"I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support." Anne Frank's diary begins with these now-famous words. Her book, published by her father in 1947, has become a landmark of world literature in its singular account of innocence in the face of barbarism.
Born in Frankfurt in 1929, Anne Frank emigrated with her family to the Netherlands in 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of a crisis-ridden Germany. In 1942, as the authorities tracked down Jews in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, the Frank family moved into the 'annex', a flat hidden behind a false bookcase, to escape the Gestapo.
In August 1944, the family was betrayed by an unknown individual, and the inhabitants of the annex were deported to Auschwitz. Afterwards, Anne and her sister were transferred to Bergen-Belsen. Anne died of typhus in February or March 1945, shortly after the death of her older sister Margot.
Only 38,000 of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands survived the Nazi occupation, one of the highest Holocaust death tolls in Europe. Dutch professor Johannes Houwink ten Cate, from the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) in Amsterdam, reflects on the significance of this literary work.