Anne Frank

Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (June 12 1929 – c. March 1945) was a German Jewish girl who wrote a diary while in hiding with her family and four friends in Amsterdam during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Her family had moved to Amsterdam after the Nazis gained power in Germany but were trapped when the Nazi occupation extended into The Netherlands. As persecutions against the Jewish population increased, the family went into hiding in July 1942 in hidden rooms in Otto Frank's office building. After two years in hiding, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps where Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen within days of her sister, Margot, in March 1945. Her father, Otto, the only survivor of the group, returned to Amsterdam after the war ended, to find that her diary had been saved. Convinced that it was a unique record he took action to have it published.

Related topics

Holocaust and World War II related

• Anne Frank Remembered — a documentary film made in 1995 about the life of Anne Frank
• Auschwitz concentration camp
• Bergen-Belsen
• Corrie ten Boom
• Etty Hillesum — a Jewish woman who kept a diary during the war
• The Holocaust
• The Netherlands in World War II
• Tanya Savicheva — a Russian girl who recorded the deaths of her family over a six month period during the Siege of Leningrad

Anne Frank in popular culture

• TIME magazine considered Anne Frank one of 100 most influential people of the 20th Century.
• 5535 Annefrank — an asteroid named after Anne Frank
• Neutral Milk Hotel — US indie rock band whose 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was inspired by the lead singer Jeff Mangum's affection for Anne Frank. It includes the songs, Holland 1945 ('The only girl I ever loved/ Was born with roses in her eyes/ And then they buried her/ Alive, one evening 1945/ With just her sister at her side/ And only weeks before the guns all came and rained on everyone') and Oh Comely ('I know they buried her body with others/ Her sister and mother and five hundred families/ And would she remember me fifty years later/ I wish I could save her/ In some sort of time machine')
• A punk band from Boulder, Colorado named themselves Anne Frank on Crank, which by their explanation suggests they are "disenfranchised, yet somehow empowered."
• In response to hearing a Born-again Christian's insistence that Anne Frank's virtues alone would not gain her a place in Heaven, Ani DiFranco wrote and performed Did Anne Frank Find Jesus?, a hidden track on her live album Living in Clip ('Did Jesus find Buddha? Let's all just find each other. I wanna find Anne Frank before I bite it.')
• Winona Ryder's character in the movie Mermaids is asked by Christina Ricci's character what she wishes for, to which she replies, 'I wish I'd known Anne Frank.'
• Philip Roth — U.S. novelist whose novel The Ghost Writer imagines Anne Frank surviving the war and living anonymously as a writer in the United States.
• The Bernard Kops play Dreams of Anne Frank (1993) re-imagines her concealment in Amsterdam, using elements of fantasy and song.
• Marc Chagall — illustrated a limited edition of The Diary of Anne Frank.
• Outkast — US hip-hop band whose track So Fresh, So Clean from their album Stankonia, makes a knowing reference to Anne Frank('I love who you are/ I love who you ain't/ You're so Anne Frank/ Let's hit the attic and hide out for two weeks').
• Anne Frank Conquers the Moon Nazis, a tongue-in-cheek webcomic by Bill Mudron, about a resurrected Anne Frank rebuilt cybernetically to defend the Earth from an extra-terrestrial Nazi assault, ran online until 2003. http://excelsiorstudios.net/comic.html
• Geoff Ryman's novel 253 features an elderly Anne Frank as a passenger on the London Underground
• In 2004 Robert Steadman composed a twenty-minute musical work for choir and string orchestra entitled Tehillim for Anne which commemorated Anne Frank's life with settings of three Psalms in Hebrew.
• The comedy show Robot Chicken ran a tongue-in-cheek sketch depicting a preview for a teen film about Anne Frank. It referenced many teen film clichés (such as casting Hilary Duff as Anne, and having her dot the letter i in her diary with hearts) and included a teen pop song. It ended with the tagline "Nazis are so uncool."