2. Anne Frank
The story of Anne Frank is probably the most familiar story to us when we think of Jews in hiding during the Holocaust. She was born in Frankfurt, and her family left Germany and relocated to the Netherlands in 1933, fleeing the Nazi Regime. By May 1940, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, despite the country’s neutrality in the war. Anne and her family were trapped in the Netherlands, and they couldn’t find a way to escape.
Two years later, the Germans began to increase their persecutions of the Jews in the Netherlands, and the Franks went into hiding. In July 1942, Anne’s father Otto Frank found a place for them to hide in some concealed rooms in the building where he was working. For over two years, Anne and her family hid from the Nazis, and benefactors on the outside would bring them food and clothing. Anne kept a diary that was a birthday present, and she wrote in it often during this period.
The Gestapo discovered the Franks in August 1944, and the family was deported to Auschwitz. After a few months at Auschwitz, Anne and her sister Margot were sent to Bergen-Belsen in October or November of 1944, where it is assumed that they died of typhus in February or March 1945. When the war was over, Otto Frank was the only surviving member of his family.
He returned to Amsterdam, where he found that one of their benefactors during their time of hiding had saved Anne’s diary. Since its publication in 1947, The Diary of Anne Frank has been translated into over 60 languages, and it is still read in classrooms worldwide.