ANNE FRANK (1947)

Victim of the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime in Germany whose diary written during two years of hiding made her personification of the martyred Jewish young.

Early in the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler the Frank parents and their two daughters took refuge in Amsterdam. In 1941 after German forces occupied The Netherlands, anne was compelled to transfer from a public to a Jewish school. Her teachers remembered her as a talkative, movie-loving, dreamy girl who showed little promise.

Faced with deportation (supposedly to a forced-labour camp) the Franks on July 9, 1942 went into hiding with four other Jews in the back-room office and warehouse of the father´s food-products business. Brought food by Gentiles on the floor below they lived silently in their secret annex until Aug. 4, 1944 when the Gestapo acting on a tip Dutch informers discovered them.

Sent to a succession of concentration camps all the Franks died (Anne of typhus) except the father who was hospitalized at Auschwitz when it was liberated by the Russians. On the hiding-place floor he founds stories Anne had written about elves, bears and an old dwarf -and the diary. He had it published in 1947 as Het Achterhuis (Eng. trans., The Diary of a Young Girl, 1953). Precocious in style and insight, it traces her emotional growth amid adversity and pleads, "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart".

The diary has been widely read in more than 30 languages; in the United States it was made into a prize-winning play (by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett) and a motion picture.

The hiding place on the Prinsengracht Canal has become a museum and shrine.

In 1957 2,000 young Germans marched in rain to the camp where Anne had died.