On June 12, 1942, a girl in Amsterdam turned thirteen years old and opened her birthday presents on the kitchen table. Among them was a small red-and-white checked autograph book her father had picked out at a bookstore down the street. Anne Frank had been eyeing it for weeks. She decided right away to use it as a diary, and that very evening she wrote her first entry, hoping it would become a true friend she could tell anything. She named the diary "Kitty."
Less than a month later, the Frank family was forced to hide. The Nazis were rounding up Jewish people across the Netherlands. Anne, her parents, her sister Margot, and four other people squeezed into a secret apartment behind a moving bookcase at the back of her father's office. They stayed there for 761 days. Through it all, Anne wrote. She wrote about her crushes, her arguments with her mother, the cat downstairs, the sound of bombs at night, and her dream of becoming a famous writer. "In spite of everything," she wrote one summer day in 1944, "I still believe that people are really good at heart."
The family was discovered in August 1944 and sent to concentration camps. Only Anne's father, Otto, survived. After the war, he found Anne's notebooks tucked away in the attic and read them for the first time. He had them published in 1947. Today Anne's diary has been translated into more than 70 languages, and the secret apartment in Amsterdam - bookcase and all - is a museum visited by more than a million people every year.
