Anne Frank, the Jewish schoolgirl whose diaries of her time in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands stand as one of the most significant documents to arise from the Holocaust, would have celebrated her 90th birthday on 12 June.

The Frank family had relocated to Amsterdam in 1934 to escape rising antisemitism in their native Frankfurt, part of a mass exodus that saw some 300,000 Jews flee Adolf Hitler’s Germany between 1933 and 1939.

Settling in an apartment on Merwedeplein in the neighbourhood of Rivierenbuurt, Otto and Edith Frank and their daughters Margot and Anne adjusted to their new surroundings relatively comfortably at first.

Otto Frank supported his family by working for Opteka Works, a company which produced a gelling agent used for making jam, before starting a second business known as Pectacon selling herbs, pickling salts and spices. Anne attended a Montessori school, learned Dutch and easily made friends, demonstrating a particular aptitude for reading and writing.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler’s Germany took the Netherlands on 15 May 1940, the occupying government moving quickly to introduce the same prejudicial laws the Franks had already been subjected to in Frankfurt, including mandatory registration and public segregation. Jews were barred from public transport, parks, cinemas and non-Jewish shops and made to wear a Star of David to identify themselves.

Remembering the Holocaust Show all 16 1 /16 Remembering the Holocaust Remembering the Holocaust 80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside. Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust "The Final Solution": The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks' three point split Hannah Bills Remembering the Holocaust Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks. Hannah Bills

When the state attempted to confiscate Otto’s businesses, he transferred his shares to a gentile friend, Johannes Kleiman, and resigned as director. Another friend, Jan Gies, assumed control of assets belonging to Opteka and Pectacon, allowing Otto’s interests to survive.

Margot and Anne had meanwhile been removed from their respective schools and sent to the Jewish Lyceum. Unnerved but undeterred, Anne celebrated her 13th birthday and received a red-and-white plaid autograph book, an item she planned to use as a diary to record her thoughts and feelings.

A month later, Margot received a letter from the Central Office for Jewish Emigration ordering her to report to a labour camp.

On 6 July 1942, Otto Frank moved the family into a secret annexe he had furnished at the rear of his workplace on Prinsengracht with a view to using it as an emergency hiding place. They were soon joined in their three-floor hideaway, its entrance concealed behind a bookcase, by Hermann, Auguste and Peter van Pels and then in November by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and friend of the family.

Anne Frank pictured in 1940 (Rex)

Klieman and Gies would again come to the family’s aid, the pair part of a trusted circle who knew the truth about the Franks’ sudden disappearance that also included Jan’s wife Miep, Johan Voskuijl, the latter’s daughter Bep and Victor Kugler, employees of the firm. This collective would support the Franks, Van Pels and Pfeffer throughout their confinement, supplying them with food and news of the war.

Until the Gestapo stormed the annexe on 4 August 1944, arresting the occupants, jailing their assistants and dispatching the Frank family to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Anne found solace in her diary.

In addressing the journal directly as “Dear Kitty”, as though composing a letter, Anne was actually imagining writing to Kitty Francken, a fictional character recurring in Cissy van Marxveldt’s popular series of Joop ter Heul books for young girls that appeared between 1919 and 1925.

In it, she recorded her most intimate thoughts and feelings. “I feel bad for lying in a warm bed, while my dearest friends are out there somewhere, thrown or fallen to the ground. And that only because they are Jews,” she wrote on 19 November 1942.

Anne Frank’s diary on display at the Anne Frank Museum (Rex)

She recounted her tensions with her roommate, Pfeffer, with whom she fought for access to their shared writing desk, the older man wanting it for his study of foreign languages. “Stay calm, this fellow isn’t worth worrying your head about!” Anne wrote in exasperation on 13 July 1943, later detailing his petulant refusal to speak to her for two days or sit with her at dinner after a falling out.

Anne had covered the bare walls of their room with photographs of Hollywood movie stars and royalty clipped from magazines like Libelle. Those pictures of women like Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo and the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret offer a glimpse of the dreamworld in which she lived and her teenage fantasies of how her life might turn out after the war was won.

Just last year, we learned something new about her developing sexuality during the period when the Anne Frank House used new digital scanning technology to read behind the brown paper she had pasted over entries she was embarrassed by. The secret passages found Anne musing on the mechanics of sex, contraception, menstruation and prostitution.

Anne was also an astute observer of everything that went on as cabin fever set in between her family and the Van Pels: “Daddy goes about with his lips tightly pursed, when anyone speaks to him, he looks up startled, as is he is afraid he will have to patch up some tricky relationship again... Quite honestly, I sometimes forget who we are quarrelling with and with whom we’ve made it up.”

Anne often feuded with her mother during their two years cooped up together, Edith more inclined towards despair than her daughter. The Van Pels also fought while Margot was more withdrawn, quietly keeping a diary of her own.

When she heard a Radio Oranje broadcast from the Dutch government in exile in London appealing for citizens to keep hold of their records of the war, Anne was inspired to rewrite her journal entries into a consistent narrative, calling it Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annexe).

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She later reflected on the importance of committing her inner life to paper, writing on 5 April 1944: “No one who doesn’t write can know how fine it is. And if I don’t have the talent to write for newspapers or books, well then I can always go on writing for myself.”

Anne Frank would no doubt have been both delighted and stunned to learn of the publishing sensation her diary would become after it was salvaged by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl following her death from typhus at Bergen-Belsen in February 1945, aged just 15.

Her father was the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust and only came to read his youngest daughter’s prodigious output in the aftermath of the Allied victory, deeply moved by the realisation of how integral it had been to her endurance.