It is rare for a great and exacting experience to be matched with a talent equal to recording it. Anne Frank, for all her youth had that gift. She was thirteen years old when, in 1942, she, her parents and sister, being Jews, went into hiding from the Germans in the sealed-off back rooms of an office building in Amsterdam. Later they were joined by four others. In August 1944 they were betrayed to the Gestapo and taken to concentration camps, where, with the exception of Anne's father, they perished. The diary which Anne kept during the whole of those tense two years was later found in their ransacked hiding place.

Anne had a great zest for life, and equal zest for understanding it. She had much to ponder: difficult human relationships; the problem of parents and children; first love that came too early; fear and acute loneliness. All these matters, and much else, she describes and discusses with an astonishing candor and awareness. This brave, lively, poignant record is not only deeply moving as a story but remarkable as the revelation of a young girl's mind.

The Diary has appeared in some thirty languages and as many countries have seen the play based on it. It has been filmed by 20th Century Fox.
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