Anne Frank got the diary that would move the world
On this day · 12 June 1942
A red-checked notebook handed over for a 13th birthday became one of the most-read accounts of the Holocaust.
On June 12, 1942, Anne Frank turned 13 in Amsterdam and was given a red-checked autograph book to use as a diary. It was not quite a surprise — she had spotted it in a bookshop window days earlier and pointed it out to her father.
Anne began writing on June 14. Less than a month later, in July 1942, the family went into hiding from the Nazis in the concealed rooms behind her father’s business, the Secret Annex.
Over two years she filled the diary with sharp, funny, aching observations about confinement, family, and growing up in hiding.
The Franks were betrayed and arrested in 1944, and Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen camp in early 1945. Her father, Otto, the family’s only survivor, had the diary published in 1947. Translated into dozens of languages, it became one of the most widely read books in the world.
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