On the morning of August 4, 1944, 79 years ago today, armed police suddenly entered the hiding place in Amsterdam. Within a very short time, Anne Frank and the other people in hiding had to leave the Secret Annex, which had offered them protection for two years. First they were taken to a prison for a few days and then to the Westerbork transit camp. Anne was then taken via Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, a camp in northern Germany. She died there in early 1945. Her father returned to the Netherlands after the war as the only survivor of the eight residents of the Secret Annex.
Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1929. When she was four years old, her parents fled with her to Amsterdam, where she quickly settled in. In the years following the invasion of the Netherlands by the German Wehrmacht in May 1940, she was exposed to increasing persecution by the Nazis as a Jew. In the summer of 1942, she went into hiding with her family in Amsterdam and wrote her famous diary during this time.
Cover photo: Anne at school © Photo Collection Anne Frank House, Amsterdam
