Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929.
She came from a well-to-do family and led a carefree early childhood.
She played with her older sister, Margot, and dreamed of becoming a famous journalist or movie star.
In her diary Anne eventually recorded an extraordinary story of perseverance and hope during one of the most horrific decades of history.
Soon after Anne was born, Germany elected Adolf Hitler as its new chancellor.
Hitler was a dictator who believed in a "pure" Germany and planned to eliminate all Jewish people.
This era is called the Holocaust, and it was a dark one for Germany and Europe.
Life for Jewish people became increasingly hard.
They were not allowed to work, ride on streetcars, or even live in some areas.
They were ordered to live in ghettos and made to wear large yellow stars to mark them as Jews.
The ones who refused were sent to work camps, from which they seldom came out alive.
Anne's family was not very religious, but they were Jewish, and her father, Otto, began to worry about his family's fate.
In 1933 Otto decided to relocate his family to Amsterdam, in Holland.
He became a director of the Opekta Company, which made fruit pectin.
Things were different for Anne, but she resumed a fairly normal life, excelling at school and playing in her father's warehouse.
However, this pleasant time did not last long.
In 1939 Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II.
Then, in 1940, Germany invaded Holland, and started sending Jews there to concentration camps.
Otto Frank began to fear for his family all over again.
He was forced to resign as Opekta's director, and Anne had to leave her school to attend an all-Jewish school.
She and her sister were forbidden to visit museums, see movies, and even go out at night.
Many of their friends were summoned to work camps in Germany, and none of them ever came back.
The situation grew worse with each day.
Since the family was not allowed to leave Holland, Otto began to think of a plan to hide his family until the war was over.
He decided that the hidden rooms at the back of the Opekta warehouse would be perfect.
The family called these rooms the "secret annex" since an annex is a smaller space attached to a bigger one.
On July 5, 1942, Margot received a call-up notice summoning her to a work camp.
The Franks knew the time to go into hiding had come.
They left the next morning, trying not to attract any suspicion.
Anne brought with her a brand-new diary she had received for her thirteenth birthday.
She called her diary Kitty and wrote in it as if she were speaking to a friend.
During the hard times that followed, Kitty became her best friend and closest confidant.
The Franks hid together in the secret annex of the Opekta warehouse for two long years.
They hid with another family and a Jewish man who was a dentist.
At first no one knew how long they would have to hide, or if they would even come out alive.
However, they had hope and a determination to survive.
From time to time, Otto's former secretaries, Elli and Miep, sneaked through a bookcase, a secret door to the annex, to bring them provisions.
Both Elli and Miep were extremely careful because if they were caught helping the Franks, they, too, would be sent to a work camp.
Living in the secret annex was not easy.
Anne and her family had to be very quiet during the day.
They never went outside, and couldn't use a light at night.
Sometimes Anne slipped up to the attic inside the secret annex.
The attic's window gave her some fresh air and a quick glimpse of the blue sky.
To pass the time, Anne wrote about daily life in the secret annex.
She complained of the awful food they ate and described the tensions of living with so many people in such a cramped place.
She even joked about it and called it "being on vacation in a very peculiar boardinghouse."
Anne made her last diary entry on August 1, 1944.
Three days later German police officers burst into the secret annex.
No one knew who had betrayed the families.
They were all arrested and sent to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland where many Jews were killed.
When they arrived, the men were separated from the women.
This was the last time Anne saw her father.
Anne, Margot, and their mother were forced to work outside in the brutal cold.
They were hungry all the time and living in horrible conditions.
In October 1944, soon after Margot and Anne were transferred to another camp near Bergen, Germany, their mother died.
At Bergen, Margot and Anne again faced hard labor in the bitter cold.
They were soon infected with typhus, a disease spread by lice.
Margot died in February or March 1945.
Believing that nobody from her family had survived, Anne Frank died in March 1945, barely two months before the end of the war.
Of the eight people who hid in the secret annex, only Otto Frank survived the war.
He traveled back to Amsterdam, where Miep had found Anne's diary.
As Otto read his daughter's words, he felt her come alive again.
Her candid portrayal gave a complete picture of their life in hiding.
Otto wanted to share Anne's memory, so he published her diary as a memorial.
Soon the little book became a symbol of survival for all the young people who lived through the war.
Anne's diary was translated and published in many countries around the world.
Today it is still a reminder of hope and survival.
Although Anne Frank did not survive the war, her spirit keeps on living.