were forced to take refuge with four others in a back apartment in Amsterdam. There they remained until August 4, 1944, when the Grüne Polizei made a raid on the "Secret Annexe" and all the occupants were arrested and sent to German and Dutch concentration camps. In March 1945, two months before the liberation of Holland, Anne died of typhoid in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. Only her father, Otto Frank, survived, and it was he who saw that Anne's diary was published in 1947.Written with rare insight, humor and intimacy, The Diary of a Young Girl is one of the classics of our time. It has inspired a play and has been a best seller in almost every known language. To hundreds of thousands of people, it represents the true horror and tragedy of the Nazi Occupation.

For her thirteenth birthday Anne Frank received a diary as a present from her father. She kept it from 12 June 1942 to 1 August 1944. In this diary, which she addressed to an imaginary friend called Kitty, Anne wrote about her life - first in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and then, when the Nazi persecution of Jews forced her family into hiding, in the sealed-off back rooms of an Amsterdam office building, which they referred to as the 'Secret Annexe'. Anne had always dreamed of being a writer and hoped one day to publish her diary.

Anne Frank kept a diary from 12 June 1942 to 1 August 1944. Initially, she wrote it strictly for herself, but one day in 1944, Gerrit Bolkestein, a member of the Dutch government in exile, announced in a radio broadcast from London that after the war he hoped to collect eyewitness accounts of the suffering of the Dutch people under the German occupation, which could be made available to the public. As an example, he specifically mentioned letters and diaries. Anne Frank decided that when the war was over she would publish a book based on her diary.