Anne Frank became one of the most recognizable individual voices of the Holocaust through a diary she began writing as a thirteen-year-old girl. After Nazi persecution forced her Jewish family to flee Germany for the Netherlands, the German occupation eventually pushed the Franks into hiding in Amsterdam’s Secret Annex.

For more than two years, Anne recorded daily life in confinement: fear, arguments, loneliness, hopes, relationships, and her growing understanding of herself. Her writing became increasingly mature, and after hearing a wartime radio broadcast encouraging people to preserve personal records, she began revising her diary with the hope of eventually publishing it.

In August 1944, the hiding place was discovered. Anne and the others were arrested and deported. Anne and her sister Margot later died at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945. Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the only survivor among the eight people from the Annex, later arranged for her diary to be published.

Anne Frank’s diary endures because it gives human scale to an enormous historical tragedy. Her story does not represent every Holocaust victim, but it reminds readers that behind statistics were individual lives filled with personality, ambition, fear, and unfinished dreams. Her words survived the system that tried to erase her, making her one of the voices that changed the world.