Anne Frank

Anne Frank was born in 1929 to a well-to-do family in Frankfurt, Germany. Her family immigrated to Holland in 1933, spurred by the violent anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party that had taken power in Germany. Anne and her older sister led a typical upper-middle-class life until the Germans took control of the Netherlands in 1940. Anne received her now-famous diary as a birthday gift in 1942, and her family was forced to go into hiding in the Secret Annex three weeks later. After hiding for over two years, the family was betrayed to the SS, their hiding spot discovered. Anne and her sister Margot were eventually taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they both succumbed to malnutrition and typhus in early March 1945 – roughly one month before the camp was freed by the Allies.