Anne Frank

German-Dutch · b. 1929

Anne Frank received a red-checkered diary for her thirteenth birthday, weeks before her family hid in a sealed Amsterdam annex. For two years she filled it with confinement's politics, first love, and a writer's sharpening ambition — then revised it herself for future publication. Betrayed in 1944, she died at Bergen-Belsen at 15; her father published the diary she called Het Achterhuis, now the most widely read testimony of the Holocaust.