Anne Frank's 13th‑birthday diary gift remembered

On June 12, 1942 in Amsterdam, 13-year-old Anne Frank received a red and white autograph book she began using as her diary. She opened it with the line "I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone," and recorded life in hiding with her family from 1942 to 1944. Anne Frank was born June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Nazi authorities arrested her on August 4, 1944, and she died in Bergen-Belsen in early 1945. Her posthumously published The Diary of a Young Girl became a defining firsthand account of the Holocaust, preserving Anne's voice and her dream of becoming a writer while shaping education and public memory.