Anne Frank: The Girl, the Diary, and the Story Behind the Symbol

She wanted to be a writer. She wanted to go to Paris, to study, to fall in love, to live. Instead, Anne Frank spent 761 days hiding in a secret apartment above her father's office in wartime Amsterdam, writing in a diary that would one day be read by hundreds of millions of people. This book tells the complete story of Anne Frank, from her early childhood in Frankfurt and her family's flight to the Netherlands to escape Nazi persecution, through the years in hiding with seven other people behind a swinging bookcase, to the betrayal that brought German officers to the Annex door on August 4 1944. It follows her through Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in February or March 1945, weeks before liberation. And it follows the diary itself, from the pages Miep Gies saved off the Annex floor after the arrest, through Otto Frank's agonizing first reading, the decades of rejection before publication, and the transformation of a young girl's private writing into one of the most important documents of the twentieth century. A biography, a history, and a meditation on memory, symbol, and what it means to bear witness to lives cut short by history.